I read a post today from a friend of mine Neil Patel, Founder of KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg that was too good not to share. The post is entitled, 5 Ways to Get Your Infographic to Go Viral, and is nothing short of genius.
Neil and I spoke at an event in Torrance, CA last year. My talk was Google Analytics, which was kind of dumb now that I think about it, since the man who virtually reinvented web analytics was in the room. So I put the room to sleep with conversion tracking and a brief intro to the new user interface, where Neil went through his success story inspiring me and the other 50 people in the room. When Neil talks, you listen. So listen to this:
Infographics and SEO
Google’s algorthim consists of three primary principles, what I like to call The 3 Principles of SEO, which are:
- Relevancy
- Popularity
- and User Behavior
You can bundle everything else into one of these classifications. Age, for example, would fit into User Behavior, as it pertains the history of searches and listing selection (click-through rate history) for a particular keyword.
Infographics influence all 3 factors.
Relevancy is increased because you have unique, related imagery about a particular keyword theme, and now that Google is getting better about reading text on images, this amplifies the reasoning for using custom imagery. Popularity is increased because people love to share and discuss Infographics (read Neil’s post to see how deep the rabbit hole goes with this one). User behavior is improved because users have been known to stay on a particular listing longer if there is something visual to stare at (such as a video or kick-butt infographic).
So What are the 5 Ways to Go Viral with Infographics?
Now, what kind of guy would I be if I didn’t give props to the author by letting you read the post yourself?
I will tell you that my favorites are Step #3: Create a social media sharing plan for your infographic and Step #4: Submit your infographic to directories. Both invoke sharing and securing awesome (authentic) links and both are very structured for those of us who like using checklists.
Go get your checklist and let me know what you thought of Neil’s post in the comments below.
