I’ll be presenting at this year’s Dreamforce at a session called Marketing with Infographics for Fun and Profit.
Speaking alongside Dave Austin, Andrew Melchior and Chris Bennett, we’ll discuss the many facets of infographics. I’ll be covering the relationship between Infographics and SEO and I decided to break down the information of my 10 or so slides into blog posts. Here’s the first one…
Infographics are shared easier
First off, what do SEOs love infographics? Simply – quality infographics are engaging content that have the potential to go viral. Humans just process and understand visual content much easier than a block of text that’s saying the same thing.
Even if your infographic doesn’t become an internet sensation, visual content is proven to be shared more often than just regular, text content (such as a blog post). Here’s some data on just how much more visual content is shared:
• On Facebook, images are liked 2X more than text updates –Simply Measured + M Booth
• Quality infographics are shared 30X over comparable text articles –Visual.ly
• Infographics are LIKED 23x more than documents –SlideShare
• Infographics are shared 3x more than documents on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. –SlideShare
• Infographics get 800% more retweets and 600% more LinkedIn shares than regular blog posts –BitRebels
On top of that, we did some research at salesforce.com about the sharability of infographics against regular blog content. We examined the social shares on 250 blog posts, and found that posts that included an infographic had 31% more social shares across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.
Great, but how does all of that impact SEO?
Social shares are also good for SEO as search engines integrate social – shares, +1s, tweets, and likes – into their algorithm, so social shares give your content a nice start.
Social shares are great, but the real, long-term SEO benefit you get from infographics are their potential to garner external links. Social increases the outreach of your content, and in that increased visibility, is the potential that it will be shared on other blogs and websites related to your content.
Infographics provide a organic way to obtain external links back to your own website. Citations are one of the most important SEO signals, maybe the most important signal, that search engines use to determine how well your webpage ranks. The more relevant external links that point back to your infographic – you increase the likelihood of improving your search engine rankings.
And that in a nutshell, is why infographics are treasured by many SEOs.
