How to Use Infographics for Link Building

Infographics are very effective at increasing both engagement and links, because our brains’ ability to process visuals is a lot faster than normal text.

They are a great way to simplify complex subjects so they can be more understandable for the regular reader. If your clients are in a technical industry like medical, legal, or technology, infographics can be especially helpful to convey unclear and hard-to-understand information a lot simpler. Not only do they connect the readers with the essential information they require, but they are also valuable link building assets that can help you gain backlinks your competitors don’t have.

The downside of infographics is they require planning, research, and organized design strategies. Readers won’t be impressed by a simple graphic highlighting some facts or providing incomplete information. Creating infographics that actually help your audience is important, but it’s also time consuming to format information in an easy-to-understand way. For it to be effective in SEO and the link-building process, your infographics must be high quality.

This article will guide you through how to use infographics for link-building, so you can begin implementing these rich media assets into your SEO campaigns.

The Importance of Infographics

Infographics are a powerful medium for building unique links, connecting with your audience, and expanding a brand’s reach. If your client is well-positioned in the SERPs, they can be especially beneficial to bring in natural backlinks. Quality infographics are also known to increase social shares due to their ability to easily convey complex info. These highly shareable assets are the most effective type of rich media when it comes to increasing brand exposure – organic links, social shares, and brand promotion on third party websites.

This increased engagement and exposure results in a stronger brand, both online and offline. It also strengthens your backlink profile and can create tiered linking if you are building infographic links using QR codes.

Creating a Highly Marketable Infographic

Creating the best infographics is all about the format and information inside the infographic. If the information is not organized or flowing correctly, the infographic will not be beneficial to either the reader or the website owner, no matter how good the design is.

You must properly research and plan your graphics. This requires choosing the right format, design elements, information, and QR code links. While you can research and design your own infographics, there are also various services and tools that can help you create different types of infographics, like our Custom Infographic Link Building Service, which creates a custom infographic based on data points you submit – it’s that easy.

If you are creating yourself, the process includes;

Finding the infographic design concept by looking up various infographic formats.
Researching and organizing all the data you intend to include in your infographic (before sending it to the designer). This can be done by referring to existing infographics, written content, or using Google search statistical data.
Mapping out the layout of the data in a visual way.
Creating the infographic.
Creating QR codes to the external links you want to include, then adding them to the infographic.
Building a list of link targets and submitting your infographics for link signals. You can also use manual outreach to get your infographics included in other blogs and content.

Below is an example of an infographic we created for our sister SEO agency that used the above process. You can see at the bottom of the infographic, we included multiple QR codes to brand links we wanted to prop up. Further down the blog we also include a list of rich media links we secured with this brand asset.

You will also need to know what type of infographic format best matches the type of information you intend to provide. Here are some of them listed below to help you decide what goes best with the content you have in mind.

Types of Infographics

How you present the information is almost as important as the information itself. It’s crucial you choose the best infographic type in order to convey content to your audience and maximize the number of links you can build.

I Since infographics can be very appealing, design-wise, and frequently contain helpful information that is also easily understood, they will most likely get shared and posted on various platforms and sites.

There are multiple infographic designs and formats you can use for different types of information. Below are use cases for different types of infographics…

Informational infographics – Great for overviews and highlights on a particular subject or presenting a new concept to an audience. They are usually sectioned and numbered with subheadings for ease of readability.
Timeline infographics – This type of infographic is used to visualize the history of a specific subject or events over time. You can also use these to show the evolution of a product, service, or idea. Highlighting key intervals with visual elements gives a better understanding of the whole process you’re describing.
Statistical infographics – This type of infographic is best for presenting research data or information taken from multiple sources. This makes statistics less boring for the reader when paired with visual elements. It also enables you to relate data points to each other better.
Geo-infographics – Great for visualizing regional data and highlighting various regions, analyzing patterns, identifying the location of target markets, tracking population growth etc.
Process infographics – Best to simplify the stages of a specific process. These can be arranged both vertically and horizontally and contain highlights and critical elements of the process explained in them. They can be simple process graphs or complex mind maps that connect data.
List infographics – A compilation of various elements in a list format with helpful information to go with them. This type of infographic is the easiest to create.
Hierarchial infographics – Elements in this infographic are organized by importance in a hierarchical structure. These are similar to organizational charts.
Comparison infographics – Helps to compare several ideas side by side. The items compared are usually separated vertically to give visual separation.

