How does video impact SEO?
You may already have an SEO strategy in place and now you’re considering bringing video to the table. The trouble is, the creation of video can often be costly - plus, if not executed well enough, it’s money down the drain.
Incorporating video into your SEO strategy
If you’re considering incorporating video into your marketing strategy, it’s super important to know what your goals are. But don't worry, we’ll discuss that a little later.
Your new video content can be a fantastic addition to written content on your website, whether you’re looking to showcase your brand’s ethos, history or simply your products.
What is video SEO?
Put simply, video SEO is the optimisation of your video to be indexed and rank on search engine results pages for relevant keywords. There are a variety of optimisation strategies to give your videos a higher chance of ranking. But what are they?
Things to consider when you incorporate video content:
Page speed - When you’ve worked hard to create a fast-loading website, you don’t want to ruin your SEO with hefty video. Use lazy load to avoid any negative impact on your load time.
Video schema - Using video schema will help to increase your chances of having a video thumbnail in organic search. There’s a handy Google tutorial you can check out for more help.
What are your goals with video and SEO?
On-page engagement and conversions
Video can be a great tool if you’re experiencing a high bounce rate. Often users don’t want to read a shed load of content - especially if the topic is quite a heavy one! Instead, video content is much easier to consume. Turning your information into a visual format can help to increase engagement with your content and increase conversions.
Build links/generate social shares
Building links is key to your SEO strategy and can be utilised for video SEO too. The issue is, however, that video is more prominent than ever - making ranking, link building and social shares a little harder to come by.
We’re all familiar with viral videos, right? We’re quick to share video content that makes us laugh, amazed, annoyed or want to further discuss a certain topic. It needs to offer something to the viewer and evoke a strong enough emotion that they’ll share it.
When it comes to building links, your video content needs to be useful and informative. It could be that you’re sharing a tutorial style piece of content, educating its viewers. This works wonders for gaining links to your website or YouTube channel. Again, it can depend on your own goals here!
Brand awareness
Often, video is created to put a brand ‘out there’, demonstrating to its consumers (and future ones) what it has to offer. A great example of a video that generated a huge amount of backlinks is the “viral” video from DollarShaveClub.com.
Created with the purpose of raising brand awareness, the video was accompanied with a great PR/outreach strategy and quickly gained traction. When the video was featured across leading news websites, all those juicy backlinks were formed.
What type of video content should you create?
Educational
A great example of educational video content is Moz’s “Whiteboard Friday”. These gain a lot of attention both on their website alone, but also a huge number of links, embeds in blogs and other content and social shares. These, all together, increase traffic for Moz.
According to Open Site Explorer, a particular Whiteboard Friday video received 402 links from 37 referring domains and over 1,000 social shares.
Funny
We all love funny videos. We all love relatable content that simply, makes us laugh! If you’re looking for engagement on social media, shares and backlinks, funny videos will always win. But you have to be original and authentic, don’t go seeking out funny content to copy. Plus, always ensure that it resonates with your brand!
Brand awareness
Much like the DollarShaveClub example above, a video that showcases your brand can often go further than you think. Whether it’s introducing your company as a whole, the people behind the brand or even showcasing ‘behind the scenes’ processes, video is a great way to get your brand out there visually.
Ways to use your video content
Product videos
Video content for products helps instil confidence in consumers before they go ahead and purchase.
Video SEO on a landing page
When a user lands on your website, you have seconds to gain their attention and keep them there. Video content is perfect for a landing page that has a goal - to convert users into customers/clients.
Do you need help creating the perfect video SEO strategy?
If you’re struggling to find the best way to utilise video in your SEO strategy, get in touch and we’ll get your brand growing in no time.