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Supercharge Your SEO with Advanced OCR Tools: A Step-by-Step Guide

OCR stands for optical character recognition. This revolutionary technology enables computer systems to understand and extract text from inside an image.

If you don’t understand why that is impressive then here is some additional information for you. Computers do not see images the same way we do. We see an image as a single thing. Computers see images as a bunch of pixels plotted on a plane. They can see that each pixel has a different position and color, but they can’t understand that the pixels form to create something.

With OCR, that is now possible. Computers can understand that certain clusters of images are in fact letters, numbers, and other characters. This means that computers can use OCR to understand and extract text into a different format i.e., one that can be manipulated with a word processor.

This technology has quite a few uses in search engine optimization (SEO). In this article, we will teach you what they are.

Step-by-Step Guide to Incorporate OCR in Your SEO Strategy

To incorporate OCR in your SEO strategy you need to know its specific uses and have an OCR tool to use. Let’s begin by finding a tool.

Selecting the Right OCR Tool

Selecting the right OCR tool is an easy job. This is because there are numerous online tools available that can use OCR for image-to-text conversion. 

Most of these tools are free as well and have enough features that you don’t need to look for a premium solution. 

Some of the best tools in this business are ImagetoTextConverter.net, ImagetoText.me, and the DNS Checker Image to Text Converter.

With these free tools, you can extract text from multiple images or PDF pages at once. Their accuracy is also over 90% so you won’t have to pour over every result to check for errors. 

Their user interface is also quite simple, which helps new users understand how to use these tools. The best feature of these tools is that you can use them using scripts because no account or registration is required.

Use OCR Tools To Make Your Website More Accessible

Now that we have selected an OCR tool, let’s see how they can improve the SEO of our websites. 

One of the top ranking factors of the Google search engine is website accessibility. Google wants websites that are easy to use and easy to access for all kinds of people. That includes those who are visually impaired. 

Usually, visually impaired people use screen readers to scroll through websites and understand their content. However, screen readers are not able to understand images. This means that someone relying on screen readers will not be able to understand any images on your site.

With OCR tools and some manual labor, you can create image descriptions for screen readers. OCR tools are helpful here if your image has a lot of text in it. With the image-to-text converter, you can easily extract the text from the images and add it to their descriptions.

This makes your website provide a better user experience and that boosts your SERP (Search engine results page) ranking.

Improve Image Indexing

As we already established in the introduction, computers cannot understand images in the way that matters. While OCR is a solution, it is computationally expensive and, therefore, not available for every computer. 

Unfortunately, this includes search engine crawlers. As a result, any images on your website cannot be indexed in the standard way. The way Google does it is that it uses the image’s metadata such as any captions, alt-text, and the image name itself. 

Google also checks these things for keywords and then indexes the image according to the information it was able to get.

With OCR, you can easily create all of this metadata if your image has text in it. You can simply extract the text and supplement it with some keywords and add it to the metadata.

This improves the crawlability of your image. The better the crawling the higher the chances of your web page ranking going up.

Improve PDF Indexing

If your web page has some PDF files, then know that those can’t be indexed. PDF files need to be downloaded to be read and some of them don’t allow screen reading either. 

What can’t be read can’t be crawled and will negatively affect SERP ranking. To avoid this you can use an OCR tool to extract the text from the pdf and add it to its description or add it to the web page.

This way, crawlers can index the data and make it available for Google search. This will I, prove your SERP ranking in the long run, so it is good for SEO.

Repurpose Infographics into Blog Posts

Infographics and images are often touted as amazing things that will boost your SEO. However, as you may have already realized, this is not completely true. 

What’s true is that these things are visually appealing and improve the user experience. That does indeed boost the SEO of your web pages. However, we also learned that images are hard to index and need copious amounts of metadata optimization.

Even if you do that well, there is no guarantee that your image-heavy and infographic-dependent content will rank well or not. What you can do here is repurpose such content (if it’s not performing well)into a blog post.

Of course, an image-to-text converter is the play here as well. All you need to do is extract the text from the infographic and then embellish it with some quality writing to improve up on it. 

Content repurposing is often successful because it allows people to engage with your content in a different, perhaps more accessible way. This improves the engagement metrics of the content and raises its SERP ranking.

Create Structured Data for Crawlers

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. This data helps search engines understand the context and content of your website more effectively.

For instance, structured data can tell search engines whether certain content is a product description, a review, or an event, which can enhance how your content appears in search results.

Image and PDF indexing can be massively improved by using structured data. However, creating it is not easy. A lot of manual writing is involved. You can take off some of the edges by using an OCR tool to extract text from images and use it in the structured data with only minor edits.

Examples of structured data include “Product Schema” and “Event Schema.” Product schema shows that the data is about a product being sold on the website. Event schema shows that it is information about any event going on the website such as a sale, promotion, or giveaway.

By implementing structured data using the text extracted by OCR, search engines can better understand the specific content on your pages. This improves indexing and allows search engines better to match your web pages with the right search queries. 

In the end, you get a better SERP ranking. 

Conclusion

Harnessing OCR technology can be a game-changer for your SEO strategy. It bridges the gap between visual content and search engine accessibility, enabling you to unlock new opportunities for indexing and ranking. 

As search engines continue to evolve, utilizing tools like OCR to make all your content—textual and visual—searchable and discoverable is a great approach that can set your website apart from the competition.

Saasland
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