This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Now Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage startups with content and traction called End Game.
Contributing Author: Ken Leaver
SEO is an old game but has been evolving quickly with the advent of AI. And basically everyone in the game is adjusting quickly.
One area in particular that gets less attention is the area of photos.
How the SEO game has changed recently
SEO used to be a game of keyword stuffing, buying links, and a number of technical optimizations. But the game has changed a lot in recent years.
Basically Google has gotten really good at getting its algorithm to simply serve up the best answer to the question that was asked.
If you’re Google and you want to optimize for the best answer what do you do?
Well you look more and more at browse behavior. When a person searches something… which result do they click on?
If they visit a link do they stop their search? As this would then be a strong indicator that they got the answer they were seeking.
Or do they go back to search results and then continue searching? As that would generally mean they didn’t get their answer.
Do they spend a lot of time on your page? As that would generally indicate higher quality content.
What matters less is… how many times your keyword shows up. Or what html tags you use. etc.
Why are photos powerful for SEO?
If you think about what I wrote above… you understand that SEO is more and more becoming a game of clarity and good readability.
Do you read articles that are poorly written or stuffed with useless text? No.
The vast majority of us love photos… and pay more attention to them when reading than the actual text.
Which is why we view that SEO is more and more becoming a game of quality, contextual photos as much as it is a game of quality writing.
How has AI changed the game with photos?
One major hindrance with photos for SEO articles in the past was the whole copyright issue. You needed to either purchase photos or you needed to use free stock photos.
These free stock photos tended to be quite general as they’re typically used as bait to subscribe to the better stuff.
But with the advent of AI Photo generators like Midjourney and Dalle-3… you can now create your own high quality, contextual photos in a matter of seconds.
Dalle-3, which is available as part of ChatGPT 4.0
And this means that now you can start to outcompete all that old content out there with better photos.
This is something that I think many businesses still don’t get.
They’re sitting fat and happy with a steady river of SEO traffic and thinking that their position is impregnable… but they don’t realize that AI images are like the special forces that are gonna break into their position.
What is our unique approach here?
So our recipe is based on a few key principles:
1) Very easy to read
We make it ‘easy’ to read by having lots of photos and breaking things up with good formatting/spacing. This article is a good example of the style guide that we follow.
How do we do this? We do this with vetted Upwork writers who we have trained on what photos to use and how to format the content.
2) Very interesting to read
We try to make the tone light and interesting. How? By training the tone of voice on human writing of the style that we are looking to emulate.
3) Solve your question quickly
We don’t beat around the push. Rather we aim to solve the intended question of the user as quickly as we can.
And then just add more and more detail below that.
Interested in our SEO services?
Check out www.endgameken.com.
AI = Great Images = More Time on Sight = Better SEO
