From the very beginning, the world of SEO has been rife with myths that have somehow managed to pass themselves off as facts and fool a whole generation of webmasters and even SEO practitioners. After proving itself indispensable in increasing traffic and achieving prime rankings in the SERPs, SEO should be free of these myths by now. But several Google algorithm updates have passed, and these myths still stand and continue to mess with the heads of webmasters and SEO practitioners alike.
This is a very text-heavy topic and design. There's no data to visualize, but the descriptions are short, and easy to understand. If readers want more information, that's available on the website.
When you have an AdWords PPC campaign, it is not a set-and-forget system. To get the most from your system, you should follow an on-going, structured plan like the Pay Per Click Checklist infographic. Midas Media has designed this simple infographic to maximize your PPC results.
That said, PPC now spans a whole spectrum of platforms from social media, content, display and of course ‘the daddy’ Google search itself.
This actionable PPC optimisation checklist is directly attributed to managing an AdWords PPC campaign, but it’s fair to say it can be applied to other paid search marketing too. It can also be used as the basis for a campaign review and audit check list.
This is published on the landing page as a good combination of longer article with more in-depth detail, and a simple infographic that is easy to understand and share.
The web is inundated with new content on an hourly basis. So much so that it can be hard for any content to stand out. Readers have an attention span shorter than a goldfish! With trending hashtags, sponsored posts and the brevity of posting with fewer than 140 characters, hot trending topics often play a factor in the success of your infographics. But it doesn’t have to.
While we’re busy flitting from one project to the next, always looking ahead, it’s possible to lose track of our content once it has passed the design phase. But the long-term success of your content relies on more than just good design. I define the Online Lifespan of your infographic as the amount of time it remains relevant to the audience, and it plays a huge role in the measurable success of your content.
First, you need to determine your project’s goals. What is your goal for this infographic? Are you looking for a short-term boost in traffic? Or are you looking to post content that readers will view and share for years to come?
Sometimes your infographic works with an online lifespan somewhere in between. For example, the annual “Death & Taxes” poster visualizes the Federal Budget and has a lifespan of a year before its information becomes outdated when a new budget is released.
If you’re looking for longevity, however, choosing a lasting topic for your content can work to your advantage. Here are just a few of the benefits:
More bang for your buck: It essentially costs you the same amount of time and resources to design an infographic with a short online lifespan as it would for a design with a long lifespan. You spend the same amount of time and effort in your design and research, but gain two very different results.
Visibility: No one will be searching for the Top 10 Christmas Traditions in 2015 after December 25, 2015, so all of your traffic needs to happen within a short period of time. A longer-lasting way to frame this infographic would be to create a timeline of Christmas traditions over the last few hundred years. Although this isn’t typically “evergreen” content, you’ll see a resurgence of traffic every year around Christmas time. Without a hard end-date, your infographics can live on driving views, backlinks and social shares for years to come.
Less maintenance: Once you’ve created a piece of evergreen content, there’s little to no maintenance necessary to keep your content relevant.
While there are situations where trendy and timely content can work in your favor, creating content with a longer online lifespan can lead to longer lasting success. It all comes down to the topic choice and the type of data.
Selecting your topic is the most important factor in determining the online lifespan of your infographic. Jumping on a breaking news topic is a great way to get your client some quick visibility, but does little to increase its long-term exposure. However, coming up with truly evergreen content like the infographic below will keep your content relevant long after you’ve created it.
Keep these goals in mind when selecting a topic for your next infographic. A blend of trending topics and evergreen content can build a very robust content strategy.
Update on Thursday, March 31, 2016 at 3:33PM by
Randy
The Site Auditor tool from Raven Tools has discovered The 5 Most Common On-Page SEO Issues. Of interest to infographic designers and publishers is that 78% of all issues were image related. That means after all that time spent researching and designing a good infographic, most people fall short when they publish them online.
We recently realized we had access to a landfill of valuable on-page SEO data, so we started digging. We then released our 2015 study analyzing on-page SEO issues.
The infographic is an ideal teaching aid when explaining on-page SEO to prospects and clients. Feel free to use it where you’d like. Above are the 5 most common on-page SEO issues, as well as how to fix each issue.
1. Image Optimization Issues
2. Duplicate Content Issues
3. Meta Description Issues
4. Structured Data Issues
5. Link Issues
You have to craft a good infographic landing page whne publishing an infographic! I teach this in my workshops and classes at SMU CAPE, and there is a whole chapter dedicated to the right way to publish infographics in my book, Cool Infographics.
Creating an infographic is no simple task. A lot of time and resources go into the data research and design of a good infographic, but not always into figuring what happened after publishing it on the Internet. Where many companies miss the mark with their infographics is in their tracking efforts after the infographic has been released. Pageviews, social shares, reposts, backlinks, and more are all part of measuring the success of an infographic.
It is important to understand that infographics need as much promotional and tracking support as articles, videos, advertisements, and even the products and services their business is marketing. Learning what works and doesn’t work should be a huge part of future marketing plans.
The work of tracking an infographic starts the day it’s published online. Here are five key areas a company should focus on after they've released an infographic.
