Impact your digital marketing and SEO with infographics

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.

William Playfair, 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.

In our next post – we’ll chat about how to optimize your page for SEO.