How SEO-friendly are Datawrapper embeds?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is important to many of our users, and we take it very seriously. This article explains what we do and what you can do to make your site even more SEO friendly.

How does Datawrapper optimize for SEO?

Datawrapper follows as many best practices as possible, so you don't have to worry about them: When you embed a Datawrapper visualization on your page, you can be sure that it is optimized for performance, displays well on mobile screens, uses semantically correct HTML markup, and more. All of this improves your website's search engine ranking. 

Will my Datawrapper visualizations be crawled?

Yes, they will. When you embed a Datawrapper visualization in an article or on a website, it automatically includes the  indexifembedded tag. This allows Google and other search engine crawlers to read and index them for search results.

This means your visualizations contribute to the SEO of the page they’re embedded in. 

Note that this only happens when you embed your visualizations. Our share pages (e.g. datawrapper.de/_/3Jz13/) are not indexed by Google. They're not publicly listed anywhere.

What can I do to improve my SEO performance?

There are two methods we recommend when it comes to Datawrapper visualizations: 

1. Embed your Datawrapper visualizations as web components instead of iframes. Web components load faster, which means improved SEO rankings, and the visualizations appear to search engines just like native content. To them, they're indistinguishable from other content on the page.

2. Add an alternative description to your visualizations. This can include keywords you want to optimize for, even if your visualization doesn't mention it. An alternative description also gives search engines context information about the content on your page. Learn how to write good alternative descriptions in this Academy article.