You’ve carefully crafted your website, filled it with stunning visuals, and now you’re wondering: do UGC galleries actually help or hurt my SEO?
The short answer is: they can definitely help! But, like any website element, there’s a bit more to the story. Let’s break down how CrowdRiff Galleries impact your SEO and how to optimize them for the best results.
Power Up with Engagement
Search engines love websites that keep visitors engaged. After all, if people are sticking around, browsing through your content, and interacting with your site, it signals that you’re offering something valuable.
CrowdRiff Galleries are designed to boost engagement. Beautiful visuals encourage visitors to explore, and features like zoom, fullscreen views, and CTAs keep them interacting with your content. This increased time on site and deeper engagement can send positive signals to search engines, ultimately boosting your rankings.
Keep it Speedy
Page speed is a crucial SEO factor. Slow-loading pages frustrate users and can lead to higher bounce rates (people leaving your site quickly). While image-heavy galleries could potentially slow down your site, CrowdRiff has built-in features to minimize this impact:
- Optimized images and videos: CrowdRiff automatically reduces the file size of assets in galleries without sacrificing quality. Autoplaying videos are clipped to 10 seconds to minimize initial load times. Images are optimized for default views, with full resolution preserved for expanded views.
- Lazy loading: Assets only load when they’re about to be viewed, preventing unnecessary loading at the top of the page.
- Caching: Galleries load faster on subsequent visits thanks to caching.
Unmasking Alt Text
Alt text (alternative text) is a short description of an image that screen readers use to help visually impaired users understand the content. It’s also valuable for SEO because it provides context to search engines about what your images are about.
Within CrowdRiff, you can add captions and descriptions to images that you upload. The alt text will reflect what is added to the CrowdRiff Caption, so it’s important to ensure your captions are concise, descriptive, and accurately reflect the image content. For UGC images, the Description field stores the captions pulled in from Instagram, but the alt text is generated from the manually added CrowdRiff Caption.”
In the new CrowdRiff experience, you’ll gain AI-powered alt-text generation for all visible image assets in your galleries, making them more accessible and discoverable. You can still manually edit the alt text and description to add further context or meet specific accessibility guidelines. Please note that video alt text will continue to use the current system until an update later this year.
While keywords and other metadata within CrowdRiff are crucial for your internal asset management, they don’t directly impact SEO on your website.
CrowdRiff galleries are WCAG 2.0 AA compliant, meaning they meet high standards for accessibility. They are also compliant with ADA and AODA standards for accessible design.
Fresher is Better
Search engines favor websites with fresh, updated content. Regularly adding new visuals to your CrowdRiff Galleries can give your SEO a nice little boost.
Even better, consider using Smart Galleries or Auto-Updating features (if included in your package) to automatically pull in new, relevant content. Contact your CSM to learn more about these dynamic features.
The Bottom Line
When used strategically, CrowdRiff galleries can be a powerful tool to enhance your website’s SEO. By focusing on engagement, speed, alt text, and fresh content, you can create a visually appealing and SEO-friendly experience for your visitors.
Want to dive deeper into SEO best practices? Check out these resources:
Ready to start optimizing? Review your gallery settings to see where you can make some adjustments.
