The age-old question about video SEO still exists today. Truth is that video does impact SEO and warrant your time and attention because it’ll take more than embedding a few YouTube videos on your website. You need high-quality videos coupled with the following best practices.
Videos Prove to Google you Have Valuable Content
Google checks both text and media into consideration when checking your web page’s relevancy for keywords. Having both is good video SEO because it shows your content is both varied and valuable. Cisco says this will be even more important by the end of 2019 when about 80% of all online traffic will be searching for videos.
When you include video, make sure you also include:
- Keywords in your meta tags
- A video transcript
- Relevant synonyms in your video for your chosen keywords
Videos Bring Traffic to Your Website
When hosting your videos on sites like YouTube or Vimeo, make sure to include your website’s URL in your channel names and video descriptions to give your traffic a great boost if you give people a compelling reason to visit your website (e.g. a special offer, discount code, extra information, free resources). This video SEO tip will help stop you from feeling like you’re wasting the SEO benefits of hosting videos on your own site. Third party sites will benefit you by not slowing down your website since videos are embedded, not hosted, there. They also let you share content with a highly engaged audience.
Videos Bring Links to Your Website
Adding your URL to your content on social platforms lets you earn qualified referral traffic. You’ll also gain links from other sites that will help your video SEO by making you look more valuable to Google and thus improving your ranking in the SERPs. Of course, there are a few things you must do here, including:
- Create unique, shareable videos so website owners have a compelling reason to link to your website and its videos
- Brand your videos so people become more aware of you even if they don’t click through to your website right away
- Include a short title or ending card with your logo and website’s URL
- Add a watermark to your videos
Videos Improve Your Social Presence
Social media marketing will help with video promotion and distribution. You should let it play a major role in your marketing because it’ll help with video SEO (e.g. higher social media shares lead to higher SERP positioning). This is relatively easy to do since Facebook videos receive 135% more engagement than photos. As you create your videos, keep these factors in mind:
- 85% of Facebook video watchers don’t turn on the sound
- 30% of viewers prefer a square vs. landscape video
Videos Improve Your Conversion Rate
People are about twice as likely to make a purchase when they see a video. Clearly this means that good video SEO will help improve your conversions and sales. This isn’t only true for ecommerce businesses, but Google says about 50% of people will watch a video before visiting a store. HubSpot also weighs in on this by saying that this is mainly true when you incorporate short videos that get right to the point. Videos that are under 90 seconds tend to work best because people have short attention spans.
Videos are Necessary
Now that you see the importance of having high-quality videos on your site, it’s time to start adding some. While you’re busy running your business, you can leave this job to I SEO U. They’ve successfully helped many websites with this task over the years. Get in touch with them so your website will be next.