Going through image search results can help guide you through choosing the right type of infographic. You can also use templates or graphic design services. If you build infographic links with us, our team creates the infographic for you! Our Infographic & Rich Media Link Building Service allows you to diversify your links without all the extra work.

How To Build Backlinks with Infographics

There are multiple ways you can leverage infographic content to build links. Each link building method fits into different scenarios but we recommend including as many of these as possible to achieve the best results when link building:

Natural, Organic Linking
Manual Outreach
Building Citations with Infographics & QR Codes

Natural, Organic Linking

One of the major appeals with infographics and link building is their ability to generate new backlinks for many years. If done right, the infographic does a great job of explaining the content in a visual way, enticing site owners to use the graphics without manual outreach.

They can be highly linkable and appealing to include in other content, making them a valuable link building method that can cut down on time. Natural linking is the least time-consuming approach, but it is also the hardest way to get links – especially if your content doesn’t rank high organically.

If your do rank high in the SERPs, you may be able to generate many backlinks organically. This is even more true if the topic is complex and/or technical. We recommend performing keyword research before planning your infographic to get the most return on your investment. In order to maximize your chances of natural linking, you need a topic that is highly searched but also not too competitive.

Once the infographic is done, create blog content around it that provides details and context for the infographic. You can then optimize the content for high visibility in the SERPs.

Infographics and Manual Outreach

If you don’t have strong SERP rankings or you aren’t seeing natural linking, manual outreach is your next option.

To find outreach opportunities, research sites that share content similar to your infographic. It can be helpful to reach out to websites that cover topics in the same sphere as your content, but not so closely related that there’s perceived competition from the sites you are reaching out to. For example, if you have an infographic about the mortgage buying process, reach out to real estate agents and title companies. These related companies may be more likely to link to your content because it’s not in directly what they do, but it will be helpful to their audience.

Reach out to website owners with a proposal on how to use your infographic and where on the site you think the infographic would fit best. This cuts down on friction by making it easier for them to add.

Securing outreach-driven placements requires researching a list of websites to reach out to and thinking of something mutually beneficial for both parties. This will most likely increase the chances of your proposal getting accepted.

You can start by finding articles that are topically the same as your infographic and reaching out to the writers of those articles. The benefit exchange could be a link, a piece of content on your site, a review, or even providing free content to go with the infographic.

If you don’t have time for manual outreach, consider our infographic link-building service to do the work for you. Another way you can avoid manual outreach is by adding your infographic (with QR codes) to citations…

Citations & Signals

There are many citations and signals that allow you to upload rich media to add additional content to your profile. This could be uploading files to your profile or making posts on your profile among others.

To maximize the power, add QR codes into your infographics! Google cannot crawl links in the infographic if you include them as plain, unclickable text like this, “https://web20ranker.com/”. However, you can get around this by using QR codes, which can be used as crawlable URLs on the graphic file.to guide Google crawlers to additional links. This allows you to build additional brand mentions to your website and other content assets.

If you don’t have time to build the signals yourself, you can use our Infographic & Rich Media Link Building Service, which creates the infographic AND builds links. You get over 30 links with that service, but you can add on an additional 57 links if you use all other media types – audio, PDF, podcast.

Below is a report of the infographic links built without any add-ons.

Taking it a Step Further...

We are currently testing syndicating infographics with QR codes in a press release to see if we can generate additional movement. With the QR codes in the image, we’re building even more brand links without much work…

Once we have the results of the pr embed test back, we will update this blog and publish the results. If it works, you’ll have another avenue to build brand links for your clients!

In Conclusion

There are plenty of ways to attract backlinks to your site, but using infographics as a linking method is something your competitors might not be leveraging.

Consider adding these brand links to your clients’ campaigns to not only build more links, but also provide interesting content for their audience that can be used across marketing channels. Infographic promotion is an effective and efficient method for building links to important website pages and/or brand assets.

Be sure to choose the right type of infographic for your information and add QR codes for linking purposes. There are many free QR code generators you can use.

If you want us to create the custom infographic and build the links our Infographic & Rich Media Link Building Service is an affordable link building outsource. You can get over 30 links with just the basic service. Over 50 more rich media links are available with all the add-ons!