How to Use Infographics for Link Building

Despite speculation, infographics continue to be a remarkable asset for link-building. Research proves that people remember only 10% of the information they hear. However, they retain 65% of the information they see. That explains why infographics provide such promising results. 

Today, 65% of brands are using infographics for marketing purposes. They have the power to increase web traffic by 12%. Jeff Bullas, a top social marketer, claims that articles with images receive 94% more views.

Infographics hold incredible linking potential because of the following properties. 

• Persuasive and eye-catching visuals.
• Easy to read and understand.
• Boost SEO efforts.
• Image embedding is convenient for capturing links.

Here are eight comprehensive steps that will enable you to explore the full potential of infographics link-building.

Step 1. Create a Compelling Infographic

A compelling narrative and engaging design are at the heart of any successful infographic link-building campaign. Get your infographic designed professionally around an exciting storyline that revolves around a topic of audience interest. Choose a stunning design and related facts and statistics to support the story. 

Do extensive research, sort out your ideas, and finalize a topic of audience interest with peer review. The S.U.C.C.E.S (S) model is an impressive technique for coming up with an infographic that can capture high-quality backlinks for you.

Simple

A winning infographic typically revolves around a simple topic. Target a single idea in one infographic and keep the words, design, and layout as easy to follow as possible. 

Unexpected

When designing your infographics, try to hatch a schema. Your topic or storyline should be unique enough to elicit some kind of (positive) reaction from your audience. Something that shocks or excites the audience is sure to get circulated and catch links. 

Concrete

Nothing loses interest more than vagueness. Make your idea concrete with statistics and a clear design with actionable insights and realistic statements. Use sensory language to bring your narrative to life in the audience’s imagination.

Credible

With so much crappy content out there, people crave credibility. Support your narrative with statistics and facts from credible sources and create content within your area of expertise. If you’re a home security expert, it doesn’t make sense to create an infographic for helmets.

Emotional

Choose a topic that nudges the strings of your audience’s hearts. Find out what your audience craves. What makes them tick? What do they care about? What are their worries? Reflect how your offering caters to their emotions in your infographic. 

Stories

Every good content, in any format, has a storyline that captivates the audience. Weave an engaging and relatable story around your topic and available data. Make sure the infographic design supports that storyline flow. 

Shareability

We cannot complete the S.U.C.C.E.S technique without adding the essence of shareability. Even if you follow the model successfully, if your infographics aren’t shareable, then there’s no point in creating them for link-building. So make sure to assess the viability potential of your idea during brainstorming sessions. 

Step 2. Publish Your Infographic 

Before you begin sharing your infographic, publish it on your website. That way, the people who quote your infographic will have a place to link to give you credit.

Publishing it on your website also allows you to optimize it for search. Besides adding alt-text, a title tag, and other image search optimization elements, you can create a post around it to rank and invite links. 

The post can further analyze the results, explain the storyline and describe your reasons for creating the infographic. You can spell out how the infographic fills a gap or relates to your audience and why it’s important and trustworthy. If you can make a compelling case, this intro can convince many visitors to share and link to your infographic. 

Search engines are also more adept at reading words than scanning images. When you publish your infographic, each on-page optimization element will enhance its organic reach. For instance, check out this article and infographic from a fragrance brand. It generated a ton of links that helped it rank #1 for the keyword “how to apply cologne.”  

Conclude your post with an appropriate call-to-action (CTA). The CTA may ask the audience to simply share the post or check out your store, buy a product, make an appointment or fill out a survey form.

Step 3: Promote Your Infographic on Social Media

No matter how brilliant an infographic is, it needs a little nudge to get famous. That’s why sharing it on your social media platforms should be a prominent part of your link-building campaign. Since a long infographic may not fit well with the image dimensions on most platforms, you can share its snippets instead. They can arouse the audience’s curiosity to follow the link and access the complete infographic on your website.

Paid advertisements are also a great way to seed the infographics. That’ll broaden your reach, attract more eyeballs to your infographic and increase its linkability chances. Social media platforms are now using AI-powered resources to identify your target market and advertise your brand to them only.

Paid outreach is a short-lived solution, but if your infographic is awesome, an advertisement will be a nudge in the right direction. You can use the following social media platforms for both organic and paid infographic promotion. 

