Are Infographics Bad for SEO?

Are Infographics Bad for SEO?

Are Infographics Bad for SEO? They’re Just Images, Aren’t They?

It’s true, Google and other search engines can’t ‘read’ images. That’s why you’re told to use alt tags and descriptive keywords for your website images and graphics. An infographic is an image. It’s a carefully researched and designed image which informs your reader about a specific topic. But it’s still an image. So are infographics bad for SEO?

No. Infographics are treated the same by search engines as regular images. If you don’t optimise them for on page SEO, they won’t rank high in search engine searches. But if they are well optimised, there are so many wonderful benefits!

What we haven’t mentioned is the off page SEO benefits of using infographics. Infographics are one of the most effective ways of genuine link building known today! It works like this: you upload your infographic to your blod post in a way which lets people embed it into their own website. Check out this HubSpot article to learn how to do create an embed code.  Remember to also allow sharing of both your infographic and blog post with social media and email buttons. You do all the right image optimisation and share it on your social media accounts. It’s that easy!

Your infographic then begins it’s journey of world domination or backlink creation.

How Do Infographics Boost SEO?

Most importantly, they are highly shareable. This alone is the major reason why they are so fabulous for SEO. We know that paying for links or artificial link building is bad news. It’s black hat SEO and will quickly get you penalised by search engines. The fact that infographics provide highly sharable and easy to understand visual information is why they create backlinks faster than any other organic backlink creation method. This is great SEO, also known as white hat SEO and it’s loved by search engines.

Infographics are also evergreen content. This is website content which remains as relevant today as it is in five years time. Evergreen content is the type of content your blogging strategy should be based around. An evergreen infographic is once which shares information about a topic which is relatively stable. This can be problematic if your infographic has data within it, but a regular check to see if it is still relevant solves that problem.

On the other hand, if your infographic is bad, it will fail terribly. A bad infographic:

  • uses only one source for it’s information
  • is poorly researched
  • is inaccurate or deliberately misleading
  • has old out of date facts or data
  • is based upon a topic no one wants to learn about

It’s true that some infographics have given the rest of them a bad name, but a quick Google search will show you that most are top quality! They become a permanent asset which can send you plenty of organic traffic and we all want that. So are infographics bad for SEO? No!

Now read our articles on What Are Infograaphics, What are the Benefits of Using Infographics and about our Infographic Design Service to learn more.

Tags: infographics  

Posted: Tuesday 14 November 2017