You may remember the trend for blogs which were just infographics that ran through many business blogs between around 2015-2017. Have you ever wondered why they suddenly caught on, or why they stopped?
Have you noticed how common they are on business-aligned social media platforms like LinkedIn?
Possibly not – on LinkedIn in particular, infographics aren’t so instantly recognisable, because they’ve been converted into carousels. So instead of seeing all that information laid out at once, you click through.
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Why Use Infographics?
There are plenty of good reasons to use infographics as part of your marketing.
- They’re great for visual learners
- You can lay facts and figures out clearly
- They’re eyecatching
- They get shared
The first two are important in offering value to social followers and site users; you’re giving them information (hopefully information that’s useful for them to know) and making sure it’s easy to process and assess that information.
The second two are valuable for marketing. Scrolling through your social feed you might skip a text post with the same information but a brightly coloured image with good composition gets you to linger long enough to notice the content is relevant, and if you want to send that information to someone else, it’s visibly branded.
That ten-year-old trend in infographic blog posts was built on that fact. You couldn’t copy/paste the relevant section, you had to send the image, and that meant the branding came with the information. At a time when a common direction to content creators was “go viral”, infographics offered a powerful tool for doing just that.
Their focus on key information presented in a clear, friendly style is also a useful way of thinking in this new era of AI-powered search engines.
Why Shouldn’t You Use Infographics?
This is a tricky question because we’re obviously going to say you should be – but not for everything and not always. Why not?
- Not everyone is a visual learner
- Computer image recognition isn’t perfect, so the information may not be clear to search engines
- Some topics don’t simplify down well (like this one!)
- They present real accessibility challenges for some of your audience
Put another way, they should be part of your strategy, but not all of it – and for those of you who are concerned about accessibility, consider adding a transcript of the key facts from your infographic on the blog or social post.
This can also help any search engine which isn’t perfect at reading text from an image – which at the time of writing is all of them (although yes, they’re getting better).
Where Do Infographics Really Shine?
Any visual form of social media is a great place for infographics, as is any web page where some of the information needs to be condensed.
Social media algorithms monitor a lot of factors when deciding whether to feature your post to a wider audience. Two of the most powerful for infographics are dwell time and interaction rate.
Dwell time is simple – if you scroll past something, it has almost no dwell time. Stop for a while to study it carefully, and its dwell time increases.
Interaction rate is also simple – what proportion of the people who see your post interact with it? An interaction is anything – a Like, a comment, a share – but it’s also clicking the Read More link on any post where part of it is hidden, clicking to enlarge an image so you can see it more clearly, or clicking through the pages of a carousel or an image album.
As you can imagine, infographics are a great way to really boost both metrics, which in turn increases your account’s reach.
On a website, consider breaking your infographic into sections. Between those sections you might provide a transcript (so search engines can understand the value of the page) but a better way to do it is to provide any extra insights you might have on each section.
So if you’re talking about the things you’ve achieved for a client (for example) you can go into a little detail about how you did it and what that might look like for other clients.
As AI gets better at reading text on images, this may be less necessary, but for the meantime try to find ways to make the images and the text both work to their best advantage.
Contact UsCross-Platform Consistency
A final thought on how you can use infographics – they allow you to build real consistency across your various platforms, both visually (with brand colours, typefaces, and logos) and in what you discuss.
Once you’ve created a piece of content for one channel, ask yourself how you’d change it to make it more effective on your other channels.
This might be as simple as changing the dimensions of the image to suit a different social media platform or as intensive as presenting a different interpretation of the data. (For example, if you cater to residential and business customers, a change in legislation might mean you need to tell both customer bases the same facts, but your LinkedIn post would concentrate on how it affects business, while your Instagram post might be more about the residential impact.)
Strong social media performances aren’t separate from your SEO, Google Ads and Meta Ads strategies. Done right, they all come together in a rounded digital marketing strategy that’s more effective than the sum of its parts.
If you’d like to understand how to put that into practice for you, contact us and we’ll be happy to help.
What is Site Reputation Abuse?
In May, Google launched an update designed to stop content on one site from outperforming content on another site just because of advantages in site reputation. Sound confusing? It is – but let’s break it down.
If you have a successful website, when you add a new page to it, Google will often give the new page a better ranking than it’s had time to earn. There’s good reason for this; your site is successful, so your content to date is probably good, so there’s a better than average chance that this new content will be good too.
So far, so good. But if you have, for example, a site that’s become popular because it has good financial advice content, that doesn’t actually mean your new content talking about reality TV is going to be better than the average – but until May, it got the benefit of the doubt.
A lot of highly successful sites in one niche, adding content for another niche, immediately replicated that success. Some of these sites were repurposing content from smaller sites to create these new sections, then outranking the sites they’d taken content from. Obviously, this isn’t the right way to do things!
Making it worse were two systems for monetising this advantage. Major sites would effectively sell advertisers a subfolder on their site, and the content in that subfolder would get a bonus despite being created to cash in, not even by the people whose quality content made the site valuable. Sometimes this was used to hide advertising by presenting it as top 10 lists on a third-party website.
And just earlier this year, a DJ turned black hat SEO explained a strategy where he bought the addresses of dead websites – belonging to magazines that had shut down, usually. These had a strong reputation so content on them performed well, even though the content he was putting on them had nothing to do with that earned reputation.
By levelling the playing field, the smaller sites producing the most valuable content should have a chance to climb to the top again – so long as their content really is the most helpful available.
The Google Spam Update
Now in June, Google have announced a Spam Update. Very simply, if a site violates Google’s spam policies, this update is designed to make sure it’s penalised.
Some of the tricks we mentioned in Site Reputation are also violations of the spam policy. But so are automatically generated content designed to increase rankings without providing more value, copycat content, and a whole suite of tricks using hidden redirects.
Lastly, thin content – that is, too little content on a page for it to provide value – is also a violation. There’s no minimum word count, so if you have fifty words on a page introducing a series of pictures of work you’ve done for clients, that probably won’t be thin content; on the other hand, five hundred words might be too short for a page explaining how to fill out your tax returns.
Contact UsWhat Does This Mean for Your Content?
For years now, Google have told us the best way to create content to perform on their platform is to produce good content that actually has some value for the person reading it; these changes are a push to make that promise real.
However, standards are higher than ever. You can’t just copy the homework of the next site along, even if you rewrite it; you have to find some way to build on it.
Contact First Digital Media
At First Digital Media, we always aim to produce content that covers everything and makes it clear and simple. We want to showcase our clients at their best, and we’ll help you take your industry knowledge and experience and present it as clearly as possible. Users should come back to a website, knowing they’ll learn something useful and knowing they can trust what they learn.
If you’d like to learn more about where your site content needs to be futureproofed against current and upcoming Google updates, contact us today for a free consultation or fill out the form and we will get back to you as soon as we can.
