An infographic is a visual way to offer a representation of concepts. Both simple and complex concepts are more easily understood through a combination of images and text.
When you are trying to improve SEO, you may only consider content in text format. Images are often given the short end of the stick and are a late addition, added without much thought. But, they should not be an afterthought.
- People Are Visual: Most people enjoy looking at pictures. When reading online, information broken up by complementary pictures makes it easier to grasp information.
- Readers Want What They Want Now: The average reader is impatient. Your audience wants their information now. They don’t have the time to sit around waiting for your pages to load. And no one wants to read ten pages of information to understand something. Infographics can make hard information easier to digest.
- Infographics are Link Bait: True! You need to promote your infographics to make them the link bait that you want them to become. It’s not a matter of putting the infographic on your website and waiting for the traffic to roll in. Instead you will need to promote it and tell people about it. Promotion is required for any type of content. With infographics, people are more likely to share an interesting and well designed graphic.
- Good Quality Infographics Work Best: Don’t skimp on making infographics. You can create your own infographics with tools such as Canva. Or, if design isn't in your wheelhouse, delegate the task to your Virtual Assistant.
- Use a Text Description of Your Infographic: An important feature for search engines is the text description. On the webpage where you add your infographic, include a text description. This will help the search engines pick up the information. Be sure to use the keywords for the information that the infographic covers. You can include as much information as necessary.
- Include an Alt Tag on Every Infographic: An 'alt' tag provides alternative text when images are not displayed. It’s important that you do not leave out this important addition. The 'alt' tag tell search engines what is there.
- Promote Your Infographic: Promote your infographic in the same manner you promote a blog post. Share it on social media: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+.
- Offer an “Embed Code” to Others to Promote Your Infographic: An embed code is beneficial tool to get other people to share and promote your content. Hubspot has a handy tutorial here. Teach them how to embed the infographic into their own websites and blogs. The viewer will click through and go to your page, and with the embedding they are viewing it on your page.
- Include Diagrams and Interesting Typography: Include diagrams, images, and interesting typography. You want eyes drawn to it, and you want it to also be understandable.
Using infographics is a good way to repurpose content that you already have on your website. Try taking an old blog post, poll, or survey and transforming it into an infographic to get a taste of how infographics might help your business.
Using infographics is a great way to add interest to your content and to breathe new life into your data. There are so many ways in which you can use infographics. Think outside the box to make your content visual instead of just text based. Here are some ideas to get you started:
