How to use Keyword Research for Infographic Ideas

Keyword research is traditionally the domain of SEOs. However, it’s important to understand it can greatly benefit content marketers and, more specifically, infographic designers too.

This blog post is going to detail the different ways that keyword research can benefit infographic creation. Here we go! 

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Let’s pretend you own a real estate business in Amsterdam.

You have a range of flats to sell or rent, but you want to rise above the traditional ways of advertising apartments for sale/rent i.e. advertising on property directory sites or simply uploading pictures to your website.

So you decide to create an infographic based on the apartments that you have available in Amsterdam. What do you do next? You use keyword research to ensure that your infographic targets your ideal buyers or renters.

Identify search intent

Before you delve into keyword research, it’s important to identify the search intent of the people you are trying to target. Search intent can be split up into a number of different types of searches:

• Navigational – People who already have a specific website in mind and are purely searching to navigate to that particular site [airbnb.com]
• Informational – As the name suggests, this type of search is to find information or answer a question. These could be things like [how to change a tire] or [what is the Man Utd score]
• Commercial investigation – These are informational searches with a specific commercial intent i.e. [electric toothbrush reviews]
• Transactional –  These are searches where the primary intent is to buy or complete a transaction [buy tickets for Bon Iver London June 2017]

So which type of search do you think our infographic should be based on?

And the answer is…

Commercial Investigation!

People who are looking at apartments will be doing a lot of online research as it’s a big purchase. Therefore, it’s important to provide content that will guide them in their decision.

Transactional searches would likely only be a small percentage of your users’ searches, so it would be misguided to create content to target those searches. Equally, unless our real estate business has a large offline presence, creating content for purely for navigational queries would be unnecessary.

Our infographic will be providing information on properties in Amsterdam, which fits neatly into the commercial investigation query.

Keyword research: identify keywords around your topic

Now that we understand the search intent of our user, we can begin to perform our keyword research.

Go to Moz keyword explorer and type in your infographic’s core subject: imagine you have to explain your infographic in 4 words or less. This will become your “seed keyword”. For this example, your seed keyword would be [apartments in amsterdam].

If you don’t have the paid version of Moz, then you’ll only be able to search for two keywords, so make sure that you do some thinking on your seed keyword beforehand.

On a side note, there are a number of other tools that you can use for keyword research, and you don’t have to use Moz. Here are some of them:

• Google Keyword Planner will perform the same functions as Moz.
• A more basic alternative is to type a seed keyword into Google and see what other suggestions the auto-complete gives below.
• Alternatively, Google Trends will give you the popularity of your seed keyword and the popularity of other related keywords.

In my opinion, Moz is the easiest to use and gives the most accurate information, so we’ll continue in Moz.

Once you have typed in your keyword, you’ll get the expected search volume. If it’s too low i.e. less than 20 searches per month, then use the keyword suggestions box below to identify other keywords that you can base your infographic around.

Once you’ve found a seed keyword with a good number of monthly searches and that reflects the general theme of your infographic idea, then you’ve identified the core focus of your infographic. You should then try and focus the content of your infographic around this seed keyword.

How do you know what keywords to include in your infographic?

You can use Moz keyword explorer to drill down into your seed keyword and identify long-tail keywords that could make up the different sections of your infographic.

• To do this, go back to the keyword suggestions box and click to see all suggestions.

• Then, order the keyword suggestions according to expected search volume.

• You now have a list of long tail keyword suggestions ordered by their popularity. These can then form the different sections of our infographic. For the [apartments in amsterdam] example (after we scroll down past the more generic keyword variants), we are given a number of possibilities for different sections:

[cheap apartments in amsterdam]

[apartments in amsterdam central]

[smoking apartments in amsterdam]

[studio apartments in amsterdam]

Another use for the suggested keywords section is to identify other ways of getting your infographic ranked based on a slightly altered keyword selection.

For example, back with our [apartments in Amsterdam] infographic, Moz has shown us that many of the suggested keywords are related to holiday rentals in Amsterdam. So, if you have any apartments that are available for short term leases, then they can be included in the infographic too. This would open the content up to a whole other range of search queries and traffic.

Once you’ve identified all the keywords that you are going to target, then you can build your infographic. Although the infographic should be mostly graphics, there should still be some text to offer clarity. So for the [apartments in amsterdam] infographic, you could include property images alongside property details.

Make sure that your infographic is search engine optimized

The challenge with infographics is that the majority of content is presented in an image, and the googlebot crawler is not able to recognize the content of an image. If an infographic is placed on a page by itself, then googlebot may think that there is nothing but a picture on the page. This is called thin content and is something that Google has warned about.

However – if you use Piktochart to create your infographic, you can actually download the infographic in HTML form and embed it. This means that Google is able to crawl the contents of your infographic.

To do this, save your infographic or another visual project, click on Share on the upper panel and then select the Embed Code option. It will generate a code ready for you to embed to your website, just like this:

If you are using another tool and you cannot embed an HTML code, there are still ways to optimize you infographic for search:

1. Use your infographic to supplement an existing content – if you use your infographic to supplement an existing webpage with the same subject, your infographic won’t be on a page by itself and you’ll avoid thin content. Having an infographic on the page will also help reduce the bounce rate, which demonstrates to Google that your page is well suited to the keyword typed in by the user.
2. Create content around your infographic – this is exactly the opposite of the above. If you don’t have existing content on the same subject, make sure to create some! This could be as simple as writing out an infographic summary or building upon the infographic’s existing content at the bottom of the page after the infographic. So for example, with the [apartments in amsterdam] infographic, you could link to an anchor further down the page which contains details of more properties for each section. The [cheap apartments in Amsterdam] section could link to a text below the infographic that contains details of other cheap properties in Amsterdam. This way, your infographic could act as a kind of table of contents for the rest of the page. It would quickly summarize your article, engage the user and stop them from bouncing, as well as offer links to content further down the page.

Start by creating an infographic in Piktochart for free. Customize a template from the gallery by collaborating with a team and using brand assets in the visual. Clone or delete blocks. Export the visual in PDF or PNG format.

Other page elements that need to be optimized for search

Apart from adding content to the infographic, there are other tactics that you can use to optimize your infographic for search:

• Title tag – the title tag is one of the most important parts of a page (in terms of SEO). This will indicate to googlebot exactly what the page is about. I would recommend putting your seed keyword in the beginning of the title tag. I would also do the same with the H1 tag.
• Alt tag – All images have an alt tag, and so you should make sure that you include a relevant tag for your infographic. Use your seed keyword here as well.
• Meta description – use it to optimize the click-through rate of your infographic from the search results. Infographics are a popular form of content, so it’s worth mentioning that there’s an infographic on the page in your meta description. For our [apartments in amsterdam] example, your meta description could be: Click to view our apartments in Amsterdam infographic.
• Page speed – this is another important part of SEO. Make sure that you compress the image, so that the page loads faster.

Conclusion

Keyword research is an essential part of creating infographics, as it guides your content to target the terms that your customers are searching for. The more you know about what your customers are searching for, the better you can tailor your infographics.

Do you have any other SEO tactics you use in conjunction with your infographic creation? Do you know of any infographics that are well optimized for search? Do let us know in the comments below!

With Piktochart, you can create not only infographics but also presentations, reports, posters, and more. Collaborate with a team to create visuals. Organize them in folders for simplifying accessibility. Get started for free.