Infographic & SEO: Everything You Need to Know

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What Is an Infographic?

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An infographic is the presentation of information in a visually engaging manner. It relies heavily on charts, diagrams, pictures, and illustrations to communicate ideas.
Infographics have been around for decades. They were in your classroom, at your dentist’s, and in the office of your driving instructor. But it was through the internet that infographics found their true potential.

Who Uses Infographics?

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Everybody! Infographics are the perfect content format to communicate a subject, especially if it’s a complex one. But, we can broadly categorize their users into three:

• Business : Marketers use infographics to increase organic traffic and brand awareness.
• Education : Teachers use infographics to simplify complex subjects for their students.
• Social causes : Activists use infographics to spread awareness on social issues.

Types of Infographics

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There are three major types of infographics; they are:
Statistical : These are perfect if you have large amounts of data to make sense out of. They make use of data visualizations like charts, diagrams, and maps. Text in bold fonts narrates the information underlying the data.
Informational : They are a popular type of infographics on the internet. Instead of data, they use the information to weave a story. They can have one or more data visualizations and text in bullet points, quotes, and boxes. They use visuals to enhance comprehension of textual information.
Process : These are educational infographics that explain how to go about a task. Clear and concise instructions are the characteristic of such infographics. Information in these infographics flows in a linear order. Visual elements like icons, illustrations, shapes, and lists help the viewer understand steps.

Benefits of Using Infographics for SEO

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1. Infographics Increase the Quality of Your Content

Quality content is the potion to cure most maladies of your content marketing. If you have quality content, your bounce rate will decrease, and your dwell time will increase. Search engines will start noticing your website, and your rankings will go up.

Make Your Content Great with Infographics

Infographics, with its lively presentation of information, can win the attention of visitors. If created wisely, they can also increase the time they spend on your website.
Now, a good infographic educates and entertains its viewers, not confuse them. If it’s good, a visitor will understand the story by scanning through the elements just once. If they have to do so twice or thrice, then your infographic has failed.

2. Brings You a Lot of Links

A lot of research and hard work goes into creating a good infographic. Not all have the ability or patience to create them. This is why there is a high demand for quality infographics.
So, if you can create infographics on great topics, people will share them. Other websites will link up with you to use your infographics. This results in a lot of inbound links to your website.

Relevant : Legit Ways to Earn Backlinks to Your Site

Help Them Find Your Infographics

Promotion is as important as creation. Here are some tips:

• Publish your infographics as a new post along with some copy and an embed code.
• Promote your infographic on a social medium having the right audience.
• Email influencers explaining your infographic and requesting them to take a look at it.

3. Stays Relevant Even After Years of Publication

Keeping your content relevant is key to keeping your rank on SERP. Unlike plain text, infographics stay relevant long after they go online.
People tend to share and reshare them on social media and other web platforms. This means organic traffic from infographics will continue undiminished for years.

How to Create Infographics That Last?

The more specific the topic of your infographics, the higher your returns will be.
For example, ‘The benefits of eating vegetables’ is a hot topic. It is, however, too general a topic. Instead, try ‘the benefits of eating tomatoes.’ This is a more specific topic, and interest in it will not wane with time.

4. Increases Brand Awareness

The human brain processes an image 60,000 faster than we do text. That is why infographics do a far superior job in communicating an idea than chunks of plain text. You can use this quality of infographics to increase your brand awareness. Here’s how:

• Users share infographics that are visually appealing and easy to understand.
• Your logo, name, or tagline throughout the design facilitates greater brand recall.
• Promotion on Pinterest and Instagram lets more of your target audience find your work.

Extra : Compared to plaint text, people are 40 times more likely to share visual content. Also, information recall after three days is 65% for visual content and 10% for auditory content.

5. Increases Your Domain Authority

Posting great infographics is one of the two proven ways to increase Domain Authority (DA). The other is by posting long-form content.
The DA is an important SEO metric developed by Moz. Every website gets a score on a scale from 1 to 100 based on the number of quality backlinks. The higher the score, the higher are your chances of appearing on SERPs. And, as you already know, a good infographic is a magnate of backlinks!
Extra : Remember, it’s not for the algorithm that you are making the infographics. Be in the shoes of a user while creating them. Ask yourself: Can I understand this? Has it answered the question? If the answers are ‘yes,’ then you have a great infographic on the anvil.

