Infographics may have seen the height of their popularity but don’t underestimate the power they have on your SEO content strategy. In head to head comparisons with text articles, there is no doubt that infographics outperform in every category. The benefits of an infographic include more links, increased traffic and higher levels of engagement by incorporating visually appealing forms of content.
What is an infographic?
An infographic is a collection of visualized data that uses charts, images and graphs with minimal text. Infographics can tell a story, explain instructions or act as a resource that summarizes data-driven facts and statistics. Infographics are used to communicate large amounts of information that is more easily understood through the use of visualized data.
The following infographic lists 14 benefits of an infographic as it pertains to an SEO content strategy.
Infographics are an excellent SEO content strategy for creating backlinks and brand awareness. Before the rise of video, infographics were the most widely shared pieces of content. They combine imagery with statistics and facts for a more enhanced and enjoyable learning experience.
Additionally, the benefits of using an infographic are as follows:
Undeniable popularity
One benefit of an infographic that there is a high demand for quotable resources. People are always looking for hard facts to back up an opinion and add credibility to their content. Infographics are ideal as resources since they provide an easy way to navigate through a collection of facts and data points.
With over 2 million blog posts being published a day, there will be no shortage of the demand for statistical resources.
The brain retains more information
According to Brainrules.net after three days of reading a text article a person will retain 10% of what they read. When placing an image in a text article that percentage jumps to allow 65% retention of the same content. This can be attributed to the fact that 40% are visual learners.
Infographics can literally be described as visualized data. Pairing images with the main data points makes up 95% of the entire infographic. They can be used as the ultimate tool for not only getting your message across to an audience but having that message retained for a few days after receiving it.
Get more Facebook likes
Your social network will give you much more traffic and exposure by using infographics over text. Infographics get approximately 200% more likes compared to text articles on Facebook. (~Wave Video)
Better performance with directions
When presented with driving directions that included images, people performed 323% better than those who had directions with text only. It’s a natural tendency for the brain to attach relevant images to text, which would explain the difference in performance.
Consider using infographics for how-to pieces of content. Users will have a higher success ratio for learning and completing a task when there are images to support each instruction. As you are well aware, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Widely used strategy
It’s comforting to know you’re employing a strategy that is proven to be effective. 65% of businesses are using infographics as part of their SEO content strategy because of the benefits gained.
Infographics serve as an excellent tool for B2B marketing because it’s easier to convey large sums of information in a visual display. Using visualized data is also improves the conversion rate to build local links.
Higher user engagement (dwell time)
Engagement is one of the factors that site owners can improve on to boost ranking in the search results. When you know that a high-quality infographic is 30X more likely to be read than a text article, how could you not use infographics?
Now that you know users are much more likely to read visualized data, as opposed to a list of stats and facts., improve the time visitors spend on your page by using engaging images with data-driven facts.
The length of time that visitors spend on your page is an engagement statistic known as dwell time. Increased dwell time contributes to a higher ranking in the SERP.
Enhanced link building capabilities
As a link building strategy, infographics can be a powerful tactic to land you a lot of high-quality backlinks. Infographics generate 178% more inbound links and 72% more views (Hubspot) than content with just text.
Guest posting on high traffic websites can get your image in front of a large audience. It only takes a quality infographic to start the ball rolling for attracting backlinks.
Here at Digital Ducats Inc., we used an infographic on website design trends to generate thousands of backlinks. The project was aimed at acquiring local backlinks from Toronto experts but became one of the most linked pages on the site.
The backlinks we acquired came from a few different sources: Local companies linking to the page, guest posts that linked to the page and were syndicated across hundreds of other websites, and people landing on the page and linking to it after it ranked for a number of keywords.
We also submitted the image to a few of the most popular infographic directories to get the ball rolling with a few starter links.
Drive more traffic from improved search visibility
One of the three largest ranking factors search engines use is backlinks. It should be no surprise that once your infographic starts accumulating backlinks it’s going to start ranking for a number of different keywords, which drives organic traffic.
More backlinks also equate to more entry points for visitors to find your website. If your article is syndicated across a large number of websites, the backlinks alone will drive significant volumes of traffic.
Optimize your page for phrases that represent business value. Increase the number of keywords your page ranks for by including an explanation of your data point as a text portion within your post.
Including text on your page (as opposed to only posting the image) provides search engines with the content and context to rank for keyword related phrases.
More engagement, more links, more views lead to more visitors. On average, infographics generate 12% more traffic to your website. (Demand Gen Report)
Gain journalistic attention
Journalists will follow press release sites for interesting stories that they can publish on their blogs. Consider the heightened engagement that infographics generate and it makes sense why journalists are more open to republishing a high-quality infographic.
Colour attracts attention
Use the psychology of colour to your advantage. Colour increases the willingness to read by 50% so make your infographics visually stunning and full of colour. (Neomam)
Increase social engagement
Before video made its big surge in popularity, infographics were the most shared form of content on Facebook. As the second most shared form of content, take advantage of the ability to expand your audience and increase social engagement.
