Jumping through the constant hoops of search engine optimization can feel like an endless charade of performance art. The need to please the SEO gods remains at the forefront of most marketers and brand managers’ minds, as a lacklustre performance in search can dramatically reduce overall traffic to any website. With so many different ways to improve or maintain SEO clout, individual strategies can be often overlooked or forgotten. As SEO continues to evolve toward a more content-driven strategy, it’s important to remember how various types of content can boost performance. Today, we’ll discuss some ways that infographics can actually boost overall SEO clout in Google, Bing and other search engines.

Intensify Your Ranking Efforts

Many people worry about how various forms of content – audio, video and infographics – may not provide ample SEO benefits when compared to blog posts and regular text. However, infographics present a very unique opportunity to rank in a different set of search results: image search. Research has shown that ranking well in image search can be just as impactful on SEO as traditional ranking methods. In addition, many people use image search to find things that they might not otherwise look for in traditional search. If you want to expand your traffic sources and rank better in search at the same time, then you’ll want to start pinging links to search engines in the form of infographics.

Increase Engagement and Shares

Specific pages may not stand out to users when it comes to simple navigation around your site. A page with standard information may be read and appreciated, but the likelihood of it being shared or engaged with further is much lower than when using a content format like infographics. Much how social media images and videos perform much better in terms of engagement than standard text posts, infographics can be a boom to your shares and engagements when compared to standard pages of text. If you want to double the effect in terms of generating more traffic, then be sure that you’re pinging links to these infographics on social media as well. While this particular element might not boost SEO directly, you’ll appreciate the extra traffic and the broader increase in engagement and shares on your website will augment SEO efforts.

Augment Existing Content

When it comes to keywords and tags, you want to be well-represented in search. This means that each page of content should be optimized in order to include a variety of keywords and tags. Another great thing about infographics is the fact that you can add multiple extra tags and keywords to the image attributes for each one. This will provide you with more opportunities to saturate each page and each piece of content with keywords that you are targeting, but will not be penalized in the same way that drenching mere text in keywords would cause.

Infographics provide a wealth of information to readers that they’ll truly appreciate. At the same time, you can boost SEO efforts with them by augmenting existing content, increasing engagement and shares, and creating more ways in which to rank in search.