Add graphics to your content

1. Choose online tools that you can use to help create custom graphics to add to your content.

You want to create original graphics for your content and avoid using stock images. This allows you to design each graphic according to your specific brand visuals and create graphs, charts, and infographics to support your original research. Some examples of tools you can use to create graphics include Canva, Piktochart, or Infogram. If you have more advanced graphic design skills, you can find templates or design elements on Envato, and use software like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop to customize and create graphics.

2. Determine what type of graphic will be most helpful to your readers to illustrate a specific concept or idea within your content.

For example, if your content describes numerical data and metrics, create custom graphs or charts to help readers visualize that data. Another example might be a blog post that details how to increase certain performance metrics for social media, where you include screenshots of analytics platforms to show how to navigate the software to generate specific insight reports.

3. Insert the original graphics you created into your content, where they will integrate with the natural flow of writing and break up large chunks of text to help keep readers engaged.

Breaking up blocks of text is important to improve readability and optimize your content for SEO. Including imagery and graphics signals search engines that your content will be useful and engaging to the readers, and that it is likely to satisfy search intent. This also helps improve the value of the piece for your readers because it makes the content more scannable. Graphics give readers a mental and visual break from pages that appear dense with text.

4. Size your graphics using best practices for user experience and site speed.

It’s recommended to keep image file sizes under 500KB to avoid bogging down your webpage with slow loading times. You can speed test your website with PageSpeed Insights. The maximum recommended image dimensions for web pages is typically 2000px in width and 1500px in height. Use a tool like Adobe Spark,Optimizilla, or another image resizing tool to compress the file size of an image or crop it to different dimensions.

5. Add alt text to all the images and graphics that you add to your content to improve user experience, make your content accessible, and improve SEO.

Alt text is a written description of an image that you can add from the backend of your website. The text is readable by screen reading software that will narrate the description aloud for visually impaired users to understand the context of your images. Alt text will also display if a user’s web browser fails to load the image. This is helpful to your readers because it avoids disrupting their experience, since they can still benefit from the alt text description if the graphic fails to load.