Infographic

The infographic is one of the tools of content marketing. In a digital world where a user's attention is limited to seconds, a good infographic can break heavy expert text into digestible pieces.

From an SEO and link building standpoint an infographic is highly valuable, because it has natural potential to be shared (to go viral). If you create a unique infographic with worthwhile data, other sites will be glad to link to it, and you gain valuable backlinks.

Advantages

• High sharing rate: people share visual content on social media (especially Pinterest and LinkedIn) far more often than plain text.
• Better comprehension: up to 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual. An infographic helps people grasp connections in an instant.
• Building authority: creating a detailed infographic positions you as an expert who understands the topic in depth.
• More traffic: thanks to Google Images an infographic can bring relevant visitors to the site.
• Versatility: one infographic can be recycled in a blog post, a newsletter, a client presentation or as a Facebook post.

Disadvantages

• Time and cost: a good infographic requires the work of an analyst (data gathering), a copywriter (the wording) and a capable designer.
• Crawlers cannot read the text: Google cannot “read” text inside an image. An infographic must therefore always be accompanied by a text description and a proper alt tag.
• Responsiveness problems: large, detailed infographics can be illegible on smartphone screens unless they are designed with a mobile-first approach in mind.

Practical example

Imagine you are a financial advisory firm wanting to explain how compound interest works. If you write a five-page expert article full of mathematical formulas, few people will read it. But if you create an infographic showing the growth of savings over time with a simple chart and icons (a snowball getting bigger, say), the reader grasps the principle in 10 seconds.