The word “content” is often used to describe the written word. However, data-driven imagery is increasingly gaining popularity over content that just favors text. Here’s why.
1. Well-Designed, Data-Driven Content Is More Engaging
Have you ever looked at an article with no images or paragraph breaks and bounced?
Of course you have. Few readers are courageous enough to scale that giant wall of text. It’s psychologically daunting.
If you’re looking for examples of how to improve the design of dense information, analytics companies provide a great example.
They do a great job of taking raw information and reformatting it in a useful way.
Take notice at how the average analytics dashboard uses visuals to tell a story. You’d be hard pressed to find a successful analytics company that doesn’t use colorful charts and graphs to visualize their customers’ data.
Source: https://www.woopra.com/learn/customer-analytics
Customer analytics company Woopra does a good job of this. I couldn’t imagine looking at that same information in a spreadsheet or plain table format.
Good content tells a story. The data provides the bones, and the visuals bring them to life.
Data without imagery is hard to understand. Imagery without data lacks substance.
That’s why the two are made for each other.
2. Data-Rich Content Improves SEO
If you want your articles to get organic traffic from Google, data-rich content is the way to do that.
SEO expert Garit Boothe put it this way, “Links are the currency of SEO. Every time one website links to another, Google sees that as an editorial vote. The more votes your website gets, the higher it will go up in the search engine results.”
How can you get other websites to link back to yours?
The answer is to create data-driven, visually-enticing content. Writers cite facts when making a point. If your website hosts the facts that others find citation-worthy, then you’ll earn their backlink.
A great example of this is by the link building experts at uSERP. They compiled a page of link-building statistics, and then created images throughout that page to visualize the statistics that they discussed.
Source: https://userp.io/link-building-statistics/
The image above describes how longer-form content tends to generate more backlinks.
What images can you create to improve your long-form content?
Another example that I like is from the financial sector. The writers at the Tokenist compiled a list of financial statistics in the US. They broke up their article with many visuals to accompany that text.
You’ll notice that their article doesn’t contain any unique data. They simply compiled data from publicly available sources, and then aggregated it into one place. In fact, they don’t even design their own visuals!
But it still worked. According to the link tool Ahrefs, 187 websites linked to that particular page.
You don’t need unique data sets or design elements to employ this technique yourself. (Although it does help.) All that you need is to put together the right information and pre-existing visuals in a way that adds value to your audience.
3. Well Designed Data Tells a Better Story
The best type of data visualization puts out a narrative. As they say in the news, “What’s the story?”
No one does this better than Pudding.cool. (What a fun domain name!)
One fun example is their page, “ ‘The Office’ Dialogue in Five Charts”. Their first chart is an interactive comparison of the number of lines spoken by every character. You can toggle between the “per-episode basis” and “entire series” views.
Source: https://pudding.cool/2017/08/the-office/
They also have an interactive chart that ranks the most negative characters and a fun visual display for every “that’s what she said” quote, among others.
On a more serious note, they also have interactive, data-rich content on how police officer complaints are investigated and the topics that Congress focuses on the most.
You can see the stories that they’re trying to tell. The Office piece seeks to retell the stories that the funny TV show characters told themselves.
The more political articles make a statement about the under-investigation of inappropriate police behavior and the things that Congressional members care about.
Finding the right data is important because it lends credibility. People want to know the facts, and that’s what data gives.
The problem with only using data is that people don’t connect with it. There are loads of publicly available government and private-company databases. But most people never take the time to look at them, even if it’s a subject that they are interested in.
That’s where the visualization comes in.
A smart researcher needs to analyze the data to only show the overall trends and concepts that are most useful for their audience. Then, using good design, color, and a little personality, you can highlight those selectively curated facts for human consumption.
What Story Are You Trying To Tell?
Whether you’re running an SEO campaign or trying to connect better with your own blog audience, data-driven visuals are a great way to do that. You won’t be disappointed if you try it.