How to Build Links With Infographics and Boost Your SEO

How to Build Links With Infographics and Boost Your SEO

Written by:
Chloe West

Dec 30, 2019
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Year after year, we hear about how “infographics are dead,” and marketers need to invest in other areas of link building, promotion and visual content.

Yet, year after year, infographics continue to outperform other types of visual content and help boost SEO. Despite its decrease in popularity, link building with infographics continues to be a winning strategy.

This is because infographic link building takes time and requires outreach that many marketers simply don’t want to do.

Building links and improving your website’s SEO is a strategy that requires time, patience and a lot of adaptation each time Google and other search engines update their algorithm.

But using infographics to build links is a tried and true strategy every time.

 

Why Use Infographics For Link Building

There are so many different link building strategies out there, whether you have an outreach team whose main job is searching for link opportunities, you write guest blogs that include links back to your site or you search for broken links your articles can replace.

Creating and promoting infographics is yet another powerful strategy that can increase website traffic, improve your domain authority and boost your SEO.

In fact, studies show that infographics can help increase website traffic by up to 12%, and original graphics like infographics are the top performing visual content type.

If you create an infographic that focuses on a trending topic, and includes helpful stats and data visualizations, it can entice people interested in that topic to share your infographic with others.

Let’s talk real world applications for a second.

You’ve heard of Game of Thrones, correct? If you haven’t, you must have been living under a rock because it’s a wildly popular TV show that just finished its final season in 2019.

To commemorate some of the questions many viewers had, like who will win the Game of Thrones, we put together a couple of charts visualizing each character's probability of ending up on the iron throne.

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This infographic was immensely popular among Game of Thrones fans, generating tons of traffic and engagement, and even getting picked up by a few other websites.

This strategy has worked so well for us that we regularly create new charts and data visualizations on trending topics. You can check out a few of them here.

 

How to Create a Compelling Infographic

If you want people to share your infographic and use it to build links for your SEO strategy, it needs to be compelling and well-designed.

In order to create an infographic that will guarantee shares and engagement, follow these steps.

1. Research your topic.

An awesome infographic starts with awesome content.

No matter how well designed your infographic is, if it doesn't provide readers with new, relevant, useful or inspiring information, they’re not going to be interested.

To increase your chances of getting picked up by popular bloggers and larger news outlets, create content that is completely original and never before seen.

But how do you get your hands on exclusive content? The best way to do this is to use your proprietary information, or conduct your own poll or study.

Here’s a quick example. Let’s say your business provides email marketing software for businesses to send newsletters to their audiences. Your infographic could include aggregate data you’ve collected, like open rates and unique click rates by industry.

Omnisend's infographic is a great example of how this could look.

Or, if you're a digital marketer and you’re interested in researching trending topics from the last month, you could easily access a world of information on Twitter or Facebook that can be tallied, analyzed and visualized using an infographic.

And if you don’t have the means to collect your own data, you can always conduct your own thorough research to ensure you’ve found everything you can on your chosen topic.

The important thing is to ensure you’re creating a data visualization that informs and delights.

2. Pinpoint your audience.

Now that you have your information, you need to have a full understanding of the audience that would be interested in consuming your infographic.

You could have one of a few different audiences.

If you’re creating a link building infographic that pertains to your audience, then you want to choose a highly-specific segment of your audience that’s most likely to share your content.

If you’re jumping on a trending topic, the target audience for your infographic might be a less targeted segment of your audience.

It’s important to know who specifically your information is targeting so that you know what your content’s tone and theme should be. For example, if you're targeting young college students, you probably don't want to assume an overly serious tone of voice.

Your infographic visuals should also consider your audience and the types of design they prefer to see.

3. Create a compelling narrative.

After gathering your research and determining the specific audience for your infographic, it’s time to develop a compelling narrative that will engage your readers from start to finish.

Visual storytelling is an art all its own, and it’s important that you learn how to capture that when creating the storyline for your infographic.

Take your readers on a journey. Instead of sticking a bunch of statistics all over the place, organize your information in an order that makes sense. Determine your starting point as well as your conclusion.

Think of it this way—your infographic should be a visual map of how you plan to take your reader from point A to point B.

Take a look at the infographic template below. Notice how it easily guides the reader through the do’s and don’ts of starting a small business.

how-to-build-links-with-infographics-Create-a-compelling-narrative

Customize this infographic template and make it your own!Edit and Download

If you provide viewers with an interesting and entertaining journey, you can be sure they'll arrive at the final destination with a full understanding of your topic and the desire to do something with that information.

There are many different types of infographics to choose from. You might want to present your information in a timeline, create a flowchart to guide your reader from start to finish, or compile a mix of different charts to visualize all of your data and statistics.

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Create your own stunning infographics.

  • Add your own text, icons, logo and more
  • Add interactive buttons and animations
  • Use drag-and-drop content blocks
  • Customize colors and fonts to fit your brand

Get Started Now

Choosing the best way to visualize your information is essential before starting your design so that you know what kind of template to use and where your information should live within your infographic.

5. Create a wireframe.

how-to-build-links-with-infographics-Create-a-wireframe

Before jumping into your design, consider creating an infographic wireframe. This helps you determine where you’re going to place each piece of information before you get started with your design. It can also help you find some infographic design inspiration.

Designing with a road map will save you time and effort as you'll know exactly what to do once you start designing. Learn more about planning your infographic in this article.

6. Design your infographic.

We’re finally there! The design phase. It might seem like a long process, but consider this—how do you create any other piece of content?

An infographic is no different. It requires goals and objectives, a strong topic, an outline, a target audience and every other component that any other piece of content needs.

