How I leverage Piktochart
(This blog got rejected from Piktochart so I'll post it here).
I don’t think I could call myself a professional SEO yet, but I somehow manage to consistently get results for my clients. I don’t have that one fancy trick and I don’t believe in black hat, but I do understand one simple concept: Google is actively trying to create the best experience for it’s users.
Google has invested untold billions into improving their ranking algorithm with all sorts of different signals just so you and I could have the best experience possible when surfing the web. If they didn’t do that, then the searcher would go to another search engine besides Google, which is why Google is doing everything they can to provide us with very high quality SERP’s (search engine result pages).
Now keep that in your head.
If you go and ask your typical SEO “What do I need to rank?” he’ll say something like:
Have a good website with a lot of pages on it
For certain KW’s make sure you have an optimized title tag
Optimized H1’s and sub headings
At least 500 words of “good unique content”
Put some Schema on it and make sure you have good internal linking (site structure).
Get backlinks
Boom. Ranking.
All that stuff is still true! At the end of the day Google is still a software program that has to read texts and index pages based on what it reads in that text.
But I believe most of them would leave out a newer, very important ranking single: User engagement.
Case Study:
Let me give you guys a perfect example. My friend wrote a review for a new restaurant in Portland and in the article there's line that says they have “The Best Chicken Parmesan Recipe on the West Coast.”
He posted the article and it got some good engagement and shares. A month later he checked on some rankings and noticed he was getting more traffic than usual to that article. He was actually ranking pretty high for the term ‘best parmesan chicken recipe’.
We know that article had nothing in it about an actual recipe for Parmesan chicken, and the people that clicked on the link quickly learned that too, which is why the “time on page” was almost zero seconds and the ‘bounce rate’ was 99 percent.
People who were searching for this query obviously did not find that particular page helpful, so they immediately left.
And Voila
The page started going lower and lower until it didn’t even rank at all for that keyword. It simply goes to show that the way people are interacting with a page, is directly related to how it is going to rank for a search term.
At the end of the day, it comes back to the argument that content truly is king on the internet.
How I leverage Piktochart
Here is a small example of how I applied this knowledge with the amazing help of one of my favorite tools: Piktochart.
Have you ever worked with a website in a really boring niche? Have you ever complained that there is nothing to write about that people will engage with? I'm going to tell you about my experience with my medical billing client which may be the most boring niche in the world.
They didn't have a big budget for content and that’s not really why they came to us, but they gave me the permission to post if I wanted to.
For a long time they were paying a content writer to write decent 500 word blog posts. Pretty general stuff like: “Why Outsource Your Medical Billing?”
They wrote a lot of articles like that and those articles never went anywhere.
Then it was my turn to try and the truth is that I didn't know much about medical billing and coding and they didn't really have the time to help me learn.
So I started off researching some stuff about medical medical coding in and quickly realized that the healthcare industry is a big topic. Duh. I knew I wasn't going to be able to write quality articles about medical billing, but I was sure I could find something health care related that people would want to read.
I went to a couple forums and found out that there are a lot of doctors that are not getting paid as much as they think they should. So I found some data on that and made an infographic titled “The state of physician compensation”. (BTW this first one was made with Canva - I didn’t know about Piktochart yet, which is why the second looks way better).
I went and put the infographic in a blog post on the website and shared it with those online communities that I found.
It Worked
The next day when I looked at the analytics I realized that someone must have shared it because it got over 2000 page loads in just three hours. I checked where I had posted it and there were tons of comments and shares. A month later I noticed the page authority was at 28 (that’s highest on the website besides the home page). I’m super thankful that I linked the page back to the home page to make sure we got all that juice!
I made another one called “Ten overpriced items in a hospital” and what do you know, same thing, it got shared all over Reddit.
Now after a couple months which blog posts preformed the best?
That’s right, my two little infographics that each only took me about an hour to create and now are the highest performing posts on the website and still getting views and engagement.
This is a four month snapshot (when the physician compensation was posted). You’ll see the “Ten overpriced items” number 8. That was posted only a month ago, so it is already on track to be the best performing post.
That was four months ago and we have already seen a rank increase and a jump in domain authority off two pieces of easy content.
In the end
Look, I am not saying this is going to get you to position one, but I do know that I put a small effort into these infographics and got a big return. Now are the people that are coming to that page going to actually need medical billing and become a conversion? No, and we know that.
We are simply trying to prove to Google that we are a quality site and deserve to ranked higher.
When we keep getting engagement, our domain authority increases and now we can rank easier for the terms we want to rank for (provided we make awesome content and infographics for those pages too!).
And we found a formula
That formula is:
Topic in your niche + find the controversy + make an infographic about it = Good things for your website.
Back in the day, it would have taken way more time and effort to create that infographic, but now with companies like Piktochart, what was once too much time is now a reality and a VERY powerful tool for marketers and businesses.
Oh btw google cannot crawl jpegs so make sure to transcribe the infographic and optimize the text so Google can index the page!
Tom Danowski is a markting specialist for Webfor.com and has his own blog at Tomcatpdx.com