SEO infographics 101: how to optimize infographics for search traffic

So you’ve created an awesome infographic to accompany your new blog post. It surely helps your content stand out, which is one of the blog SEO best practices. If you have also followed the other tips, your blog post will soon find its grateful readers, and you’ll probably move on to crafting your next post. The problem with such an approach is that you’re missing out on lots of traffic by ignoring your infographic. 

While often treated simply as a supplement to blog posts, an infographic can actually ramp up your blogging SEO strategy if used properly. You just need to optimize it for search, and in this post, we’ll spread on how you can turn your infographics SEO-friendly step by step.

How Can Infographics Impact Your SEO

Before we get to the practical part, let’s make it clear why infographics should be a part of your content marketing strategy.  

First off, infographics are helpful for link building and earning organic inbound links. When you create a stunning, visually appealing infographic that’s chock-full of valuable stats and information, people will be eager to share it on their own sites.

You can easily add an embed code to your website making it easy for people to copy and paste your infographic into their own blog posts or landing pages while linking back to its source.

Another great thing about infographics is that they increase your chances of ranking well in the image search, which is both a separate Google search channel and one of the SERP features. Check the SERP for your target keyword to see if it contains an image block—if so, you surely need an infographic to gain some extra clicks and traffic.

35 Google SERP features you should monitor for better SEO

Ultimately, infographics are a popular visual medium, that can help you increase the overall value and shareability of your article.

How to Optimize Your SEO Infographic for Search

Once you’ve pinpointed a post that you think could benefit from an infographic, just like with a blog post, you’ll have to spend some time optimizing your infographic for search.

Take the following steps to get the most out of every infographic you create.

1. Do your keyword research

Whenever you create a piece of content with SEO in mind, it all starts with picking the right keywords. Infographics are not an exception, as you need to optimize them for a particular keyword.

If you already have a text that you want to supplement with an infographic, you should also have a list of keywords to choose from. If, on the other hand, you came up with an idea to create an infographic in the first place, you’ll have to first conduct keyword research.

Once you pick the most promising keyword, use it as a guidance when creating your infographic—it should be perfectly in line with the user intent behind the keyword. Your infographic copy should actually offer a brief visual solution to user’s problem described by a keyword.

You may or may not insert the keyword itself in your infographic copy depending on whether it fits well or not. After all, Google can’t read the image text, and even if it could, keyword stuffing is an outdated practice that will bring you more bad than good.

Keep your keyword in mind though, as you’ll need it to fulfill the next steps.

2. Name your file accordingly

Your file name shouldn’t just be something like “infographic_01_final.jpg.” Instead, make sure to include your selected keyword that best describes your infographic in the file name.

While Google can’t read the actual content of your infographic, it can read your infographic’s file name, so something like “increase-blog-traffic-infographic.jpg” is going to be the way to go.

Let’s take the small infographic above as an example. The file name includes both a keyword that is a topic of the blog post and the information describing the content of the infographic itself. This way, you help search engines understand what the infographic is about and increase its chances of ranking in the image search.

3. Add your alt text

Another way to let the search engines know what kind of information your infographic offers is by adding an alt tag, which is used within the HTML code of a page to describe what an image represents. If an image fails to load, users will see the alternative text you suggested in the alt tags. Besides, alt tags ensure your content accessibility to all users including people using screen readers when browsing the Internet.

Just like with the filename, use your keyword in the alt tag to help Google understand which search terms are relevant to your infographics. A good alt text would be something like “Infographic about increasing blog traffic.”

You can take a look at alt text in action below.

In the article about marketing plans on Visme’s blog, we have an infographic with a plan for marketing video creation. We therefore, used an alt text that explained what the infographic showed, and we also included the word “template” in the alt tag since this specific example is editable.

4. Optimize your header tags

To even further stress that your blog post contains a large infographic that people may want to check out, you can include the word “infographic” in your title, which is normally marked as <h1> header tag in HTML code. Therefore, Google will also spot the keyword when scanning the page.

If you wonder, how you can make the word “infographic” fit into the title, here’s an example of how we’ve done this in an informational COVID-19 article/infographic over on Visme’s blog.

So you can put the word “infographic” in the square brackets at the end of your title like in the example above. Alternatively, you can use a semicolon in your title: “Infographic: Your Online Course Creation Process.”

Another option would be to include the infographic keyword  in <h2> header tag instead of <h1> tag. Naturally, your infographic should be placed in this particular section of the text right beneath the heading. Just like with the <h1> tag, you’ll want to come up with a compelling heading that best describes the content of a section and then add the word “infographic” to it. Here’s another example of how we’ve done this at Visme:

5. Pay attention to your article URL

An article URL should contain your focus keyword, and if an infographic is also the focus of your blog post, feel free to include the word “infographic” in it.

How to create a well-structured SEO-friendly URL

Mind though, that you don’t necessarily have to do this every time you create a post featuring an infographic. Also, pay attention to the URL length. The best practice is to keep your URL slug 3 to 5 words long, so if you have a lengthy keyword that you use in your URL (e.g. how to create a Zoom meeting), you don’t want to fit an extra word into it.

6. Write your meta description

Writing the perfect meta description is an art. You’re given 160 characters to perfectly summarize your piece of content, include your focus keyword and entice searchers to click through to your post.

But we have faith in you! Just remember to stay concise and to the point. Your meta description isn’t the place to get flowery with your copy.

Instead, use a sentence to summarize your content and a second as a call-to-action. Do your best to include the word “infographic” and your focus keyword within your meta description.

7. Ensure a healthy word count in your post

You don’t want your infographic to be the only bit of content in your blog post. It should only enhance your post, and help to point out the most important snippets of information.

Search engines like long-form content, so you need to create a 1,000-2,000+ word article to accompany your infographic, instead of using it as the sole bit of content in your post.

Needless to say, that the text before and after your infographic should provide additional details to what is depicted in the infographic. Using relevant keywords is also a good idea.

To provide you with the perfect example of how to include an infographic within your post, we’ve created an infographic to summarize this 1,400 word article and included it below.

Create Your Own SEO Infographics Today

Ready to start designing stunning infographics and using them to optimize your blog content? Doing so can help drastically increase your website traffic and generate more backlinks to your website, so the time to start is now!

Using a design tool like Visme in conjunction with an SEO tool like SE Ranking is the perfect recipe for optimizing your infographics and articles.

About the Author

Chloe is a Content Marketing Manager at Visme, an online graphic design software. She loves to write about digital marketing and design and find new ways to engage audiences through content. Chloe is based in Charleston, SC, where she loves exploring her city with her son.

Chloe West

Chloee is a freelance writer, blogger and social media manager. Although she specializes in content about digital marketing, she writes about a variety of topics like career, finance, parenting, and lifestyle.