Creating SEO Visuals with Midjourney: Guide & Practical Examples

Author: Maciej Grzymkowski, Senior Content Writer

Despite only being widely available for a relatively short time, artificial intelligence tools have become such an integral part of our daily lives that for some, it’s difficult to imagine a workday without them. Without a doubt, the rise of generative AI has transformed the way we create, perceive, and interact with content on the internet. 

Midjourney is one such tool. Capable of generating high-quality images depicting anything you want it to show, as long as you can provide the AI with an accurate prompt. David Holz’s revolutionary program is now being used by companies and individuals all around the world, giving stock image databases a serious run for their money.

It is no secret that content, both written and visual, is an integral part of search engine optimisation. Taking advantage of Midjourney for SEO can help you boost your website’s search engine visibility and rankings in a number of ways. 

What is Midjourney?

Released by San Francisco entrepreneur David Holz in 2022, Midjourney is a generative AI tool that creates images based on users’ natural language descriptions (i.e. prompts). 

With each subsequent version release, Midjourney’s ability to produce hyper-realistic images improved to the point where lots of them are indistinguishable from real-life photographs. 

As opposed to ChatGPT, Midjourney does not come with an official API. Instead, the tool is actually a Discord bot, which relies on the popular messaging app to support the exchange of users’ prompts and AI-generated images. This is probably Midjourney’s biggest barrier to entry, as using Discord to work with an AI tool is not intuitive to say the least, especially if you’re used to having a separate API in the past. 

However, once you do get used to working with Midjourney on Discord, using the “/imagine” command to feed the bot with image descriptions will quickly become second nature to you. Later on in this article, we’ll get into more details on how to modify and adjust your prompt to make the most out of the Midjourney bot. 

Benefits of Using Midjourney for SEO 

Blog posts, landing pages, product descriptions, category pages, the homepage. What do all of these different parts of a website have in common? They all need quality, appealing visuals to provide the best possible user experience, but also to get a shot at ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Having lots of high-quality, optimised images on your website may help it rank on Google Images. It’s an often-overlooked part of Google, but it really shouldn’t be – in the US, Google Images account for over 20% of all web searches. That’s a whole lot of traffic! 

Where does Midjourney come into all this? Well, unless you have hundreds of self-taken pictures readily available, sourcing images can get quite tricky. Free image websites like Unsplash or Pixabay are great, but don’t always have the exact pictures you’re looking for (especially in some of the more obscure niches). Premium stock image databases like Adobe Stock or Getty, on the other hand, are rather expensive and can eat away at your limited budget. 

Enter Midjourney. It comes at a significantly lower price tag than most premium stock image websites, and with just a little bit of training, you will be able to reap its many benefits, such as: 

• Access to a virtually limitless pool of images 
• Pictures that look exactly as you envision them (as long as you get the prompt right)
• Ability to create product visualisations based on existing sketches 
• Capacity to generate dozens of images in a unified style that suits your website’s themes and colour palette 

How to Use Midjourney for SEO: 5 Practical Examples

Ok, so you know that Midjourney can be effectively used for SEO content creation due to how big of a role the visual aspects of a website can play in its rankability. But how exactly does that translate into practice? 

Here are five Midjourney SEO use cases you can implement on your own, and save lots of time and resources in the long run. 

Create Eye-Catching Featured Images for Blog Posts

Every blog post needs at least one featured image. It’s a standard way of introducing your readers to the article and its main subject matter. The very best featured images need to be closely related to your blog post’s title, and serve as a sort of visual representation of the main gist of the text. 

With Midjourney, you can step your featured image game up and say goodbye to generic-looking stock photos. Simply write up a prompt you want to see visualised, and send it to the Midjourney bot. 

Here’s an example of a featured photo for a (non-existent) blog post about buying used Porsche cars:

Prompt used: “a used car dealership parking lot filled with Porsche 911s in different colours”

Create Branding Assets 

You may have heard that Midjourney has a lot of trouble generating coherent text on its images. While that’s true, it shouldn’t deter you from using the program to generate professional-looking branding assets that don’t contain any text, such as logos, mood boards, or brand mascots. 

Midjourney can also be an excellent tool to give you that creative push you might need to develop a cohesive style and visual identity for your brand. In the example below, I’ve prompted the Midjourney bot to create a mood board for a “cosmetic brand catering to women of colour,” without having the slightest idea for the company’s artistic direction. Here’s what it came up with:

Prompt used: “create a minimalistic mood board for a cosmetics company catering to women of colour”

Create Images for Your Landing Pages

If you want to give your website a unique feel and flair that corresponds with your brand’s visual identity, using custom background images for landing pages is a good way to go about doing so.

