The power of visual data

One of the things I frequently worry about with my job is data overload. I LOVE data, but many of my clients either don’t care about the nitty gritty, or depend on me to sort it out for them. So, I’m very careful to use the K.I.S.S. method whenever possible. (Keep it simple, stupid)

Recently while prepping a deck for a nature center, I was trying to get across the fact that our SEO queries are fundamentally changing for the better. I had prepped a big table of the top 50 queries and how many impressions they had over the past 30 days BLAH BLAH BLAH when all of the sudden, I caught myself. I thought “Who in the heck is going to understand this other than me?” So, I transformed the “Top SEO queries” report into a tag cloud:

 tag cloud

Tag clouds are a great way to express data to almost anyone. “The bigger words are where we appear most frequently” was my tee up during the presentation. I’m glad I simplified this one down, and will use it as a standard “trick” going forward in my presentations. What kind of things have you discovered like this?

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