SEO-Optimized Infographics: A Blogger’s Best Friend

SEO-optimized infographics are a blog post powerhouse.

They drive massive traffic to your site, get tons of engagement, build your brand, get lots of backlinks and more.

Most of all, they help your blog content land on Google’s first page consistently.

Not by luck, not once in a while, but intentionally and frequently.

Why does that matter? Because the average traffic share of Google’s first page is 91.5 percent (basically everybody).

And if you’re the first result?

The first result gets 32.5 percent of search traffic!

That’s a major leg up on your competitors.

So how do you do that? It’s not by writing a hundred blog posts with a hundred infographics (or even a thousand).

It’s by writing one blog post that features an engaging, SEO-optimized infographic!

That’s right, focusing on SEO-optimized infographics is a reliable way to drive traffic and grow your audience.

It’s something all content creators and business owners can do …but don’t!

What you need at your disposal is an understanding of how visual content and blog posts come together to land on Google’s first page of results.

That’s what this post is all about.

Everyone loves a budget-friendly content marketing strategy

You might be wondering why SEO-optimized infographics over other types of content?

Why not run paid ads on your blog to expand their reach? Create cool videos on YouTube? Sponsor conferences and networking events to get your name out there?

Two words: accessibility and scalability.

Learning a few SEO basics is free, and it’s very easy to design SEO-optimized infographics.

There are a lot of online design tools that provide you with easy-to-customize infographic templates, a simple editor and tons of educational design resources to help you out.

You’d be surprised at the kinds of professional designs bloggers can create on their own today.

On the other hand, paid ads get expensive very fast.

You can purchase links on other sites (sometimes for hundreds of dollars per link) at the risk of receiving a Google penalty.

Purchasing links goes against Google’s guidelines and if you get caught, it’ll drastically reduce your organic traffic for months!

Not worth it.

Hiring professional designers or graphic design agencies is not risky. But a single infographic design can cost you a few hundred dollars or a few thousand (and that’s just the design, not the research or SEO-optimization).

That’s not something you can really scale.

Understanding a bit of SEO, creating your own SEO-optimized infographics and getting free links is risk-free and budget-friendly.

Once you see that it’s working, you can also double (or triple, or quadruple) down on it to ramp up your results without any hassle.

Convinced?

Then let’s get to it!

What’s so special about SEO-Optimized infographics?

Convincing Google your post should be on page one is what SEO is all about.

When it comes to SEO, Google and other search engines have specific ranking factors – factors they use to determine the value of online content.

These factors aren’t a secret, and by following best practices, you can easily satisfy Google’s requirements.

Here’s where infographics come in.

In Brian Dean’s latest list of Google’s ranking factors, he shares a ton of factors that infographics easily impact. Here are just a few:

• Mobile optimized
• Keyword in description tag
• Number of backlinks
• Page loading speed
• Keyword in title
• Title tag starts with the keyword
• Keyword density
• Image optimization
• Keyword appears in H1 tag
• Bounce rate/Dwell time
• Keyword in the title tag
• Repeat traffic
• Keyword in URL

SEO-optimized infographics absolutely impact these ranking factors.

Let’s start with everyone’s favorite – backlinks.

Backlinks are just links on other pages pointing back to your content.

A solid, well-researched, informative and original blog post has high chances of being shared as a post or linked back to as a reference. And, guess what?

Infographics are one of the best, cost-effective ways to get quality backlinks.

Infographics are the most shared form of content online for a reason.

Since infographics are so popular and engaging, more publications are willing to syndicate them or share them in their own content without even being asked (over other types of content).

There are also some technical steps you can take to make your infographic SEO-effective.

Focus on a long-tail keyword and make sure you’ve placed it in the H1 tag, the body text of your infographic post, the URL and so on.

Now for the indirect ways SEO-Optimized infographics influence SEO factors.

Infographics are visual and captivating. That’s how they affect dwell time (the length of time people spend viewing your post), along with repeat traffic (how often they return).

The more time people spend viewing your content and coming back to it, the more relevant and valuable it appears in Google’s eyes.

Social media shares don’t directly impact SEO since Google doesn’t factor in shares and likes.

Of course, with more shares and likes, the higher the chances that your content gets viewed and linked back to.

If you’re creating content that has a tendency to get shared more, you have a clear advantage.

That doesn’t mean an infographic about any random topic will work (hence the SEO-optimization).

It also boils down to the actual value of your content. If you’ve got good data and meaningful insights, then your infographic will take off.

That brings us to the process of creating SEO-optimized infographics.

I’m going to show you ways to do a bit of research for your infographic, along with how to format your infographic to make it as effective as possible.

Good research, facts and stats are the heart of SEO-optimized infographics

Cool looking visuals might lure unsuspecting viewers to check out your infographic.

But without any real meat or relevance, people will bounce (bounce rates, also a ranking factor).

Your infographic won’t pick up any steam, publications won’t want to share it or syndicate it and Google won’t care about it.

Insightful and compelling content is how you reward your audience for clicking and encourage them to comment, share, link back to it and more.

My research phase has three essential stages

1. Choose a topic your audience actually cares about

Why rank for “things cats do” if you sell an online invoicing tool?

Unless there’s a really interesting overlap between small business owners and avid cat lovers, I’d focus on something more relevant.

Let’s say you’re a real estate agent targeting new homeowners. What do homeowners ask questions about? What issues are important to them today? How would you find out?

You can use tools like FaqFox to scrape forums for questions directly related to your topic.

First, enter your topic. Then enter any relevant sites/online forums where people would ask questions about it.

You can even click on one of the tags that appear for a few site suggestions. Then hit search:

FAQFox pulls up popular posts on your topic that you can check out and start brainstorming over.