In order for these images to work, they’ll need loads of empty space in the middle, so as not to draw attention away from the on-page text. 

You might know from experience that stock image sites are not the best place to look for such images. Using Midjourney, you can generate hyper-realistic images that leave plenty of room for text. Take a look at this image of a mountain range that would make for a great landing page for a travel agency.

Prompt used: “A beautiful mountainous valley on a sunny day. The clear, blue sky takes up the top two-thirds of the image.”

Product Visualisations 

This one is a lot trickier than the previous use cases, mainly because you’ll need to feed the sketch of your product to Midjourney in order for the bot to work its magic on it. 

To do that, open up a separate chat with the Midjourney bot. Then, attach the image to a message and send it in the chat. Right-click on the picture and select “copy image address.” 

Once you’ve got the image URL, simply paste it into your “imagine” prompt, specify that the image is meant to be a product visualisation and incorporate any details you might want to have in the final photo. 

The trick to creating a high-quality product rendering is to have a professional, accurate, and detailed sketch. With that said, Midjourney will work with any photo you give it. Here’s a visualisation of my hastily-drawn coffee mug.

Prompt used: “<image link> kitchen table, product rendering”

Convert Blog Posts Into YouTube Videos 

A YouTube channel is a great additional funnel that can drive traffic to your website and increase conversions. You don’t need studio-quality clips or exciting on-screen action to accumulate views, either. A well-written script might just do the trick. Channels such as “Casually Explained” manage to amass millions of subscribers using videos that, without the clever voiceover, would be nothing more than slideshows. 

If your website has a blog section populated with listicles and other types of blog posts that generate lots of views, you might want to consider turning them into YouTube videos and use Midjourney to add a visual component to these clips. 

Here are two images that could work in a YouTube video titled “X Reasons Why Mountain Vacations Are The Best.” As you can see from the prompts used to generate these pictures, sometimes even the simplest of commands can yield great results.

Prompts used: “a man skiing,” (left) “a couple hiking up a mountain” (right)

Midjourney SEO in Action: Commands and Parameters Guide 

Having a detailed prompt in mind is one thing, but you also need to be able to adjust Midjourney’s settings and image generation parameters to truly get this powerful AI to create the images you envision. 

Basic Commands 

Once Midjourney is all fired up and ready to go, you can use it to generate almost any image your mind can conceive of (with a few exceptions). Here are the three basic commands to use when working with the bot. 

/imagine

The single most important command. Without it, your prompt will not get picked up by the Midjourney Bot.

Once you type “/imagine” into the message box, a black rectangle titled “prompt” will pop up. This is where you’re supposed to type in your instructions for the AI. 

The prompt can be as long or as short as you want, as long as you stay within the 6,000-character limit. 

/settings 

Typing this command into the message box will reveal the list of settings and modes you’ve activated in Midjourney.

You can experiment with these to see how they affect your AI-generated images. 

For example, the “Turbo” mode will result in 4x faster generation times, but they’ll also use up twice as many GPU minutes available in your Midjourney subscription. 

In High Variation Mode, the variations Midjourney creates based on the previously generated image will follow different concepts, and be quite different from each other. 

Low Variation, on the other hand, will only slightly alter the details of the photo upon your variation request, resulting in four images that are very similar to each other. 

The Remix Mode lets you personalise your image variations by typing in an additional prompt. After upscaling an image you like the most and clicking “Vary (Subtle)”, you’ll be presented with a text box, where you can type in an extra prompt, instructing Midjourney to adjust the image in accordance with your preferences. 

Play around with the Remix Mode to create some really powerful images. To give you an example, here’s an image of a crying child generated in Midjourney:

Prompt used: “photorealistic portrait of a crying child”

And here’s a remixed version of that same image with a completely different prompt to guide the AI. Move away from the screen a little and squint your eyes. Do you see the face?

Prompt used for the variation: “a war-torn city street with buildings in ruin”

/describe 

This command is best described as “/imagine” in reverse. 

It takes any picture you upload, and returns four unique prompts. 

You can then use these prompts to generate a picture that’s very similar to the one you’ve uploaded.

The “/describe” command is incredibly useful if you need to recreate a photo you’ve already seen, but can’t use it due to copyright restrictions or the presence of a competing brand in the image.

Understanding Midjourney Parameters 

The “/settings” command lets you change some of the parameters, but it’s not exactly the most comprehensive Midjourney feature. 

You can set the parameters for each image by typing up a corresponding command at the end of your prompt. Using specific parameters in your prompts with an understanding of what each one of them is responsible for can give you a much higher degree of control over the Midjourney Bot. 

