How To Do a Local Infographic Right Airbnb Style

Airbnb just released a beautiful interactive infographic on the local economic impact the company has had on nine cities. If you are considering using content to attract links, for both national and local SEO, this would be a good piece to study.

The design is beautiful, but the interaction and “scrollability” is what sets this apart from your typical everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to infographics. It’s also responsive and the different elements work nicely on a mobile browser:

Calling this an “infographic” really doesn’t do it justice. It’s more like a work of art that also has information.

They took an interesting approach with the geo information. With local linkbuilding, you want to drive inbound links to a page that targets the specific geo. The idea is that you get anchor text with the city name (e.g. “economic impact in New York”) which should help all the “New York” pages connected to that page. Airbnb took a slightly different approach. At the bottom of the page, there are links to info about the different cities they studied:

But these link to a single page with anchors for each city like http://blog.airbnb.com/airbnb-economic-impact/#new-york.

This allows linkers to link to New York specific content with New York specific anchor text, while links from others to other cities on the same page do the same for those cities, and combined, it all adds up to a lot of links to one page that they then funnel down to different neighborhood pages in those cities via internal links:

My only quibble is that the anchored URLs might not be so obvious for some linkers. But all in all a really nice job that is already paying off in high quality links.

Hats off to Dennis Goedegebuure, Airbnb’s SEO master. He is on a content/story-telling roll these days.

Disclosure: I own a small amount of Airbnb stock from my role as an advisor to Nabewise, which Airbnb acquired. Go Airbnb!