Rather than firing off your entire infographic into your network, use snippets of your image as teasers. Chop your infographic up into multiple pieces of content to create more opportunities to drive traffic and build your audience.
Using pieces of your infographic also meshes better with the format for Facebook and Instagram. Facebook uses rectangle images and on Instagram, you should try to make each snippet a square so users are able to see the entire image.
Infographics increase your pages marketability
Add value to your content by creating an infographic. Whether you’re engaged in a link building outreach campaign or you’re publishing content on your website for a specific audience, elevate the quality of your content by incorporating data-driven images.
You can improve the success rate of your outreach with infographics by making your value proposition more enticing. Website owners are much more open to sharing an infographic on their website as opposed to publishing an article.
Assist with processing information
Reading straight facts and data can eventually lead to a reader completely tuning out their attention and losing their focus. An infographic helps readers digest data-driven facts and information in bite-sized chunks.
The fact that there’s an image to help break the monotony of numbers and text contributes to an understanding beyond words. Seeing a comparison chart will immediately get the message across as opposed to reading the comparison statistics.
When you want your audience to be able to get through large amounts of data, using infographics makes it easier to accomplish.
Excellent sales and marketing tool
Based on increased data processing and retention, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that infographics are excellent sales and marketing tools. Use infographics in sales meetings, product pitches or project proposals to get your message across more emphatically.
The use of infographics on a sales page within your website works to can keep your company in a prospective client’s mind for a longer period of time. Data-driven images are the perfect tool to help increase sales.
What are the disadvantages of infographics?
Not to be a Debbie downer, but nothing is all rainbows and sunshine. There are always a few clouds that loom on the horizon…
You can’t dive headfirst into creating an infographic without knowing the downside. Here are a few things to consider before deciding on whether you’ll use an infographic or not.
Time consuming to build
Infographics are extremely time-consuming to create when you compare them to publishing your typical blog post with images. The amount of energy and resources that go into creating an infographic can dwarf regular blog content when you consider the research you need or coming up with effective data points.
An infographic isn’t very effective unless it serves a purpose really well. Original research is ideal, which in itself is an entire project. Otherwise, you’ll need to come up with line items in which you can’t take everything from one source. You need to mix up your sources and make sure they get the proper attribution.
The design is also a time-consuming aspect. Original images are preferred which means you’ll need to come up with an image for each data point in your image. Don’t forget to customize the background, the text and header to create something unique.
Not ideal format for social media
Most infographics with a lot of information are long and skinny, which is not ideal for social sharing. Of course you can make infographics specifically for social media, but again, your images won’t be able to pack as much information when you’re limited to a square or rectangle.
Generic templates bore people
There are a few companies that you can turn to for the software to create infographics. What happens when thousands of people are using the same software? You start to see the same generic templates and the same icons and images which devalues the level of professionalism your infographic exudes.
In order to separate yourself from the masses, you need to customize your projects as much as possible. A unique design will be much more appealing to your audience and impressive to prospective clients.
There’s risk associate with your investment in resources
Creating a unique and effective infographic is not something to take lightly. You’ll need to invest the time to make it something that looks professional enough to grab the attention of your audience. There is always an implied risk that your infographic doesn’t live up to expectations.
Suppose you’ve decided to use an infographic as a link building method. After hours of labour-intensive work, you begin a massive outreach to companies and website owners you thought would love your idea. If no one wants to put your infographic on their website or link to yours then you’ve wasted a lot of time in resources on a project with minimal results.
Harder to edit and update
Once your infographic is posted on your website, you already have a URL assigned to it. In order to update your image, you need to go back to the infographic editor, make changes, save, optimize the image, edit the name and upload back to your site with the same URL so you don’t lose any backlinks. It’s a bit of a process….
Enjoy the advantages of using infographics
There’s a lot of publishers that write about the rise and fall of infographics but don’t be fooled into thinking they are an ineffective marketing tool. The truth is that infographics had their golden era and now that they aren’t being glorified, it takes useful data and a well-planned infographic to have the same impact on your website.
If you’ve been in the SEO business since 2013, would know that this was the year the popularity of infographics went absolutely through the charts. If you had an infographic you could get it published on some of the top names in the industry and earn high-quality backlinks.
IN 2016, however, when the industry became saturated with low-quality images, publishers stopped publishing them and journalists stopped sharing them in their columns. That didn’t put an end to infographics, but just made the data that they hosted the main selling point.
The point is that at the end of the day, original data reigns supreme and a well thought out and carefully planned infographic can generate traffic, backlinks and contribute to new sales.
One thing that remains constant is high-quality content translates into more traffic, backlinks and credibility. Incorporate infographics in your content strategy for added value and new sources of backlinks and increased search visibility.
