Hi Kalena,

I’m the SEO for a large online employment agency well known across the US.

Our major competitor has been using a lot of infographics in their blog lately and it has paid off for them in terms of their social media presence and traffic to their site. Our company is about to hire someone who can design infographics for use on our Facebook page to see if they will also work for us.

I have two questions – firstly, the price range seems to vary widely for infographic design services. Can you recommend some good quality infographic design experts who charge reasonable rates?

Now for my second question. One of the design companies we are considering claims that infographics can contribute a lot to SEO efforts, especially since Google Panda and Penguin basically crushed any link building efforts we used to spend a lot of time on. My concern is that I don’t want my company to spend thousands of dollars on infographics only to find out later that they have no SEO benefit whatsoever. I would rather them spend the money to hire blog writers to get more content published on our site.

What is your opinion on this and do you think that having custom infographics designed would be money well spent?

Thank you
Mike

————————————-

Hi Mike

What a timely question! One of my clients is actually considering investing in infographics, after seeing the results they have had on traffic levels for one of their regional sites in Asia.

In terms of SEO benefit – yes infographics can contribute to SEO – assuming you design them with search engines in mind. By that, I mean pay close attention to the title and headings on your infographic, the keywords used in your filename, the tags you use to categorize it and the format it is saved as. As social media goes hand in hand with SEO strategy these days, it makes sense to invest in content that will increase your social media reach and therefore create more links back to your site.

If you save your infographic as an image, be sure to include a logical alt img attribute including relevant keywords to describe the content when you embed it. If you embed it in a web page, you can have more control over the optimization of that page and the way it is shared, so I would definitely recommend that. Embedding it in a page also ensures that when you share it, people are taken back to your site, rather than viewing it on another platform.

If you have a Facebook page for your company, you could consider embedding it / sharing it there, as long as that is where you want the traffic to end up – this will be of more indirect SEO benefit – the logic being that people will eventually end up on your site after spending time on your Facebook page / reading about your products and services. My recommendation would be to embed it on your site/blog and then share the post via your social networks.

Whether you share it as a static image or a blog post via social networks, remember to tag it thoughtfully (Facebook) and use a short tweet description (Twitter) to enable others to retweet it without having to edit your description. Same rules for Pinterest – use popular, related category tags to ensure you get as many re-pins as possible.

If you use one of the new Infographic creation tools online like Piktochart (see below), your infographic may have an interactive layer embedded that allows you to enter search engine indexable content such as keywords and a description. This means that search engines will be able to crawl the content of your infographic as they crawl your web page.

Now, as for the other part of your question about whether I can recommend any good quality infographic design experts, I actually I did some research for my client about Infographics recently, to see if there were any online apps that could create them easily. It turns out there are several.

Here are the best ones I’ve found:

1) Infogr.am – this is super easy to use and free. I was able to help my son create an infographic for his homework within about 20 minutes. It includes a few basic templates to choose from and straight-forward functionality to produce something very quickly. It publishes direct to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or you can simply share on the web via URL.

2) Piktochart – I like this one the best – it has high resolution graphics, hover tools, some neat interactive elements, an easy to use interface and even built in SEO. Only problem is the free version comes with just 6 themes and layers a watermark over the top, so there really is no choice but to go the Pro (paid) version to get over 100 themes/templates and remove the watermark. However at USD 29 per month or 169 per year, the price is reasonable to justify this.

3) Visual.ly – this is probably the most sophisticated of the three – it has different free/paid versions for different consumer markets and lots more templates and design styles to choose from. You can publish direct to Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest or you can download your creation. You can quickly create infographics based on 2 or more competing hashtags, Twitter accounts or existing web pages as well. It also has a built-in marketplace if you want to high an Infographic designer who specialises in using Visual.ly if you need help creating your own infographics.

Hope this helps!