How To Boost SEO Ranking With Video Content

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One of the most important things you can do for your business is to market it. Marketing builds brand awareness, increases sales, grows your business and engages customers. There are many ways you can market your business but one of the most effective is SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it’s the practice of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic. It also increases your brand’s exposure through non-paid or organic search engine results. To get the most out of an SEO marketing campaign, you have to understand what people are searching for online, be able to answer their questions, use the words they use and publish the type of content they want to consume.

Other types of marketing, such as paid advertising, social media and other online platforms can be very effective at generating website traffic, however, most online traffic is driven by search engines. And so many people now use the internet and search engines to find out about different products and services that you would be mad to ignore their importance.

Optimizing your site helps deliver better information to search engines, which ultimately means your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search engine results. A number of practices and techniques can be used to improve your search engine ranking, one of which is video content.

What do we mean by video content?

Over the past ten years, video content has become a vital part of many marketing strategies. Using videos allows you to communicate with the audience you are targeting in a way that they can easily consume wherever they might be. Video content also provides value, relevance and flexibility.

So what exactly is video content? It is any content format that features or includes video. Some of the most common forms include vlogs, animated GIFs, customer testimonials, live videos, webinars and recorded presentations. Google has reported that 60% of consumers in the US prefer watching video over live TV. Google has also reported that since 2015, consumers aged between 18 and 49 are spending 74% more time watching YouTube.

Why videos are so popular?

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What is it about videos that makes them so popular? This article will explore in more detail the answer to that question.

Videos are short and sweet

Videos have become the go-to form of content because they allow you to deliver a huge amount of information in a short and concise manner. You must have heard the saying ‘a picture paints a thousand words’, and this is definitely true when it comes to video. Potentially, if you follow the logic of this saying, a video that is a minute long could communicate 1.8 million words, or around 3,600 pages of text.

Videos can be hard-hitting storytellers

As well as being packed with information, it’s also possible for videos to tell a story. When information is given in story form, it tends to stick in a person’s mind for much longer compared with cold, hard facts.

Videos help to improve the user experience

Use a video and it means you are focusing on the user experience. By seamlessly blending together sounds, movement, and visuals, you’re communicating everything that people like. An added bonus is that videos can be easily watching using a mobile phone. It might interest you to learn that approximately 60% of worldwide video views are made using a smartphone.

How videos can help your SEO ranking

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Just adding videos to your website is not going to boost your ranking, but you have probably already guessed that. The impact of video on search rankings is a little more sophisticated than that. Let’s start by looking at how video content can impact your SERP ranking.

Visitors stay longer on your site and bounce rates are lower

Videos can be very powerful when it comes to convincing visitors to stay. Video content is very engaging, which means people take more time to absorb it. The longer people stay on your site, the better chance you stand of getting search engines to recognise the value of your video. Because people are spending longer looking at your content, it is more likely they will dig deeper and check out some of your other pages, thereby reducing bounce rate.

Click-through rates increase

More clicks are made when a result includes a video compared to those that have no video. Click-through rates increase if the search engine and people know there is a video on your webpage. To increase your chances of appearing in the rich results (rich snippets), you must provide textual information and a catchy thumbnail.

Improves your backlink profile

People like nothing better than sharing amazing content, which is good for your website’s ranking. All the time your video is getting shared on the web, it is passively getting backlinks to the page that contains the video. Host your video on a site such as YouTube and you can earn more backlinks as well as qualified referral traffic if you add a link that takes people to your website, either in the video description or under your channel information.

Helps improve your Google My Business listing

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Google My Business listings has a lot to offer so make sure you take advantage. Google will reward you with a place in the Local Pack. Choose to use images, messages and posts and your listing will rank higher than one with minimal information. Gain an edge over the competition and create an appealing video that explains what your business is all about and demonstrates a product or service in less than half a minute and add it to your Google My Business page.

How to optimize your videos for SEO

Now you’ve got an understanding of the importance of video content, let’s look at some of the ways you can use it to stay ahead of the competition.

Video SEO keywords

Keywords are key to your video getting displayed on Google and YouTube, the two largest online search engines. Therefore, if you want your video to be successful, it has to feature keywords that are relevant to your business. Google Keyword Planner is great for helping you find the best keywords to use.

Optimize meta data

Tags, filenames, and descriptions are just as important as the video itself. They play an integral role in video SEO. Try to use keywords in your video tags, filenames, and descriptions.

You’ve got ample opportunity to describe what your video is about. YouTube, for example, allows 5,000 characters of description text, so make sure you use as much of this as possible. Best practice is to use your keyword a few times in the description as well.

Include a video transcript

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A video transcript is a complete textual representation of the content spoken in your video and provides lots of detail regarding your video’s content for the benefit of search engines. Because search engine bots crawl text and use what they find for indexing, a transcript of your video means the search engine can better understand the content. The end result of this improved understanding is that your video ranks better.

Give each video its own dedicated page

It’s much better to have one video per page, as Google gives preference to the first video it might find on a web page. Any others are ignored. It’s easy to work your way around this preference. Simply organise your web pages so that’s there’s only one video on a page or in a post.

There might be a temptation to publish the same video several times, but on different pages of your website. This is a big no-no because it creates internal competition and confuses Google’s algorithm

Use a video sitemap

A sitemap provides metadata about video content for the search engines. It can be used as an extension to the sitemap for your existing website. Use it to tell the search engines about things such as the category, title, description, length, and your target audience. There should be a sitemap for every video you embed on your website.

Optimize your video to reduce load time

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Load time is taken very seriously by Google, so you should take it seriously too. Your audience is also going to take it seriously too. We’ve become a society that has no patience and one that requires instant gratification. If your video is exceptional and the test outstanding, it will make no difference for your customers if the page takes forever to load. The longer a page takes to load negatively impacts the user experience. A study found that mobile users were 57% more likely to leave a web page if it took longer than 3 seconds to load.

You can optimize video content by hosting it on YouTube, for example. Use HTML5 format and it will reduce the dependence of heavy video plugins. Use a Content Delivery Network and it will improve the overall performance of your website. Use a tool such as Blazemp or Handbrake to reduce the size of the video without impacting on the quality.

Host your video on your website and on YouTube

It is recommended that you host your video on both your own website and YouTube. The end result will be better performance and results.

The use of video content is gaining momentum as we speak. You can use it to boost your video’s visibility, improve its ranking and increase the chances of it showing up in search engine results.