It’s no secret that video content has become an essential part of modern-day digital marketing. Businesses have changed their marketing strategies to incorporate videos in order to communicate with their target audience in a way that is easy to consume on the go, yet at the same time, provides flexibility, value, and relevance.
However, videos aren’t just great for engaging audiences, they can also improve your SEO and ultimately your website rankings.
Over the years, Google’s SEO algorithm has changed considerably, with its preferences built around many different factors and aspects of web content, and paged favoured by Google search algorithms rank well on the search engine results.
The technical aspects of SEO stay fairly consistent, but what’s different in SEO today is that it’s much harder for low-quality content to rank well, the general preference for higher-quality content is true for any type of content. We know that a picture is worth a thousand words, and videos work very well at delivering large amounts of information in a short concise manner. As well as being packed with information, videos tell stories, and for this reason they tend to stick in people’s minds for longer periods of time.
Experts predict that more than 80% of all consumer traffic will be videos by 2021 (Cisco report) so how can you leverage videos to improve your search engine rankings?
YouTube
Google owns YouTube and it is also integrated with a search engine. You can use YouTube to create a business channel and publish videos related to your products and services. Videos on your YouTube channel not only boost your rankings on YouTube’s search engine, but it could increase your chances of ranking on Google.
Your video’s metadata, must have enough contextual information to ensure that your audience discovers your content, however, the video’s content will remain the most important factor. No matter how good your metadata and keywords are, a poorly made or irrelevant video is not going to rank on Google.
Video Watch Time
One of the most critical factors measured in Google’s algorithms is how long a visitor stays on your website or watches your video. The longer users spend time on a page, the more Google trusts that specific webpage and therefore this results in a higher rankings.
Search engines also think that a site has more relevant and vital information when it contains a related video, this again increases search traffic and ranking.
It is therefore important to create videos that will provide value and be engaging for your target audience to keep their interest.
Social Sharing
The more people watch a video, the more likely they are to share it with their followers. Therefore it is critical to consider your target audience when creating videos, if you know who you are talking to, you can design your video to cater for them.
A strong social media presence is essential to increase your site’s visibility, by generating social media shares, you reach more users who can share your content on their own social media accounts.
On-site Conversions Increase
The primary goal of SEO is to increase on-site conversion. This means that site promotion and improvement doesn’t end at getting people to click through your site.
By it’s nature, video content is more digestible, which increases it’s content quality and in turn, video content can be one of the most effective ways of converting users.
With videos, you can also prompt viewers to subscribe or follow you on social media and even make a purchase, compared to written text, a video can be far more engaging to visitors in just a matter of seconds.
By placing an interesting video on your homepage, you can increase conversions and boost your business engagement.
Using Rich Snippets
The search engine results pages of Google are frequently updated through rich snippets. These are additional pieces of information other than the meta description, used to give potential visitors an idea of what they will see when they visit your site.
In these snippets, Google will display your video’s title, thumbnail, and a simple description. It is essential to make sure that your description and thumbnail are fully optimised, accurate and provide well-designed photos and graphics.
Rich snippets help secure higher click-through rates. This is because rich snippets give users an additional preview into what your video will be about.
The bottom line is that people prefer watching videos, engage with them and tend to remember them, exactly what every marketing strategy aims to achieve. Not only do they have marketing potential, but they are one of the most important ways for you to improve your SEO.
Videos have repeatedly proven their capability to boost the online visibility of brands, drive more traffic and increase website rankings in the eyes of search engines.