After you’ve taken care of all that, it’s time to design your infographic. Starting with an infographics template helps make the design process much easier, and you can use an infographic design tool like Visme to drag and drop your design elements around your canvas.

Once you’ve completed your design, be sure to give it a once-over and consider having a colleague take a second look to ensure there are no typos and that all of your information is accurate.

 

How to Build Links With Infographics

Now we’re getting to the good part. Here’s what you’ve all been waiting for—how to build links with your newly designed infographic.

The important thing here to remember is that promotion is key.

You’ve just spent all this time gathering information for and designing a beautiful and compelling infographic. Now you need to make sure people will find it.

A good rule of thumb is to spend at least the amount of time promoting your infographic as you did creating it.

Let’s jump into our step-by-step guide on promotion and infographic link building.

1. Publish your infographic.

First things first, you need to publish your infographic so that other bloggers and creators have a place to link back to. The best way to do this is by creating a new page or blog post on your website to house your information.

Let’s jump back into our Game of Thrones example for a second.

If you take a look at that post where we published three different infographics, we also include a written narrative that explains our thought processes when finding and creating these infographics.

how-to-build-links-with-infographics-Publish

This is the perfect example to emulate in your own infographic publication. You don’t want to share the infographic by itself.

First of all, Google wants to see some text within a web page or blog post. While the search engine might say that word count is not a factor, it’s plain to see that longer pieces of content tend to rank higher.

While higher word count is by no means indicative of quality content, there does seem to be a correlation between the two.

A good strategy is to publish a new post with your infographic, some copy explaining your process and your findings within the infographic, alongside an embed code to make it easy for others to share your infographic.

Last, but not least, end your blog post with a call-to-action, asking your reader to share the infographic on their site. While this isn’t a guarantee, it will help increase shares better than ending without a CTA.

2. Share your infographic on social media.

Start your promotion plan by sharing your infographic on social media. Determine which of your platforms have the best audience for your specific infographic and focus on those.

Take a look at our Facebook post sharing our Game of Thrones infographic and linking back to the article.

Create a content promotion plan to tease bits and pieces of your infographic and article over your selected social media platform(s) for the next few days or weeks.

Share smaller snippets of your infographic each time so they’re better suited for social media and you’re not giving away your entire piece of content at once. Post a couple of tweets each day, and share once every couple of days on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Find relevant subreddits as well, and share your content on those. This is a great way to reach even more targeted audience members.

3. Promote your infographic on social media.

Once you’ve created a promotion plan for organic social media sharing, create an ad on your top platforms.

Whether you’re using Facebook ads, Twitter ads, Instagram Story ads—these will be better for sharing infographics than Instagram feed ads—or LinkedIn ads, you need to make sure your platform of choice makes sense for your content.

To get an idea of how you should design your ad, take a look at how we’ve shared a snippet of a much larger post and infographic on our Twitter.

This is a great way to increase views on your content and chances that others will share it on social media. You want to emulate this idea and do the same on your own social platforms.

However, both organic and paid social media are just for planting a few seeds and getting your content out there. Our remaining strategies are better for actually building links.

4. Reach out to bloggers and influencers.

Now comes the part that you need to work much harder on – reaching out to influencers and bloggers in your industry or that are relevant to your topic who are known for sharing infographics.

Outreach like this needs to be strategic. You don’t want to start off your initial communication asking for something.

Instead of writing an email that says, “I created this infographic. Can you share it with your audience?” consider crafting something more along the lines of this:

“I put together this infographics on [insert topic here], and I think your audience would really love it. Would you be interested in taking a look?”

If you get a response, this is a point where you can ask for a share. Respond with a simple, “Is this something your audience would be interested in? I would love it if you would consider sharing on your website or social media!”

You can use a tool like Respona to help in your outreach efforts.

5. Send to infographic directories.

There are tons of infographic directories out there that you can submit your infographic to for publication. Many will accept your infographic by itself while others require a unique description to accompany it.

This is a great way to provide a link back to your original content and help your infographic to get in front of an even wider audience.

6. Submit a press release.

Another great way to generate hype and buzz around your infographic is by creating and submitting a press release to various PR sites.

Since journalists follow press releases, this could give you a chance to be featured on an important online publication. Check out some popular press release sites like PR Newswire, PR Leap and PRWeb.

Create your own infographic and start building links today!

  • Add your own text, icons, logo and more
  • Add interactive buttons and animations
  • Use drag-and-drop content blocks
  • Customize colors and fonts to fit your brand

Sign up. It's free.

7. Connect with your contacts.

Do you have a list of people you’ve worked with in the past who might be interested in your infographic? This is a more personalized strategy than regular influencer outreach, as you likely have direct emails and connections to these contacts.

Reach out to them to let them know about your new infographic and see if they would be interested in taking a look and potentially sharing it with their audience.

You also want to reach out to anyone you cited within your infographic. Letting people know when you’ve used their information or quotes as a source is a great way to get a share, as they’ll likely be much more enthusiastic about showing their followers.

 

Start Building Links With Your Own Infographics

Ready to start your own infographic link building strategy? Start designing your own beautiful infographics right here in Visme!

Get started with a template to make your design process easier, research your topic then get started with your link building outreach and strategy. You’ll be able to increase website traffic and boost your SEO all in one fell swoop.

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    About the Author

    Chloe West is the content marketing manager at Visme. Her experience in digital marketing includes everything from social media, blogging, email marketing to graphic design, strategy creation and implementation, and more. During her spare time, she enjoys exploring her home city of Charleston with her son.