Posted by Video content carries great opportunities for websites and businesses to resonate better with their audience. Thanks to advancing technology and the virality of social media, video has become bigger than ever when it comes to SEO.
The popularity of video content creation has grown in recent years. Smartphones and social media are making the creation and accessibility of videos more straightforward than ever before, whilst it’s much easier to upload and publish video content online.
Google’s algorithm favours video content. This algorithm works to calculate the possible most relevant content for users. By optimising video accordingly with the correct search query and right description can be gold dust for creators looking to obtain a favourable ranking among search results.
(Image: Backlinko)
According to Backlinko data, investment in video content is set to double over the course of the coming years.
Another key point regarding video is the quality of information that can be provided within the content. On YouTube for instance, it’s common to find clickbait titles and descriptions that mislead viewers. This content tends to have higher bounce rates which send the videos down in the rankings. However, with quality content supported by valuable keywords and titles, it’s much more straightforward for the likes of YouTube and Google to reward your efforts with more prominent SERPs.
Let’s take a more actionable look into why video content can be a vital asset for boosting your SEO, and how it’s possible to make videos that will get your company noticed:
Google’s Favouring of Multimedia
Google has looked very favourably on video-based content, and over the past few years has worked to better accommodate multimedia results to queries.
Google has become so efficient at understanding where your best results are likely to be that many searches will return a carousel of video results that have been especially picked by the search engine’s algorithms to best match the questions that you’re asking.
As we can see above, Google’s evolved to not only showcase the most relevant videos to users, but to also break the content down into sections for ease of reference. This can help to further optimise longer videos to ensure that users find the information they need in the most efficient manner.
(Image: Search Engine Journal)
As we can see from the image above, video is also well-optimised when it comes to mobile browsing, with results displayed in a prominent manner – even if users search for ‘all’ results related to their query.
This is part of a concentrated effort on the part of Google to deliver a rich array of solutions to the questions browsers may have, and it’s a great opportunity for businesses to rank higher with fewer competitors to get in the way. After all, video results are typically more sparse than text-based results on search engines.
Generating a Greater Social Media Presence
If you’re looking for your video content to go further, then optimising for social media should be your number one priority.
Not only is social media an excellent way of creating more engagements with your content, but it could be a boost to your wider SEO efforts. There’s a significant correlation between more shares on social media and more favourable SERPs.
While social signals aren’t supposed to directly influence ranking positions, it’s clear that it can have an indirect effect. Social platforms are also great for getting your video content noticed. For instance, Facebook videos tend to attract 135% more engagements than their photo-based counterparts. By sharing your video content on social platforms, you can increase the number of users viewing and generate more interactions with your brand as a result.
As a good rule of thumb, it’s best to adapt the videos you create for each social media platform. For instance, 85% of Facebook videos are viewed on mute, and square videos attract between 30% and 35% more views on certain platforms compared to landscape videos.
Always be on the lookout for small but effective ways of adapting your content in a way that will help its performance, because every little helps when boosting your brand.
Greater Link Building Potential
Video happens to be one of the most effective ways of link building – especially when the content you create is engaging, informative, and well produced.
(Image: Brid.tv)
According to the statistics above, video outpaces webinars, whitepapers and infographics in terms of attracting links, falling second only to the publication of data and research.
As link building is one of the best ways to help Google to look at your brand and website in a more favourable manner, it’s essential that you exploit the popularity of video as a means of generating more prominence for your brand.
There are many ways you can go about leveraging more effective links as part of your video production efforts. Be sure to link your website to your YouTube channel, use YouTube cards and ask viewers to subscribe or link to your video.
It’s also important to always add descriptions to your videos as a means of making them more discoverable. Some websites also choose to market their videos on Reddit, or submit them to various services like FollowerWonk, MudRack or Klout.
Quality is Key When Creating Video
As ever, quality is key when incorporating video into your SEO strategy. Remember to make valuable content that’s in tune with your website’s or company’s goals.
This process is cyclical in its nature. After all, video gives your rankings a boost, which helps more people to see your site, which, in turn, leverages more clicks. However, if you rush this process, you’ll generate more bouncebacks and lose the credibility you’ve been aiming to build.
Analytical platforms like Google Analytics or Finteza can help in this regard, where you’ll be able to view how users interact with your pages and its content.
As the image above shows, you can see the session duration of arrivals from specific social networks – helping you to understand how engaging your content is as it’s shared to your social accounts.
Be sure to use these insights as guidance for refining your video content creation and building new videos that are better suited to getting your brand noticed.
When correctly leveraged, video content can vastly improve the reach of your brand. Just remember to avoid the temptation of skimping on the quality of content and you could find yourself in possession of a key tool in your path to prominence.
About the author:
Dmytro is a CEO at Solvid, a creative content creation agency based in London. Founder of Pridicto. His work has been published in Shopify, Zapier, Mention, WordStream, Entrepreneur, Scoop.it, BuzzSumo, and Campaign Monitor.
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Great strategies outlined and yes as Video marketing is on the rise nowadays with more and more people opting for videos and also search engines preferring video content it’s much preferred but optimising for the keywords is must and a well written content with a exceptional video is of no match.