Why Images Might Be Hurting Your SEO (Lessons from 6M Visitors)

0:00Yesterday's daily podcast was about AI Invest.com. AI Invest and how it went from under 300,000 organic monthly visitors, 300,000 visitors a month from Google, from SEO to 5.5 million in just a month and a half. And when I recorded it, when I recorded this episode, the data that I was looking at said 5.5 million. This is just so crazy. Then a few hours after that, new data came in. This was after recorded, went to 5.9 million. They were at nearly 300,000 organic monthly visitors, which is great. And in a month and a half, they 20xed their SEO traffic. And something that's interesting is they are largely top

0:48offunnel content, largely an AI news publisher. By the way, if you want all of the reasons for how their growth has exploded to such a degree, I talked about that on again yesterday's episode, that's episode 775 of this podcast, 5.5 million monthly visitors in 2 months, the AI SEO playbook. That's the episode. But what's interesting is they're a news publisher and they don't have images at the top of their articles. And so what I wanted to make today's podcast on is when you should use images in the top of your content and when you shouldn't because there's this huge misconception in I would even say user experience. I I

1:26actually just put out a post on X. I put out a tweet uh I said half of good SEO at this point is just user experience and everybody tries to over complicate it. It's a really big user experience misconception that you have to have images at the top of your articles, the top of your posts, the top of your pages. An AI invest a news publisher, an AI news publisher doesn't have any images at the top of its articles. And I actually think, especially if you're putting up top offunnel content where people just want to get their answers fast, I think for top offunnel SEO, blog

2:02SEO, you don't want to have any images at the top that are going to make people scroll more. It could, it's different if the images are in the same line with your title. That's what I do on the blog of edwards.com. I have the title to the left and then I have the image to the right. I used to have a huge image up top and I switched it to this design so there will be less scrolling to get to the content. What's interesting is AI Invest and I've seen this from other websites too. AI Invest doesn't have any images. They have featured images which show in the preview but when you

2:35actually click on the article when you actually see the article if you're a searcher getting to the article there's no images up top. Instead they have breadcrumbs. Then they have the author. Then they have the title. They have the publishing date. the read time. They use AI to generate a podcast of the article, which you can do really easily with Notebook LM. I was just actually doing it for edwardstrom.com. I was thinking about putting it in, but if I wanted to put it in above the main content, it's going to take away pixels from the main content. It's going to make it longer to get to the main content. You'll have to

3:07scroll more. I I didn't think the AI podcast was was that engaging, so I decided not to do it because like this article, I'm looking at one article right now. one minute read, but the podcast about it is 4 minutes and 26 seconds. And the way that these AI podcasts are generated, it's a lot of fluff. It's a lot of fluff and slow speaking. And if you're coming to one of these articles and you just want to get your answer, that's different. However, if I guess if you're browsing through the site, if you're browsing through the site looking for just interesting information, you might want to click on

3:39this as like an actual user of this site. But if you're coming from search trying to get an answer really fast, probably not going to use the podcast. What they do is they have these AI summaries which are really really great. I think this is going to be a huge trend in the future with with blog SEO. It's going to be AI summaries up top. I think

3:57that's going to be an enormous trend. And then they get to the main content of the article. But there's no heading image. There's no heading image. Their articles don't have heading images. Then I I started thinking about bottom offunnel SEO. And a mistake that I see so often when people are creating these conversionbased purchase intent bottom offunnel SEO landing pages, a mistake that I see so often is using images that actually don't really help. When you're making a bottomunnel SEO landing page, you are making a page that is meant to basically sell somebody who is searching for a keyword. They already know that they're looking to take action. They

4:36they know what they want. They don't know the brand that's going to give them what they want. And so you need to put in an image that shows why your brand fits this keyword, why your brand fits this search intent. The image at this point, especially like here in the hero above the fold, the image at this point is basically part of the copy. It's

4:58basically part it's it adds to the page. It's not just a random image that's slightly related to the topic. It's a screenshot. You're showing your office. You're showing your software. You're showing your happy customers. You're showing your staff. The something that is as indicative as possible to why your brand serves this keyword. And that's what the image should be for the above the fold before people start scrolling

5:26of a bottom ofunnel SEO landing page. And that's what that image should be. And that image helps people convert. And that's why you use an image there. And it's not an image, by the way. It's an image to the side, to the right. And then the the H1, the big title goes to the left with some copy underneath and a button underneath that. But for top ofunnel articles, for blog SEO, I think actually you either want to do you want to do no image or an image that that's

5:52just to the right or left of the title. But either way, the image should not make it so you have to scroll more to get directly to your content. And I think it's a much bigger part of search engine optimization than a lot of SEOs realize because a lot of people will get to a page and if they don't get what they want immediately, they will just bounce. And so by giving people the content as soon as possible, you greatly reduce bounce rate. And pogo sticking is such a huge thing that Google tries to minimize. Pogo sticking is when searchers click on one result and then

6:28go back to the search results because they didn't get what they want. They're pogo sticking around the search engine results pages. It's so important to minimize that. And with top offunnel content where people are trying to get their answers fast, a big image at the top that makes people scroll more delays that delays the time it takes to get the answer. So I want to make this podcast episode 776 of this show just to talk about that because I think when you understand a concept like that and you understand you know people are really trying to get their answers fast and you you start thinking how can I give people

7:03answers as fast as possible. Oh AI summaries that's a good idea. When you start thinking about that and you start thinking about search engine optimization in terms of user experience it makes a huge difference in the results you can get. And the fact that AI Invest is doing it and they're up to 6 million searches a month now from Google and a month and a half ago they were at 300,000 with top offunnel content. Typically people would expect images to be at the top of blog posts or at the top of news articles. And the fact that you're seeing this I just said you know this is completely worth

7:40talking about. It's something that a lot of people miss. If you weren't doing this I hope you're going to think about doing it now. This is episode 776 of the Edward Show. This is my daily digital marketing podcast, 776 days in a row doing this show. If you want to learn more about bottom of funnel search engine optimization, I have a 13 and 1/2 hour course, Compact Keywords, which shows how to use search engine optimization to get paying customers, users, and warm leads getting crazy testimonials. You can watch all the testimonials and learn more at

8:10compactkeywords.com. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you again tomorrow.