SMX Overtime: 3 tips to maximizing visual search potential

Kristopher Jones, founder and CEO of the digital marketing agency LSEO.com, shared his expertise during the “Maximizing Visual Search Potential” session at SMX West. Jones offers tips for making budget-friendly videos and why indicators point to good visual design leading to higher search rankings.

Making videos is expensive. Please share some quick tips to make good effective videos at a lower cost.

Jones: Too many marketers fail to leverage video as a primary marketing tool because they mistakenly believe that making videos is expensive. The truth is that you can create quality videos with your IOS or Android device and use free or low-cost video editing apps like iMovie, Clips, or PowerDirector to edit your video for length and quality. You can also elevate the quality of your video production with an investment under $750 all-in by purchasing an HD camera ($400 – $600), tripod (under $30), and photo / video light and green screen kit ($150) from BestBuy, Amazon or a similar big box retailer. The key is to think through how and where you want to shoot the video. Consider space with natural light and that shows off whatever message you are trying to communicate (i.e., if you are talking about your business consider shooting video with your place of business as the backdrop). If you are a small business or solopreneur it’s not about how much you spend on your video production, but instead how you can outcompete larger businesses by leveraging video to produce as much high-value video as possible that more effectively communicates with prospective customers, while ranking well on search engines like Google, YouTube, and Vimeo.

Do you foresee “good visual design” becoming part of search algorithms?

Jones: Proper UI / UX design is central to SEO best practices. As Google’s machine learning algorithm becomes increasingly sophisticated, there is increasing evidence that good visual design leads to higher organic search rankings. Simple, responsive design coupled with fast page speeds leads to greater user experience and will kill it on mobile rankings.

How do you balance creating a site with a lot of images with Google page speed rankings that penalize slow sites?

Jones: First off, you can take a lot of the strain off your website and web browsers by reducing image sizes, enabling compression and using proper image formats. Images and page speed are both important to conversions so striking a balance can feel tricky. Fortunately, Google Page Speed Insights provides great tips to help you diagnose page speed problems related to images and other back-end elements. By following SEO best practices, you shouldn’t have too much of a problem developing a website that balances image heavy content with optimal page speed.