In today’s digital marketing landscape, staying competitive means constantly evolving and adapting. The landscape is shifting all the time, from Google updating its algorithm to your competitor’s stepping up their tactics. This means that you need to be on top of the latest strategies in order to effectively promote your business.
You’ve probably heard of link building, and most likely have already included this as part of your digital marketing strategy in order to improve your SEO, promote your business, and attract new customers. But what about visual link building? Let’s dive into the world of visual link building and discuss how you can use it to take your marketing to the next level.
What is Visual Link Building?
Link building has become a well-known marketing tactic in recent years and involves building links on high-authority sites to point back to your website. This not only drives organic traffic back to your site but also increases your site’s domain authority, therefore boosting SEO.
This is important because backlinks, specifically backlinks are one of the main factors that Google looks for when ranking sites. It is critical, however, that these backlinks are built on high-authority sites. Building 10 high-quality links are usually more effective than building 100 or 200 low-quality links.
This is something that businesses can struggle with, but working with a consultant like Ghostmarketing.co.uk can help you to build higher-quality links that will help you reach your marketing goals.
Visual link building, also sometimes called image link building, takes the principles of link building to the next level. It involves creating visual assets that can be used as link baits.
These visual assets could be images, but that could also be other forms of visual content such as videos, infographics, maps, and pictorial guides. In essence, it leverages the power of images and visual content to build high-quality backlinks.
Visual content is an incredible tool for marketers and one which is overlooked in traditional link building. Users simply love visual content: evidenced by the rapid growth of visual platforms like YouTube and Instagram, and the high performance of visual content on other platforms like Facebook. In fact, 37% of marketers say that visual content is their most important form of content.
Great visual content catches users’ attention and gets more shares on social media as well as more click-throughs, generating more traffic. Because other sites know this, they love having this content on their sites, making it great for more link building.
How Visual Link Building can Benefit Your Business
Visual link building has a number of benefits for businesses. Firstly, visual content is amazing for capturing attention. Today’s online world is a busy, crowded place and half the battle is standing out from the noise and getting users to notice your content in the first place.
Two metrics for measuring how well a piece of content engages users are the bounce rate and social shares, and visual content has been shown to perform better in both aspects.
One Hubspot survey showed that users were naturally drawn to visual content. Furthermore, pages with visual content are shared nearly twice as often, and visual content is remembered by users longer. This is important for link building because visual content offers more value to your potential link hosts, as well as delivers a higher rate of traffic for you once the content is published.
A big part of link building is getting your links put on high-authority sites: that is, building high-quality links. One of the biggest challenges is pitching your content (and therefore your link) to sites that are overwhelmed with large numbers of similar requests. Having an impressive infographic or other visual assets automatically makes this pitch more likely to be successful.
Although visual link building has many benefits, this doesn’t mean that you should throw out your other link-building tactics. In its most perfect form, visual link building is used in conjunction with other link-building tactics, as a complementary tactic. This approach can deliver a phenomenal ROI for your link-building strategy.
How to Use Visual Link Building to Market Your Business
The first and perhaps most critical part of visual link building is creating visual assets. As with all forms of digital marketing, the quality of this content is critical: without high-quality visual content, it is virtually impossible to build high-quality links.
You may have the skills and resources to create this content in-house, or this may be the time to hire a graphic designer or video creator to make it for you. This will involve some financial investment, but if applied as part of the right link-building strategy, you will see a return on this investment many times over.
One of the most effective types of visual assets in visual link building and in digital marketing, in general, is infographics. A strong infographic is visually stunning, engaging, and provides real value to your potential customer: all vital characteristics of good visual assets. Infographics not only get high numbers of shares on social media and have the potential to go viral, but they are also great for generating organic traffic.
Once you have a great piece of visual content, you can use it to build high-quality links to your site.
Here is a summary of an effective visual link building process:
- Create a stunning piece of visual content (or hire someone to create it for you).
- Identify opportunities and link hosts who may publish your content and link back to your site.
- Shortlist the prospects, identifying the high-authority domains.
- Reach out to the sites, asking them to publish your content with a link to your site. Be sure to emphasize the value your content represents for them, and personalize your approach for each prospect.
- Repeat!
Visual link building, incorporated into a broader strategy that also uses other link-building tactics, can be a highly effective digital marketing tool with a very high ROI. Not only will this improve your SEO, helping your site to rank higher on your customers’ Google searches, but it can drive more traffic to your site. All of this means you’ll be able to expand your customer base, drive more sales, and grow your business.