To make sure you get the most out of your infographic, make sure it is published on the company’s website on a dedicated landing page or if that’s not available, in it’s own blog post. That will provide a dedicated landing page URL as the one primary link in posts to drive all the views and backlinks to one place. By creating a landing page you can access your own web analytics to see pageviews, traffic patterns and referring sites. You also have control over which social sharing buttons to include for default text and sharing statistics.
An often overlooked ally to tracking infographics after their release is your company’s own website analytics. When you examine the metrics of the overall company website, inbound links can become a jackpot for insights about who picked up your content.
Pro Tip:
Use inbound links to keep track of pick-up, and target new outlets for future outreach efforts.
An alternate (or secondary) method would be to publish your infographic on a hosted platform like Visme or SlideShare. These platforms display the infographic within an enclosure that can be embedded and shared on other sites, and gather the analytics from all of the sites displaying the enclosure in one tracking report.
For many companies, the goal of publishing infographics is to attract links and visitors to its own website. To find all of those links, you have to go looking for them.
Pro Tip:
Use an SEO backlink tool like Majestic SEO Site Explorer, Moz Open Site Explorer, or even do a Google search of the full landing page URL (another advantage of having a dedicated landing page URL). These tools will allow you to be able to find all of those valuable backlinks.
Be sure to check the value of links from those sites. One strong link can be worth more than many weak links. Google call this PageRank, Moz calls this Authority, and Majestic calls this Trust. Choose one metric for your tracking so you are comparing the same type of score across all of the sites that link to your infographic landing page.
Go through your list of industry specific websites, blogs, and news media outlets you pitched the infographic to, and search their website to see if anything pops up (wait about a week or two before searching to give time for an article to be written).
3. Social Share Counters
Social media can be used as a good indicator of how well your content is performing online, especially when looking at social shares from a specific media site pick-up. It’s important to remember that social sharing doesn’t help your own website’s pagerank, but it does build widespread awareness and exposure of your infographic content.
Pro Tips:
a. Use the counters from the social share buttons you set-up on the dedicated landing page.
b. Search Twitter (and other social media sites) for the full URL link to the landing page to find other social media posts that didn’t use your buttons but did link back to the infographic.
c. Check the social share button counters on other sites that reposted the infographic for additional sharing stats.
4. Reverse Image Search
When a blogger, media outlet, or journalist has chosen to write about your infographic, it doesn't always mean they will also take the time to include a link back to your website, or will even remember where they found the infographic. Reverse Image Search is a valuable tool to use to find reposts of your infographic that don’t link back to your website..
Reverse Image Search is a service offered by Google, Bing and TinEye. They allow you to drag and drop, upload your own image or choose an image online to start the search. The results will list all of the web pages in their index that include that image, in any size. This is the best way to find sites that posted your infographic without linking back to your landing page.
Reach out to any high value sites you find that published your infographic but didn’t include a link. Politely thank them for sharing your infographics, and ask them to add a link back to the original landing page.
5. Gather Your Results
Pull together all of the results you found into a summary that your company can use as a benchmark to evaluate future published content. Your web analytics, combined social shares, backlinks from sites and image-only posts together paint an overall picture of how well your infographic performed.
Site that have seen their own success from posting your infographic are more likely to post future infographics from you as well. Start building an outreach list of people and sites that appreciate your content.
Even the slightest effort put into tracking your infographic can significantly improve your understanding of the value of visual content. In order to understand it’s value, you have to understand its reach. Then, you can evaluate how your content is performing, and make any changes needed to make future content more likely to garner the pick-up and exposure your team or company seeks.
Remember, you can’t improve what you don’t measure!
Are there any other tracking methods you use to keep track of your infographics or other visual content? How do you measure success for infographic (or any visual content)?
Update on Wednesday, July 15, 2015 at 3:02PM by
Randy
The SEO world is constantly changing. The SEO Rank Correlations and Ranking Factors 2014 infographic is your guide to good rankings! The infographic was created by Search Metrics, and they determined that the most important factors to optimal SEO is high quality!
We made it and just in time for this fall’s season. So download Ranking Factors 2014 on your tablet or smartphone because this study will be your best SEO read yet. Last year’s Ranking Factor study placed positive emphasis on good content, onpage technology and social signals that correlate with better positioned websites.
Get the latest and greatest SEO Ranking Factors and Rank Correlations 2014 – Google U.S. and get an in depth definition and evaluation of the factors that have a high rank correlation with organic search results.
A great way to summarize the top level findings from a longer report. This is a detailed infographic, but the information is incredible valuable.
I wish more of the numbers and statistics were visualized. Big fonts are not data visualizations!
Making a cool infographic is one thing, sharing it and making it go viral is another. Luckily, the Viral Sharing Tactics of an Infographic infographic published by Piktochart gives some tips on how to make your cool infographic a hit!
Making your carefully crafted infographic go viral isn’t a dark science. It doesn’t just happen miraculously. You have to make it happen.
