The Most Successful Piece Of Kissmetrics Content Ever Was An Infographic

At Kissmetrics, we made our first infographic in 2010 as a kind of experiment. We knew that infographics were good for SEO, and we wanted to test it out. Then it blew up. That little infographic about color psychology and marketing landed me on a Canadian radio show talking about something I basically didn’t know anything about—I actually just read off the infographic the whole time. There are two main reasons to use infographics:

• Infographics generate backlinks like nothing else. Even if you cite and utilize outside research in your infographic, others who see your infographic are likely to attribute you as the source. They’re also inherently shareable.
• Having your logo on an infographic is good for brand awareness.

In 2010, it was easier to make these kinds of SEO plays. Backlinks aren’t as important to SEO as they used to be, and infographics aren’t as effective as they used to be—but they’re still incredibly effective. When it first came out, it accounted for 1/6th of our total backlinks. To date, that infographic has still been our most successful piece of content. As you can see through Moz’s Open site explorer, this single infographic accounts for around 38% of total root domains linking to the blog and around 15-16% of total backlinks the Kissmetrics blog, even six years down the line. At around 39k shares, it’s also our best-performing piece of content overall.If you search “color psychology” on Google today, our infographic doesn’t even show up on the first page. It goes back to imitation: people saw that what we were doing was effective, and they built on it. Help Scout wrote a post that was 2,000-3,000 words—and Google’s search algorithm likes words more than it likes images. The lesson here is that if you don’t pay attention to what's really working and adjust your strategy, someone else will fill the void. SEO, like all other good things, needs to be reinforced and nurtured over time.