This is a great way to find out what kind of questions your target audience is asking and what kind of content has been created.

I also like Brian Dean’s suggestion of checking out Udemy courses. While he’s talking about choosing blog post topics, it certainly applies to infographics as well.

You can search for courses by keywords or categories and Udemy shows you the most popular ones.

Best of all, people are paying for this content so clearly it’s valuable to them!

He breaks down that process for you in his recently updated blog post.

2. Select a long-tail keyword

Once you’ve got a topic in mind, you have to choose your angle. More importantly, you’ll need to determine a long-tail keyword for your infographic.

Keyword research is important because it’s the only way people can find your content.

If you use terms that people don’t use for their searches, then Google won’t understand how your content is relevant to what people search for.

3. Conduct original research on your topic

The whole point of research is to make a new discovery, or put old ideas to the test. To do that, there are tons of research methods for you to use to get your answers:

• Ask industry professionals
• Analyze various sources of existing data
• Survey or poll your users/subscribers
• Run your own experiment and share your findings

I’ll elaborate on a few of those research methods.

Asking your industry

A great way to add value to your infographic is to get insights from industry experts.

‘People’ is a vague term, but when you can say “300 homeowners share their favorite tools for budgeting” or “300 real estate agents share tips on finding helpful home insurance policies”, then your infographic has some appeal and real validation.

Survey or poll your users

There are a number of tools out there like Survey Anyplace, Survey Monkey or Pollfish that make conducting surveys simple. Even with free versions, you can design and send out a professional-looking survey to collect data.

Running your own experiments

Running your own experiment is a great way to validate yourself as a leader in the industry.

You get to establish yourself as a direct source of new, helpful information.

Plus your unique findings are exclusive to you, which makes promoting your infographic much easier.

You can also check out this in-depth resource on doing online research (including finding reliable stats, sources, quotes and visuals) to find relevant data the old-fashioned way.

Part 2: Format your infographic post for search engines

In a lot of ways, when it comes to SEO, you can treat your infographic like any other blog post.

Using headers, inserting keywords, determining a URL structure are all ways to influence your infographic’s SEO power.

Let’s take a look at that list I shared before:

• Mobile optimized
• Keyword in the title tag
• Number of backlinks
• Keyword in description tag
• Page loading speed
• Keyword in title
• Title tag starts with the keyword
• Keyword appears in H1 tag
• Image optimization
• Keyword density
• Bounce rate/Dwell time
• Repeat traffic
• Keyword in URL

If your blog is already mobile-friendly, then you’re all set. If you’re not sure, run this test to find out and make the necessary changes.

Some of the factors in that list you can directly influence, while others depend on the quality of your content, the topic, how readable it is and so on.

Make sure your infographic is relevant to your niche and target audience. What you share with a dental SEO would be different than what you share to the patients of a dentist.

Once your infographic is ready to be shared, here are a few essential tips for posting an SEO-optimized infographic.

Insert your long-tail keyword in the right places

Like any blog post, you want your long-tail keyword to show up where it counts – the introduction, the URL, in the H1 header and so on.

Be sure to write up a brief introduction (100-150 words) explaining what the infographic is all about, too.

This lets you include your long-tail keyword, other relevant terms, and link out to helpful resources. An intro is also helpful to your audience, as well.

Below is an example of a brief intro for one of our infographic posts that has done pretty well.

It shares results of a survey on visual content marketing. I’ll share some data regarding how that infographic post has performed later on.

Use SEO plugins to help optimize your post

For WordPress, a simple tool like Yoast lets you tweak important sections (the meta description and URL slug) and it also lets you know what could be improved/added.

There are actually a few alternative SEO plugins that you can use. You can also check out Brafton’s roundup of SEO marketing tools to give your content that SEO edge.

You have to optimize the infographic itself – the image file

Your infographic itself also needs to be optimized. Here are a few SEO factors that matter.

Like any image in a blog post, you want to include your alt text. Alt text tells Google what an image is all about so it knows when to pull it up.

Typically, you can just use your long-tail keyword as the alt text.

Page loading speed is another ranking factor. Your page loading speed will be impacted by the size and file format of your infographic.

Your infographic should be a small image file (less than a MB), with a resolution around 72-100 PPI, and an optimal file format (PNG, JPEG or GIF).

Tools like compressor.io let you reduce the size of images. This is helpful if your infographic is a little large.

Promote your awesome, SEO-optimized infographic and get even more backlinks!

Finally, as I mentioned earlier, backlinks are a major contributing factor when it comes to your content ranking.

The more authoritative sites that point to your content, the better. Backlinks tell Google your content is valuable, engaging, and well-liked for that topic.

Beyond just asking people to link to it as a reference, you should pitch your infographic to sites, offer to write a post on the topic pointing back to your infographic, or encourage sites to syndicate your piece.

Those are just ideas, but you want a backlink outreach strategy in place for any major pieces of content you publish.

Pro-Tip: If you conducted a survey to create your infographic, then reach out to all your respondents and ask for a backlink. They’ll likely be interested in the results and it’ll provide value for their audiences so they’ll be happy to do it.

Content marketers understand the value of visual content, particularly infographics.

They know that featuring SEO-optimized infographics on their blog or sharing it on their social pages will easily engage their audience.

If your content is relevant to the topics they typically cover, they’ll be receptive to your request.

So how did our visual marketing statistics post do anyway? Great! We secured over 1000 backlinks for the post according to Ahrefs:

And we’re dominating the first page of Google search results.

So it does work, in case you were wondering! Now let me know what you think. Have you tried a similar strategy and seen worthwhile results?

Or is there something my approach is missing that would make it even better? Comment and let me know!