6. Gives You More Bang for Your Buck

Granted, you will have to spend a little more money to create an infographic. It, however, gives you more bang for your buck compared to normal text content.
This is because a good infographic contains many data visualizations. These and many other visual elements in it are, in fact, very much capable of standing alone.
These ‘components’ can add value to your new blog and social media posts, ebooks, ads, posters, and videos. It’s content that you can use many times across all your digital properties.

Increases User Engagement

Placing infographics between editorial content will raise your dwell time and scroll depth. They are especially effective on top-of-the-tunnel users who are always short of time.

7. Makes Your Content Mobile-Friendly

The use of smartphones and tablets is increasing by the year. The preferred content on these devices is, of course, visual. This is because content like infographics facilitates easy comprehension of information. They can cut through mountains of data and show the underlying pattern or trends.

Repurpose Your Existing Content

If you have a website, you might already have a wealth of information on it. You can repurpose these pieces of content by turning them into infographics. This will make your content more attractive to your users. Notably, 40% of internet users engage with visual content better than they do with text.

8. Help You Rank on Image Search as Well

If you optimize your infographics, you can get some extra traffic via image search. It is a separate search distinct from the normal one.

Optimization of Infographics

Filename can contain your keyword. E.g., Instead of going for a name like picture01.jpg, use sandblasting-benefits.jpg.
Alt-text is the text that appears in case a picture fails to load. It describes what the picture is about. Crawlers can detect this text.
URL should ideally be three to five words long. Of them, one or two should be your keywords.
Metadata of your infographics can be anywhere from 130 to 160 characters long. Use your keyword exactly once within this description.
Accompanying text is the last but not least among these factors. This piece of text gives search engine crawlers extra material to read.

9. Infographics Can Go Viral

Infographics are the perfect content format in this age of viral posts. Once published, they will journey through the digital alleyways for a long time. And every time someone shares them, you get credit either as backlinks or as brand promotion.

How to Make Infographics That Go Viral?

The easiest way to find a viral topic is by keeping an eye on what is popular on social media. Check out trending hashtags on Twitter, Reddit, Google Trends, or BuzzFeed.
Design and delivery come next. Don’t copy or repeat anything. Find an angle of the topic that others have not explored.
Set a mood for your infographics. Should it be humorous, informative, or authoritative? Your answers to these questions will determine the performance of the infographic.

10. There Are Less of Them Today

In the first half of the 2010s, infographics were among the most sought-after content on the web. Everybody wanted to jump on this bandwagon and ride its success.
It was, however, not long before that excitement gave way to hate. The reason? Thousands of mediocre infographics are flooding the web. What followed a period of lull. Now, however, infographics have come of age. They have struck a balance between quantity and quality.
This is why infographics matter now more than ever in your SEO efforts. It has positioned itself as a quintessential building block of every content strategy. Investment in it has become a necessity, not a novelty. Extra: Websites using infographics get 12% more traffic than those that don’t.

11. Gives You Insights into User Behavior

You may be good at creating infographics, but not all your works will give you sterling results. Some may perform better than others. This may be because of their design, topic, or relevancy.
Fortunately, you can track the performance of all your infographics. This tracking will help you make deep inroads into the behavior of your target audience. Through analysis, you will be able to find out:

• The type of topics your users like
• The form of design your users like
• The social media your audience uses
• The infographic strategy to use in future

Extra : Ensure that you have a separate landing page for each of your infographics. This will help you see each of their performance in driving traffic, encouraging shares, etc.

Best Tools to Create Infographics

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1. Canva

Canva is not just an infographics maker. It is an online design tool that happens to have an infographics section. Nonetheless, it has a huge collection of templates and elements for you to select from.
The free version is enough to get a lot of things done. However, those who want more features can opt for paid versions. The cheapest plan is Canva for Work, which starts at $12.95 a month a user.

2. Venngage

Like Canva, Venngage too has an elaborate infographics section. To simplify selection, Venngage has divided templates into types. These include statistical, informational, process, comparison, etc.
Each type has a sizeable stock of templates, illustrations, icons, and other elements. While you can change the colors of icons, you can’t do so with illustrations. It also has all the charts and graphs for your data visualization needs.
Students get it for free. The cheapest plan starts at $19 a month.

