Infographics for SEO: A Quick Guide on how to create compelling infographics and their importance

An infographic is a crisp, brief, visually appealing, and effective means of representing information and data. Its visual elements generally include graphics, color coding, and reference icons. Statistics, time frames, and references are some of its content elements. Hence, an infographic presents complex information, be it a message or vast amount of data, relationships of various parameters or an analytical piece of information, in a compressed and compact manner. The idea is to make the information appear attractive for the readers. One of the most critical advantages of infographics is that one can lead the readers to quickly comprehend the piece of information one wants to convey and in no time. Hence, in today’s world, when the attention span of the generation has declined drastically, infographics prove to be an effective way of spreading content. Data is one of the biggest trends of the current times and you must not miss on that for doing SEO.

Search Engine Optimization, in the simplest of terms, is all about the online presence of your content and how you optimize it for it to appear in the topmost search results shown by search engines such as Google and Bing. Infographics, because of its increasing popularity, especially on various social media sites such as the Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest, has become the favorite tool of digital marketers, content marketers, and businesses. Given the visual appeal and ease of comprehension, companies have been widely using infographics for spreading awareness of its brands and increasing content sharing.

Let’s now have a look at how to create a compelling infographic:

• The first and foremost step is to find out the right information to compress in the infographic. One must have clarity about what kind of information you want to present and whether the information will add value to the reader or not. Unless the content is useful and makes good sense, even the most creative and impressive data will lose its significance, as it doesn’t add any value to its users. Quality content is the king. Do your research, use proprietary information, or conduct a study, and present information that is unique and which no one has known before.
• Know your audience as it helps in setting the theme and tone of the infographic. Say if your target audience is college going students, then a serious theme would not be useful. They would instead require a more chirpy, quirky, and bright theme. Hence, it is essential to understand the target audience and the kind of message you want to convey. It sets the stage for the upcoming steps.
• Now that you have decided on your target audience as well as the information to be presented, the next step is to determine what type of infographic to create. A static infographic would have data presented straightforwardly. These are informative and are ideal for a visual presentation of a product or service’s detailed information. An infographic that is in motion is suitable for presenting stories, processes, developments over a period or complete systems. In this case, you can completely control the user experience. There are also interactive infographics that present a lot of information with a focus on specific details, hence better engaging the audience while conveying the message.
• Elaborate your content and create a framework. After deciding the content, the next step should be to develop a fascinating and compelling narrative out of the information available. You can build stories or put your information pointwise. If it is an analytical piece of information, you can showcase the cause and effect relationship, or if it’s a process that you need to present, then you can go for a step by step approach. Next create a framework, in other words, decide which element should go where in a frame. It will help in ensuring that the flow of the infographic is logical and comprehensible. That is the stage where you can afford trials and errors.
• Next step is designing your infographic. It is a crucial stage as it needs a lot of details. One must ensure not to overlook any essential information; neither should it be congested with redundant data. Decide on the fonts, use spacing effectively so that it appears to be spacious and not congested. The layout must be consistent throughout for the infographic to have a smooth flow. Colors, the quantity of text, icons, and simplicity of designs are some of the aspects to be kept in mind.
• Next comes creating a strategy to promote the content. If you don’t have an effective promotion strategy, a well-designed infographic may not attain the kind of attention it deserves. Businesses have failed without a well-planned promotion strategy. Share the content on various social media platforms, blogs, articles and other types of content. You can also go for paid services to get attention. Here, try to identify who can be your promotion partners. Partners can be influencers in the industry, guest bloggers, customers, journalists, and media personalities.
• Now the question is why infographics? Infographics create messages that can turn a dull and complex data set into an attractive piece of information. You can give it a twist, but do not overwhelm your audience, and keep your content forthright, bold and creative. If you use infographics with other web elements, the probability of search engines finding you goes up. The content on infographic can be easily shared and viewed on various devices such as mobile handsets, tablets, and so on.

A useful marketing tool, the infographic is continuously used by digital marketers to boost brand awareness. The fact that they can be easily shared and linked makes them even more attractive. Also, the visual elements that it contains can garner more views than plain text can manage. Hence, the chances of the content getting viral are also very high. They can easily track and export this to other formats.

The kind of authority that an infographic has and can help in attaining is incomparable. So get your information right and get started!