Infographics for SEO: Most Underrated Google Ranking Factor

Infographics have been a popular online marketing tool for several years. Not only do they create a visually appealing, consumable piece of content, they can also boost engagement on social media and help improve your website’s search engine optimization.

How do infographics help boost SEO?

Here are some of the reasons how Infographics can really come in handy for SEO and other purposes:

A Great Linking Building Strategy:

A significant component of successful SEO is link building, and infographics can help with that. They are a shareable, linkable piece of content that is easily consumed using a variety of methods. Social media, blogs, and email marketing can all use infographics to improve SEO effectively. Companies can email them out to other blog sites, share them on social media, and when online users start to do the same, your backlinks continue to grow.

According to Will Haynie, founder of Pelicoin:

"Infographics can be very handy for providing complex information into easy and digestable form by providing useful and value information to users"

Infographics get more engagement online.

Infographics can help your message, and backlinks, go viral. This study showed that articles with relevant visual content get 94% more views compared to ones without images. On Facebook, for example, posts with images get 20 percent more engagement than videos and 352% more engagement compared to plain links. However, the visuals must be relevant and interesting. Infographics check off both those boxes.

Infographics Can Help in Reduce Bounce Rate:

Infographics are created not only to garner external links but also to reduce bounce rates and make your website users stay engaged even longer and consume more of your content. The lower the bounce rates the higher your possibilities of getting search engine crawlers to realize the value of your content as a reliable source. This will ultimately result and facilitate in better search rankings.

According to Samuel Kane from The Money Pig "Infographics are essential and very handy way for attaining links back to your site which can not only have a great impact on your SEO but also encourages users to stay on your website even longer"

Infographics can break through a sea of content:

People are consuming incredible amounts of content. Scrolling through social media feeds and reading blog articles is almost constant. Infographics are a proven way to stand out in that sea of content, with something interesting, visually appealing, and quick and easy to consume. A consumer does not have to spend a lot of time to obtain the information from an infographic. In a short period, they can take in your messaging, gotten to know your brand, and they might even share it with their friends.

Helps You to Position Yourself as an Expert with Infographics:

The more you use graphical elements and visual content in your articles like charts, graphs, tables, plots or other pics, the higher the chances of you getting considered as an expert in your niche or field, especially if your infographic is extremely useful and informative – well-researched from reliable studies, research, and sources supported by experts from the industry or niche – to your targeted audience. There are many free tools that can help you create many well-designed infographics by using free templates.

Infographics Increase Web Traffic and Can Help You Grow Search Engine Rankings.

Because of their popularity and how easy they are to share with others online, infographics can help you bring more traffic to your website. In turn, the link building and sharing will slowly improve search engine ratings, especially when infographics combine with other web elements.

“I have seen first-hand the benefits of using infographics in content marketing. They have been an effective part of our strategy to gain domain authority for many keywords that are essential in our industry,” said Riley.

“We combine them with a longer blog post, images, press releases, and email marketing campaigns. This digital marketing strategy has effectively increase SEO for our site. Our higher domain authority has a direct impact on the companies listed on our Website.”

Optimizing your Infographics for Best SEO Results:

Google Crawlers are not intelligent to read images as they can read written content such as articles and blog posts. In order to optimize your Infographics for Best SEO results, you need to optimize some of the Infographic elements.

Keyword Research should be the initial step:

Obviously, as I said Google can't read Infographics or any sort of image file so it does not makes sense to put keywords in the body of infographics to take advantage of it.

Luckily, there are some places you can put your keywords such as Alt-text. You can put your primary keyword phrase and secondary phrases to target that will help Search Engine Crawlers to identify the purpose of Infographic.

Page Load Speed for Infographics to Load:

A Couple of years ago, Google announced another crucial ranking factor i.e Page Load Speed. Content and Websites with lower Page load Time will always rank better and given preference over other websites.

The faster your Page Load Speed, the higher you rank on a keyword and the lower your website bounce rate. You shall be well-aware of the fact that Infographics is a critical element for a Page load speed, make sure to reduce the size and format of the Infographics in JPEGS, PNGs, TIFFs, and BMPs loads the fastest.

Make sure to Optimize your Alternative-Text (Alt-Text):

Without Alternative Text your Infographics are nothing. Alt-text is the way you tell Search Engine Crawlers about the content of your Infographics or in the event when the Infographic failed to load properly.

"Screen readers for the blind and visually impaired will read out this text and thus make your image accessible.”

Most Importantly, it let Google know and explain what is your Infographic about.

Don't forget to choose the Relevant File Name for your Infographics:

Choosing the best and right-fit file name for your Infographics is equally important as your Alternative text.

It is also one of the most essential Google Factors to analyze and determine the content of your Infographic. In order to select the right file name for your infographics, please avoid using file names like image001.png because it will not just get Search engine crawlers to overlook your SEO but also going to be a strike against the SEO of your infographics.

The best way to choose your file name would be like "Infographics-for-SEO.png". This will help Google understand the content of your Infographics, just make sure to avoid keyword stuffing and using the same keywords for a lot of different image files.

Case-Study – How RenovationFind succeeded with infographics.

Keith Riley, the founder of RenovationFind.com, has been using infographics to gain higher domain authority for his online home improvement directory. These home improvement infographics have helped draw in web traffic to the website’s blog. Increased SEO means more exposure to the trades and contractors that have listings on the website.

“We put in a lot of effort marketing keywords and phrases to gain exposure to our site. We want more users to find the companies on the directory, and using infographics as a marketing tool has been part of our strategy,” said Riley.

Riley also witnessed how infographics helped their web pages crawl up the rankings on Google and other search engines.

Final Thoughts

Infographics are essential to all sort of content marketing strategies for their ability to demonstrate complex data easily that helps your website visitors to stay engaged with your content even longer.

Backlinks are one of the most crucial Off-Page SEO strategy and infographics can be a major contributing factor to help you garner some good quality backlinks. The more relevant websites linking to your content via infographics, the better your Search Engine Rankings would be.

In a nutshell, Content Marketers and creators understand the importance of visual content, especially infographics. They are well aware that embedding infographics on their articles and blogs will create a remarkable and lasting image into your customer or prospect's mind, and are worth pursuing.