3. Piktochart

Famous among businesses, this tool has over 200 infographic templates. Thirty-five of these are available on the free version.
For data visualization, you will get around 15 charts to select from, plus many maps. You can either add data to these charts manually or import a file. As for the graphics part, you will get a library of illustrations and icons.
Piktochart comes in three versions: Free, Pro, and Team. Pro is the cheapest paid version, starting at $29 a month.

4. Visme

One of the more famous infographics tools, Visme, lets you create interactive infographics. You can animate objects and add pop-ups and links to your design.
It features an easy-to-use editor. Once you select a template, you will find everything else to populate it on the editor. It also allows you to add audio or video files.
Visme comes in free, standard, complete, team enterprise, student, and teacher versions. The cheapest paid version is standard, which costs $19 a month.

5. Snappa

Snappa is a pocket battleship among infographic tools. It is not as flamboyant as the big wigs but is more than enough for a novice designer or an individual.
Snappa is highly useful to create informational and list-type infographics. Apart from elements like shapes and icons, Snappa offers vector elements as well.
Its free version has almost all the features of the paid ones. But the free version has a limit on the number of downloads a month.

6. Easelly

Easelly is an infographics tool that comes with a lot of templates divided into many categories. Graphical elements include shapes, lines, images, icons, illustrations, and simple animations.
You will get the regular charts and graphs for data visualizations. As for text, easelly offers no ready-made text blocks. You will, nonetheless, get an option to make bullet lists.
The free version of easelly is not much of anything. The pricing, though, is quite attractive. The premium business plan costs just $5 a month.

7. Infogram

If you are a data wizard with a sweet tooth for statistical infographics, then Infogram is your go-to tool. It has a great charts library that also features novelties like ‘word clouds’ and ‘tree charts.’
Since it deals primarily with data infographics, Infogram offers you several metrics. These include data and engagement analytics, link tracking, and SQL connectors.
It comes in five plans: Free, pro, business, team, and enterprise. Pro is the cheapest starting at $25 a month.

8. Adobe Spark

Adobe Spark is a cloud-based tool easier to use than Photoshop or Illustrator. It’s the best infographic tool for those who already use other Adobe products.
Spark features a great stock of illustrations, doodles, and cutouts. Customizable and ready-made text blocks are also available. Moreover, you can access libraries saved in the Creative Cloud.
You can access the team plan of Spark if you have a Creative Cloud subscription. If not, pay for it separately at $19.99 a month.

Infographics SEO FAQs

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1. How Important Are Infographics in SEO Effort?

Very. One reason is that 65% of all internet users are visual learners. It means if you can present your information or data in a visual format, they will understand it faster.
Not just that. Users share infographics three times more than they do other formats of content. And shares are the best way to garner backlinks and organic traffic.

2. How to Find an SEO-Friendly Topic for My Infographic?

Topics come under three heads: Timeless, trending, and debatable.
Interest in timeless topics will not wane with time. An example is, ‘How to simplify grammar learning.’ You can find trending topics by observing your industry newsfeed. Debatable topics are those on which a discussion is going on. An example is, ‘Divorce rate going up during the pandemic.’

3. How to Create a Good Infographic?

A good infographic starts with a good topic. For this, you have to know your audience through and through. Once you have your topic, you can concentrate on the design.
The design should have plenty of breathing space. Cluttered infographics will confuse your audience. The text should be minimal. Give more focus to the graphics part.

4. How Can I Make My Infographics SEO-Friendly?

Use your keyword in the filename, URL, and alt text of your infographic file. Optimize the meta-description as well. The next step is optimizing the page. Get long-form content (articles having a word count of 1,000-1,500 or above) to go with your work. As for the technical aspects, keep an eye on the load time of your webpage and infographic.

5. Where Can I Get My Infographics Reviewed?

One website where you can get your infographics reviewed is Infographics Review. The website will assign a rating to your infographic based on the quality of the layout and the content. The final verdict of each infographic explains how the reviewer regards your work.

6. Which Are the Top Five Websites to Submit My Infographics To?

• SlideShare : You can simply upload your infographics after creating an account.
• Mashable : Submit your quality infographics
• Fast Company : Make your submissions at [email protected]
• Visual.ly : Create an account to submit your infographics.
• Reddit : Head over to https://www.reddit.com/r/infographics to submit your work.

Do you need any help in creating infographic for your website? Reach our designers to create an attractive infographic for your website/blog.