Content Types That Will Work Best For SEO in 2020

With the web going visual, Infographics as a content type is widely used today. Infographics represent a huge volume of data in the form of visuals or graphics and make it easy to consume, in order to grab user’s attention and enhance his experience. Its visual appeal is what makes the users come back for more.

Infographics have become an important tool to promote products and services as it presents data in visual format which becomes easier for customers to know more about the product. Infographics are embeddable and the embedded links can be easily integrated on other websites, which makes it worth sharing, and help secure a lot of backlinks, which improves the site's ranking, and SEO as the whole.

Blogs still dominate the content realm, when it comes to providing information to readers and boosting SEO. Blogs give readers updated content, and form a connection with them, as though interacting with them. Blog websites with fresh content stand a high chance of getting indexed on search engines with the top search results. Blogs that are high on content and appealing, increase time-on-site and also are shared quickly by the readers thus inviting a lot of traffic. Blogs can be traditional long posts, or a just a small piece of information or something that caters to niche audiences, but the one of the most interesting ways of blogging is having blogs in the form of Stories.

Stories are an amazing way to connect with the audiences. Stories establish a connection with the user through narratives loaded with engaging visuals. As Stories are high on emotions, they keep the audiences hooked to your website and moreover marketers get an innovative chance to attract customers. Stories enhance the user experience, as the visual appeal and crisp content of the Stories captivates him/her. Stories format is advantageous for all the brands, to enhance their business prospects.

Web Stories
Web Stories is a modern format of storytelling that has been gaining popularity. Web Stories facilitate creation of visual content which is crisp, tappable and loads full-screen on all devices and produce immersive experiences. They are mobile-focused content, shareable and searchable on the web and user-first. They harness Google’s AMP technology, that enables faster page loading and enhance user-experience. Web Stories score high on user-engagement metrics like time-on-site and provide a great boost to SEO. Web Stories is an open-source project and gives publishers an opportunity to create immersive content on the web. Google also provides tools to let them test their Web Stories, before releasing it on the web.

Visual Stories is a blogging platform that lets you create Web Stories, using the Web Story Builder. Extensive customization in creating the Stories enables to enhance the visual aspect of Stories created and serves as a visual treat for audiences. You can blog in the Web Stories format by guest blogging on 55+ websites with a single sign-up on Visual Stories.

Videos as content, in recent times have seen a tremendous rise, on the web. Most of the users require a video as a part of the content which can be a product review, DIY type, solution-oriented etc. Videos produce immersive experiences, and are highly shareable. Videos also appear at the top in Google search results; having an appropriate snippet is important, so as to invite leads.
Moreover, videos when embedded on a landing page, boast of high time-on-site. Choosing correct hosting platforms for video helps in SEO, by bringing more traffic.

Also, another important way to boost SEO with video content is having easy perceivable thumbnails, because it catches the user’s attention and compels him to proceed further. In addition, having video transcripts can greatly have an effect on your rankings. Transcripts are nothing but audio-converted texts. Since Google indexes text of videos, having qualitative transcript can place your page higher on search engines. They also come handy, when you need to go back to a particular portion of the video. It also helps differently-abled to consume video information. Thus, videos are great tool to boost SEO, and overall user experience.

No points for guessing this, images are one of the most relevant content type, in boosting SEO. The human brain processes visuals much easily and faster when compared to text. Text with images adds weight and appeal to the overall content, and increases the user-engagement. Images successfully grasp users’ attention, and this is their major highlight, as with reducing attention-span of a human being, nothing but images hold their attention.

As people prefer visual text over plain-text, websites having high-quality content and attractive and relevant images rank higher on search engines. For higher rankings, image optimization is required, i.e, reducing the file size of the image to decrease the page load time. Along with this, a proper name for the image file and the right file type (.jpg, .png, .jpeg) is necessary (without compromising on image dimensions) for the image to be indexed. Same goes with the alt text that is the text description of the image.

Visual galleries are a variant of the image content type. The quote ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ aptly describes visual galleries. It involves of a myriad of images depending on the subject. Text becomes subservient here and visuals do the talking. Visual galleries appeal to the audience of every group, irrespective of language and culture. A lot of topics can be eloquently explained with just pictures. Motivational quotes, lifestyle trends, fashion, are some of them.

Though this content type also depends on visuals, they have branched out as a potential content type that can boost the SEO. Memes are humorous and witty content and provide entertainment, something which audiences long for. Due to their fun quotient, memes are highly shareable on social media platforms and spread like a wildfire on the web in no time and, hence they are termed to be viral.

The points to consider here are that the subject should be trending and fresh, and should relate to your target audience. This is the easiest and best way to gain traffic. Using relevant and entertaining memes in your blog posts will keep your audience on the page for long and will surely share it too, thus strengthening your SEO.

On the same lines, GIFs (Graphic Interchange Format) also can boost your SEO. As defined in Google search results, “GIFs are a lossless format for image files that supports both animated and static images”. They are mostly situational, which greatly captivates the user’s attention and are shared across multiple platforms. Hence, today most of the businesses and their social media pages have content in the form of GIFs.

Podcasts are a wonderful content type that can invite a lot of traffic, and is unconventional of sorts. Podcasts are audio files that can be downloaded to your personal devices from the web, and can be used anytime. The best part of having podcasts is that, people use these channels during their leisure times. Podcasts are an effective way to promote products in the form of reviews, or to launch a new one. Also, if done in a compelling way, it will automatically invite a lot of links, which can enhance the traffic. In addition, the content of the podcasts can be transformed into other content types like infographics, to help SEO and improve your website presence.

These were some of the content types that would work best for SEO in 2020. Whatever, the content type is, it should boast of high-quality content that directly appeals to your audience, so that you gain both personal satisfaction and professional success.