• Twitter: Utilize relevant hashtags and use pay-per-performance ads to increase the chances of getting backlinks.
• Facebook: Best for paid promotion because Facebook’s ad targeting has no match. FB ads are cheap and insanely effective at reaching the right audience.
• Pinterest: Pinterest supports infographics like no other platform. Being a visual search engine, it’s one platform you shouldn’t miss during infographic link-building campaigns.
• LinkedIn: Linkedin Sponsored Content is an excellent tool for generating leads. The paid advertisement on LinkedIn will reach professionals and experts. This means you can receive high-quality backlinks through Linkedin, especially in the B2B domain.

Step 4: Reach Out to the Related Linkable Audiences

Infographics can be an amazing link magnet, but first, you’ll need to get them noticed by industry influencers. Simply reach out to the market experts who cater to related linkable audiences. 

This way, you’ll ensure maximum reception and dispersion of your infographic. 

Linkable Audiences

Not all markets are receptive to infographics equally, so you’ll have to determine which markets related to your domain are likely to link to your infographic. Generally speaking, infographics are pretty popular in business, productivity, eco, pets, and lifestyle markets. 

On the contrary, markets catering to seniors, beauty bloggers, and high-end news channels aren’t too keen to publish infographics. They would prefer guides, beautiful imagery, and news stories (respectively). 

Let’s consider an infographic like this one by a skincare products’ brand. Since beauty isn’t a particularly linkable market, it’ll be best for the brand to approach linkable audiences from associated niches such as wellness, eco, and lifestyle. 

A Well-Crafted Pitch 

Your outreach pitch should be short and to the point. Mention the relevance, importance, and uniqueness of your infographic in as few words as possible. Conclude the pitch with a clear and direct call-to-action.  

Here’s a sample template for infographic link-building outreach.

Step 5: Offer to Write Custom Intros

Once your outreach pitch is accepted, facilitate its publication by providing embed links and custom written introductions to the piece. 

Many websites will require you to write a custom intro of 300 to 500 words to accompany your infographic. It will allow you to control the placement of your link, the anchor text, and the surrounding text. All of these are significant optimization factors for image search. 

Another perk of writing the custom intro is that you can control the context and narrative for your infographic. If and where it makes sense, you can also include links to relevant blogs or category pages on your website. As long as they fit and enhance the audience experience, you can generate significant referral traffic through those links. 

Step 6: Submit to Infographic Directories 

Directory links have gotten a bad rep, but bear with me when I say infographic directories are OK, as long as they are not spammy looking and have a decent DA. The backlinks from them may not hold as much value, but they do hold the potential to earn you many more links. 

Think of them as repositories with infographics on all topics. If you wish to quote an infographic to bolster your content, you’re sure to find an infographic on your required topic there. You can find dozens of infographic directories where you can submit your visual for publication.

Most of these publishers love to accept and publish your infographics, while some might require a custom intro or unique description with your submission.

The aim of submitting to infographic directories isn’t as much as about winning their links. Instead, it’s about getting the audience’s attention, explicitly looking for infographics to quote in their content. These directories can help broaden the visibility of your infographics significantly. 

Step 7: Track Your Published Links

Link-building is challenging and time-consuming, so it makes sense to keep track of the links, shares, and retweets you get so that you know your efforts are in the right direction. Moreover, as you build links, you can also lose them over time because of various reasons.

• The linking website may have deleted your post.
• They may have removed your link.
• They may have messed up your URL.

Tracking backlinks allows you to keep an eye on such instances. Typically, all you have to do is bring it to the linking webmaster’s notice, and you’ll get your link reinstated.

You can use backlink checker tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz to keep an eye on your backlinks. Sometimes bloggers use the infographic without linking to the source on your website. You can use Reverse Image Search to find such websites and contact their webmasters for links. Thank them for featuring your infographic and offer them to use the embed code or link back to the source. 

Infographics are a smart way to increase your website traffic and ranking through link-building. They are a balanced mix of visuals and text which offer information in a digestible and engaging form. 

Link building is one of the most challenging aspects of SEO. However, it’s the most fruitful one as well. A well-designed, informative, and engaging infographic promises a boatload of quality backlinks. Therefore, investing time and resources in infographics is totally worth the effort!

Karli is a content marketer and founder of content marketing and SEO collective JuiceBox. With over 10 years in the marketing industry, she’s worked with brands large and small across many industries to grow organic traffic and reach new audiences. She writes on everything from marketing, social and SEO to travel and real estate. On the weekends, she loves to explore new places, enjoy the outdoors and have a glass or two of vino!

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