Artificial Intelligence Impact on Industry, Marketing, & SEO – Part 3
November 15, 2018
Five Things I Learned at Digital Summit Dallas 2018
January 22, 2019
Artificial Intelligence Impact on Industry, Marketing, & SEO – Part 3
November 15, 2018
Five Things I Learned at Digital Summit Dallas 2018
January 22, 2019

What are infographics?

More commonly known as Infographics – information graphics represent information, data or knowledge. The benefits of using infographics include improving cognition to enhance the human visual system’s ability to see patterns and trends. When used correctly, infographics for business are powerhouses for search engine optimization or SEO.

So, who invented the first infographic?

There’s a debate on crediting the first use of an Infographic. Some say 30,000 BC cave paintings could be considered the first infographic. Also, Egyptian hieroglyphics could be considered early infographics. Of course, SEO wasn’t a factor during for early Egyptians or prehistoric cavemen, but like search engine rankings – content relevance or communication was the end goal. More modern proponents of infographic history attribute William Playfair the father of the infographic. Dating back to the late 1700s, Playfair created data-related visuals showing wheat prices and labor wages. He invented line graphs, pie charts, and bar graphs – thus, he created graphics or what we call infographics.Whether you’re crafting infographics for business, infographics for websites or infographics for SEO they are effective.

Sachs Figure Chart

William Playfair, the Father of Infographics

What are common reasons to use infographics?

For digital marketing SEO is first and foremost. But, infographics are great tools to promote a company brand. Infographics are great for explaining a complicated process or consolidating information into bite-sized chunks.  Traditional graphics and photos draw a reader into an article or commentary. But, infographics for websites draw readers in, while also helping readers understand difficult concepts and reinforce cognitive recall of the content. Any business can use an infographic, but there are certain industries that benefit most. The teams or industries that benefit most from infographics include sales, social media, advertising, digital marketers, ecommerce, multi-media producers, graphic designers, pharmaceuticals, sciences and the arts.

How do infographics impact my SEO?

First, to impact your SEO you need to start with a great idea. Without a clear understanding of what you want to convey – an infographic won’t pack the punch. Infographics for SEO help business gain traction on search engine ranking, but the catch is to make sure the infographic and the site page they live on are optimized. According to HubSpot research eye-tracking studies participants reading on the Web pay close attention to information carrying images. It was shown that infographics increase web traffic by up to 12% – enhancing SEO. Additional research has found that people following directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than following written directions alone. So, the conclusion is that infographics help readability, cognitive recall and search engine optimization – or SEO.

How do I optimize my page for SEO?

First – your content for the web page should support a single keyword or keyword phrase for the search engine to rank your page. Artificial intelligence assisted SEO, keyword phrases or conversational phrases are becoming more common on Google and Bing. So, these phrases can be used in the infographic.

For example, you’re a health plan provider and you’re looking for Millennials, ages 22-45 (1982-2004).As a whole, Millennials– also known as Gen Y or the Digital Generation want to feel connected and involved when making purchasing decisions, which is why they tend to write, read, and trust product reviews.Creatinga targeted landing page  for Millennials is a great way to target Millennials, and be found on search engines. Make sure your landing page is responsive to mobile, too since 1 in 5 millennials access the Internet through mobile devices.

Infographics represent millennial markets

Next, create an infographic that speaks to the millennials’s special health care concerns for insurance. By embedding and using the keyword phrase Health care plans for millennials” search engines will rank your landing. Studies have shown that visuals really appeal to the millennial audience.

Second – make sure the keyword phrase “Health care plans for Millennials” is part of your blog posts URL. This is part of your on-page tactics to optimize your infographic for SEO. It’s also important to include the phrase in your Meta Description, H1 Heading and your Image Alt Text, as described below for search engines to properly rank your content as relevant. For example:

  • Your Meta Description: health care plans for millennials
  • H1 Heading: your page uses H1 (the largest font) headings – and says “Health care Plans for Millennials” in the Title section
  • Image Alt Text: you include a more detailed description of the page but you include “Health care Plans for Millennials” in the description.

As an insurance health care plan provider wants to get the attention of the millennial audience – don’t forget page length and page load times are also important for SEO. Infographics are really seen as Images with embedded text so make sure your graphic is set to a 72-150 dpi jpeg or png file. Too large of a file will cause the page load time to be excessive and perform poorly for content relevance.

Tips on promoting your infographic

Make your infographic is easy to share with social buttons and an embedded form. Promoting and marketing your infographic on social media sites, such as Facebook or Twitter is a great way to push messaging out to the masses.  Share on your own sites or guest blog on other sites. Reach out to other bloggers and sites to see if your infographic might work for posting. Build backlinks and mentions to your infographic for weeks and months to come. No matter what niche or industry you are currently in, there are probably more than enough infographics out there for you to build a summary post.

graphic on creating infographics

What free tools exist to create your infographics?

If you are in for a deal, our friends at Canva have partnered with my favorite digital marketing company, HubSpot to offer 195+ visual marketing templates to help search engines find your content. Web Hosting Media has also produced a great article for the 11 Best Free Tools to Create Awesome Infographics these include Visualize.me, Easel.ly and Piktochart. Piktochart allows you to take raw text and turn these into visually engaging information graphics. In the Piktocharteditor, you can use numerous color schemes, fonts, previously uploaded shapes and pre-loaded patterns as well.

There are so many benefits to using infographics, but the key is targeting the content and the purpose so that it positively impacts your search engine rankings as well as meets your audience need for content relevance.