Google Enables Royalty-Free, Full Colour Marketing by Supporting AVIF Images
In the past, site owners were encouraged to publish images in JPG or PNG format to make sure they get indexed properly. Now, a smaller, royalty-free image format with superior colour resolution has received official support in Google’s Core Web Vitals scores. Learn everything about the AVIF format here, including how it can help your business’ marketing and SEO efforts.
Promoting Visual Content
Over time, we have watched every major social media platform embrace visual content. Gradually, services like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) transitioned from word-heavy posts to multimedia platforms capable of hosting images, video and more. Other platforms today focus entirely on visual content, like Instagram.
Naturally, marketers have noticed this and are trying to create striking visual promotions for their businesses. From diagrams, product photographs and even YouTube videos, companies post visual promotional content all the time. Thanks to Google’s refined SEO guidelines, images and even video can rank in search results now and bring in even larger audiences.
At the same time, some business models offer visual content as a product/service, best seen with examples from streaming or iGaming. These businesses enable users to access on-demand movies or play live blackjack online through an interactive livestream managed by a real human being. As online platforms continue to develop, bigger and better digital services will emerge along with new opportunities that businesses can use to market themselves.
Google Now Supports AVIF
AVIF stands for AV1 Image File, an open-source compression format released in 2019. Like WebP, it is hailed as a new way to compress visual content without losing quality, even after editing. However, Google didn’t support AVIF until very recently – they supported PNG, JPG and older but more trustworthy formats.
Now AVIF is receiving support, so images using this format will now be properly indexed, displayed in search and can help market your business. SEO experts also use images and visual content to rank in searches. This is called image SEO and AVIF has certain qualities that could make it an even better alternative to old favourites like JPG.
SEO Benefits of the AVIF Format
As one of the most recent and advanced image file formats, AVIF can give you and your business some benefits in the SEO arena. Most notably, AVIF’s small and unobtrusive file size is great for rendering web pages. As a general rule, having small file sizes and fast render speeds will help with crawling, indexing and hitting search much faster. If a page is heavy with visual assets and code, it will take longer to load. SEO experts try to avoid this because a slow-loading page translates into a high bounce rate.
AVIF isn’t just better at pleasing Google’s crawler bots, it can also appeal to the human eye more. Assuming HDR capability, AVIF supports a wider colour gamut with 10 or 12-bit colour depth. Put simply, colourful images should subtly look better than their JPG or PNG counterparts. This may result in more organic clicks if the image is used for promotion, but this assumes the colour is vivid and that your industry/audience values aesthetically pleasing imagery. For other business models, AVIF’s benefits are purely technical and not artistic in nature.
If you operate an image-heavy site or post a lot of visual content, try giving the new AVIF format a spin. Note that not every social media site supports AVIF yet – X doesn’t, for example. Even still, this format’s slight algorithmic and aesthetic benefits could give your business the edge it needs to beat the competition. In the future, you should expect to see a lot more AVIF images flooding the web now that it can be used to its full effect.
