How to Fix: Multimedia included

Multimedia included is an important SEO check in the On-Page SEO Essentials category. This is a lower-priority optimization. Address it after handling more critical issues.

What is This Check About?

This check verifies that your key pages include multimedia — images, video, audio, or other visual assets — rather than being unbroken walls of text. A page that is nothing but paragraphs is harder to read, holds attention less well, and gives both readers and search engines fewer signals about what it covers. When this check fails, it means a page that would benefit from a supporting image, diagram, or video does not have one. It is flagged lower-priority for a reason: it is an enhancement, not an emergency. But it is the kind of enhancement that quietly lifts a page from adequate to genuinely engaging.

I want to frame this carefully, because “add multimedia” is advice that gets abused. The goal is not to sprinkle stock photos on every page to satisfy a checkbox. It is to include media that actually helps the reader understand or trust the content — a screenshot that shows the step you are describing, a chart that makes a number land, a short video that demonstrates what words struggle to. Media that serves the message earns its place. Media that decorates does not.

Why Does This Matter for SEO?

Search engines like Google evaluate hundreds of factors when ranking websites. Multimedia included is one of these important factors because:

• It affects how search engines crawl and understand your content
• It impacts user experience, which is a key ranking factor
• It can influence your site’s visibility in search results
• Ignoring it may cause your competitors to outrank you

The mechanism is engagement plus discoverability. A page with well-chosen images and video tends to hold readers longer and get them further down the page, and those behavioural signals feed into how Google judges whether the page satisfied the searcher. Beyond that, media is its own search surface: properly described images can rank in Google Images and pull in traffic your text never would, and video can earn a thumbnail in results or a place in video search. So multimedia is not only making the page nicer to read — it is opening extra doors into it. The catch, which I will come back to, is that badly optimised media does the opposite, slowing the page down and dragging the very engagement it was meant to lift.

How to Check This Issue

You can identify this issue by:

1. Running an SEO audit using the SEO Roadmap tool
2. Manually inspecting your website’s source code and settings
3. Using browser developer tools (F12) to analyze page elements
4. Checking Google Search Console for related warnings or errors

The honest check is to open your most important pages and read them as a visitor would. Where is the wall of text that a reader’s eye slides off? Where are you describing something visual in words alone — a process, an interface, a before-and-after — that an image would explain in a glance? Those are your candidates. The audit tool flags pages with no media at all; your judgement decides which of them would genuinely be better for a well-placed image or video rather than one added for its own sake.

How to Fix This in WordPress

Difficulty Level: EASY – This fix is straightforward and can typically be completed by anyone with basic WordPress knowledge.

Estimated Time: varies

Follow these steps to fix this issue:

Step 1: Identify Affected Pages

First, run a complete SEO audit to identify all pages affected by this issue. The SEO Roadmap tool will show you exactly which URLs need attention. Prioritise the pages that matter commercially and the long-form articles that carry the most text — those are where a supporting visual pays off most. A short, already-clear page does not need media forced onto it.

Step 2: Access WordPress Settings

Log into your WordPress admin dashboard. Depending on the specific issue, you may need to navigate to:

• Settings → General for site-wide configurations
• Settings → Reading for indexing and visibility settings
• Settings → Permalinks for URL structure issues
• Appearance → Theme Editor for template-level fixes
• Plugins → Installed Plugins to configure SEO plugins

The work itself happens in the block editor on each page, using the Image, Gallery, Video, and Embed blocks, drawing on the Media Library. An image-optimisation plugin (for compression and modern formats) and, if you self-host video, a video SEO add-on are the two supporting tools worth having configured before you start.

Step 3: Apply the Fix

Make the necessary changes based on the specific issue. If you’re using an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math, many of these settings can be configured through the plugin’s interface. Add the media that genuinely helps the page, then optimise every asset as you place it: write descriptive alt text on every image (for accessibility first, image search second), give files meaningful names before upload rather than IMG_4821.jpg, compress them and serve modern formats like WebP so they do not bloat the page, and enable lazy loading so off-screen media does not block the initial render. For video, embedding from YouTube is the low-friction path and brings its own SEO benefit; if you self-host, add VideoObject schema and a transcript so search engines can understand what the video contains.

Step 4: Verify the Fix

After making changes:

1. Clear your WordPress cache if you’re using a caching plugin
2. Re-run the SEO Roadmap audit to confirm the issue is resolved
3. Check Google Search Console after a few days to ensure Google has recognized the fix

Do one extra check the audit will not do for you: run the page through a speed test before and after. Media is the most common cause of a page getting slower, and if adding an image dropped your load time or your Core Web Vitals, you optimised the wrong thing. Good multimedia should enrich the page without visibly slowing it.

A dinosaur’s warning: multimedia has to earn its weight

Let me date myself, because this is one topic where the old scars are directly useful. I spent years building multimedia when multimedia was the whole product, not a garnish — multi-language CD-ROM projects and interactive virtual shows, back when a title shipped on a disc with a hard, unforgiving capacity limit and had to run off a spinning drive. In that world every asset you added cost you something real and visible: disc space you did not have, and load time the user felt in their bones while a scene assembled in front of them. You learned very fast to ask of every image, every animation, every audio clip: does this advance the experience, or am I just decorating? If it decorated, it got cut, because you could not afford to make someone wait for something that did not earn the wait.

That discipline is exactly what a modern web page needs, and it is exactly what “add multimedia” advice usually forgets. The medium changed — we serve over fibre now, not off a CD — but the physics did not. Every asset still costs load time, and the user still feels it, especially on a phone on a patchy connection. So I read this check the way I read a storyboard in 1996: not “how many images can I add” but “which images does this page genuinely need, and how light can I make each one.” A single well-chosen, well-compressed image that explains the thing beats five stock photos that just fill space and slow the load. The people who thrived in the CD-ROM era were not the ones who used the most media; they were the ones who made every megabyte pull its weight. That is still the whole game, and the checkbox version of this advice will lead you astray if you let it.

Recommended Tools & Plugins

These tools can help you fix and prevent this issue:

• Yoast SEO – Comprehensive SEO plugin with built-in checks
• Rank Math – Feature-rich SEO plugin with detailed analysis
• Google Search Console – Free tool to monitor your site’s search presence
• SEO Roadmap – Complete SEO audit and action plan tool

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Making changes without testing in a staging environment first
• Ignoring the issue because it seems minor
• Applying fixes to production without proper backup
• Not verifying the fix was successful after implementation

The multimedia-specific mistakes: uploading huge, uncompressed images straight off a camera and tanking your page speed; adding decorative stock photos purely to satisfy the check while helping no reader; skipping alt text and losing both the accessibility and the image-search benefit; and self-hosting heavy video without a CDN, which turns one popular page into a bandwidth problem. Add media that helps, keep every file light, and describe all of it.

Need More Help?

If you’re still having trouble fixing this issue, consider:

• Consulting with a WordPress developer or SEO specialist
• Checking the WordPress support forums for similar issues
• Reviewing your theme and plugin documentation
• Running a complete site audit with SEO Roadmap for a prioritized action plan

This guide is part of the SEO Roadmap knowledge base – your complete resource for WordPress SEO optimization.