The key to a successful viral infographic lies not just in the content. Apart from designing a very good infographic, what you do with it after that plays a big role in making it go viral. You have to go the extra mile to publicize and enable others to publicize your infographic for you. There are many available platforms and tools to accelerate your viral campaign.
There’s some really good information included in here, and many of the tactics listed here are included in my Infographic Release Strategy from the Cool Infographics book. Designing a good infographic isn’t enough. You need to publicize and promote your design so people can find it and share it.
I would have liked to see more statistics behind their recommendations. The only data included in the design is the Google Trends chart of searches for the word ”infographic”, which is a very impressive trend! The design should have also included a copyright, and the URL to the infographic landing page on the Piktochart site. I love the “Click to Tweet” pre-written sharing element on the landing page!
Piktochart is an online infographic design tool, similar to a vector graphics software application. You can find this tool listed along with others on the Cool Infographics Tools page. I love to see that they used their own tool to design this infographic!
There’s a growing marketing practice that I think is a huge marketing mistake. I’ve seen a number of infographics being published by companies that require the reader to enter their name, email address and other contact information before they can even view the design. This “registration wall” is a way for marketers to gather the contact information from the readers so they can send out additional marketing emails later. In my opinion, publishing an infographic behind a registration wall just doesn’t make any sense.
Here’s an example of what you might see on one of these registration wall pages:
I completely understand putting valuable content behind a registration wall as a method to capture the contact information from potential leads. I get it. Assuming the hidden content is closely related to the company’s business, the audience interested in that content is likely to represent a pool of potential customers. If they’re willing to give up their valuable email address to gain access to that content, they are probably a fairly strong potential customer (or a competitor checking out your valuable content!).
However, infographics are the wrong type of content to use for this purpose. The companies I see that are hiding infographics behind registration walls are missing the benefit of infographics, which is to deliver easy to understand information to the audience in a format that’s also easy to share because it’s completely contained within the image file.
First, online infographics are meant to be shared. Infographics are popular online for two reasons, easy to understand information and easy to share. Much easier than text articles or blog posts. As soon as one reader shares the hidden infographic image file on their blog or posts it in social media, the infographic is released to the public and available to everyone without registering. Even if you ask people not to share it publicly, the accepted practice online is to freely share infographics.
Second, the research commissioned by Janrain from 2012 indicates that 86% of people may leave a website when asked to create an account. Most of the audience will just leave instead of going through with the registration process to gain access to the infographic. They never see the infographic, never read the data and never hear the message.
Third, the search engines can’t see past the registration wall. No keywords, no meta-data, no text. The search engines can’t index the content behind the registration wall, so your infographic won’t show up in search results. Only the short, publicly accessible teaser information on the registration page has any chance of being indexed to appear in results.
Here’s what I recommend. Use a compelling infographic as a top level summary of the more detailed content you put behind the registration wall. All of the people that share your infographic, are effectively advertising your more detailed information. You could even make the infographic landing page on your website also the registration page to get more information.
This way the infographics are available publicly to view and share, and the free content draws in readers to the registration page. The truly interested readers will also give you their contact information to gain access to the more-detailed report or white paper that you have available behind the registration wall. Now you have built your brand credibility with a widely shared infographic, and you have gathered a pool of potentially valuable leads.
For more statistics and information about registration walls, check out The Registration Challenge infographic from Janrain:
How often have you become frustrated filling out online registration forms? There is a better way. Janrain has compiled data on some of the most challenging aspects of online registration forms and simple solutions to improve the user experience…and conversion rates.
Update on Saturday, May 17, 2014 at 10:54AM by
Randy
The Smart Ways to Combine Content Marketing With SEO infographic is essentially a big list of the most popular online services in a number of different categories. Published by blogmost, it’s meant as a reference tool for Marketers to help plan out their content strategies.
Trying to build High Quality Links without paying anyone? This infographic reveals techniques to build them and complete details of good website + mentioned Great SEO & SMO tools for better Marketing.
No data or numbers, the most prominent sites and companies are shown for 26 different online service categories. The randomness of circle sizes appears to visualize some type of information, but there’s no data behind them. It’s just the designer sizing them to fit the different logos and icons.
The design does a fantastic job of using logos and icons in place of text. This makes the overall design faster and easier for the audience to read through. It’s a much more enjoyable experience than reading the text name of all the different companies, brands and sites.
Some description at the top would be helpful to describe how the sites were chosen for readers that find the infographic on other sites. The URL of the infographic Landing Page on the blogmost site in the footer would also be helpful for the readers to be able to find the original full-size version and associated text.
Google’s 200 Ranking Factors is a very detailed list of the known 200 aspects that Google considers in their ranking formulas. The overall length of the infographic is the major visual feature that catches your attention, and communicates a clear message about Google’s immensely complicated algorithm and how difficult SEO can be. The second level of of the design is the actual details about each and every one of those ranking factors that the audience can read if they want specific information.
Google has confirmed that they use approximately 200 ranking signals in their algorithm. However, they’ve never publicly listed them all. While this infographic is by no means official, it aggregates the best information we have about how Google ranks pages and websites.
Randy