Chaos 

Command: –chaos <0-100>

Lets you control the randomness of your generated image. 

If you set “chaos” to 0, the Midjourney Bot will create four very similar images that stick to your prompt as closely as possible. 

If you set it to a higher value, the result will be more varied and random.

If you want reliable, repeatable results, stick with low chaos values. 

On the flipside, if you want to get a number of radically different images from the same prompt, increasing the chaos value is a way to go. They’ll still reflect your general idea, but in rather unexpected ways, and won’t always adhere to the instructions from the prompt.

Prompt used: “a man and a woman holding hands at the beach.” For the left-hand picture, “chaos” is set to 0. For the one on the right (same prompt, same seed number), it is set to 100.

Aspect Ratio 

Command: –aspect <x:x> or –ar <x:x>

This parameter allows you to set the width-to-height ratio of your image. 

The default aspect ratio of Midjourney is 1:1, which results in square images. 

Other popular aspect ratios include 16:9, most commonly used for videos, 4:3, used in photography, or 21:9 for pictures meant to be displayed on ultrawide monitors.

Aspect ratio: 1:1 vs.16:9

No Command: –no <item>

Use this parameter if you want to exclude an item, colour, or other concept from your image. 

This is the only way to make sure that something you definitely don’t want to see in the final product doesn’t end up there. 

For example, writing “don’t include leaves” in your prompt will make it quite likely that leaves will, in fact, be featured in the image. This is because the Midjourney Bot perceives every word from the prompt as something you want it to generate.

Image of a lone tree with a “–no leaves” command used in the prompt.

Stylize 

Command: –stylize <0-1000>

A high “stylize” value will result in pictures that are very artistic, with lots of details and flair. On the other hand, they won’t follow your prompt as closely. 

Setting “stylize” to 0 will give you an image that closely reflects the prompt, but isn’t as “artsy.”

Delicious chocolate cake, generated with different “stylize” values. From left to right: “–stylize 0,” “–stylize 500,” “–stylize 1000.”

Quality 

Command: –quality <.25, .5, or 1>

Controls how much time Midjourney spends generating your image. A lower quality image will use up less of your GPU minutes budget, but will be less detailed. 

Keep in mind that this parameter does not affect the picture’s resolution – a 0.25 quality image will still have the same resolution as a 1 quality image.

The same puppy, generated with different quality parameters. From left to right: “–quality .5,” “–quality .25,” “–quality 1.”

Stop 

Command: –stop <10-100>

Instructs the Midjourney Bot to stop generating at a specific stage of the process. 

For example, a “–stop 10” command will return an image that is 10% complete, whereas “–stop 50” – an image that is 50%, and so on.

Two Midjourney-generated images of a pile of apples. The image on the left was created using the “–stop 20” command, the one on the right is a completed picture (“–stop 100”).

Seed

Command: –seed <seed number>

If you don’t use the “–seed” command, every image you generate via Midjourney will get a random seed number assigned to it. This is the reason why the pictures seem so random and inconsistent. The “–seed” parameter allows you to retain a similar composition to a previous image you’ve generated. 

In order to find out the “–seed” number of any Midjourney-generated image, simply react to that job with the “envelope” emoji, like so:

Once you do that, you’ll get a private message from the Midjourney Bot with the seed number and other information about the picture. Copy the number and paste it into your prompt after the “–seed” command to generate similar-looking images.

Using ChatGPT to Generate Midjourney Prompts 

One of the main advantages of Midjourney over stock photo websites or doing photo shoots by yourself is that it’s a cost-effective way to mass produce countless images for your website. 

Coming up with dozens of unique prompts on a whim is not an easy task, though. Thankfully, you can easily automate this process with the help of ChatGPT. With a simple request for an X number of Midjourney image generation prompts, the language processor will churn out a number of ready-to-use commands related to your niche. 

I’ve asked ChatGPT to give me three prompts for featured images for blog posts that discuss the benefits of yoga. Here are the results:

Prompt used: A serene sunrise yoga session by the ocean, with calming waves in the background

Prompt used: A mindfulness-focused image with a person practising yoga in a tranquil garden setting

Prompt used: A group yoga class in a beautiful park to showcase the social and community aspects of practising yoga

The Bottom Line 

At first glance, Midjourney can seem like an intimidating tool, aimed at people who have extensive experience handling generative AI programs. Fortunately, once you get past the lack of a dedicated, intuitive API, it becomes clear that it’s almost as easy to use as ChatGPT. 

Midjourney offers near-limitless possibilities for creating unique, brand-specific visual content for your website, which can greatly aid your SEO efforts. With affordable subscription pricing, it’s well-worth a shot as an alternative to other online image sources.