Using Video in Your SEO Strategy
By now you should realize that fresh and relevant content on your website, blogs and social media posts is critical to your SEO. It needs to be interesting and capture readers’ attention to the point where they actually spend time reading or viewing it (not just a bunch of words strung together for the purposes of getting ranked in Google).
Have you considered adding video to your content mix? These days, people tend to watch videos more than consuming plain text. In fact, a survey conducted by Hubspot in 2016 found that 45% of respondents watched at least an hour of video content on Facebook and YouTube every week. Snapchat is coming up strong against Facebook in this area, with users viewing about 10 billion videos per day.
5 Ways Video Can Impact SEO
Everyone has different preferences when it comes to how they consume content. Some would prefer to spend two hours watching a movie. Others would opt for a book. That’s why a good mix of content is paramount on your site. Adding video can enhance the experience for your website visitors, especially for those whose time is at a premium. They can watch a quick video and get relevant info quickly.
It’s the reason YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine. But how important is video – does it really impact your search engine optimization? Read on and make your own conclusions.
1. Link Building
Videos can triple the average number of links as opposed to text. People just prefer videos, so they gravitate to them. And videos are simply more shareable. It all boils down to what people want, and video is it. If people like viewing videos, they’re more apt to share them.
2. Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERP).
Keywords are still important to SERP, but quality content is becoming more of a factor in ranking by search engines. But just as with content, videos must inform the user with relevant and interesting information to help.
Some suggestions on making your videos more likely to help SEO:
- Keep the video length to less than 3 minutes. Studies have shown that viewer engagement wanes after that.
- Create video-rich snippets. A video rich snippet is a tiny video next to your search result listing. This is a good way to stand out from your competition.
- Transcribing the video script to text and including captions can help spiders crawl your content for relevance. This will increase traffic to your site.
3. Click-Through Rates (CTR).
Videos get better CTR because they stand out and are more refreshing than a bunch of text. Embedding a video on your website can also help. If it’s relative to your business, adding a thumbnail video next to your listing can increase the CTR. The following is a list of search results for How to Hang a Picture. Which one would you be more likely to click on?
4. Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is a metric that measures the percentage of people who land on your website, and do completely nothing on the page they entered. So they don’t click on a menu item, a ‘read more’ link, or any other internal links on the page. A bounce rate indicates the quality of a webpage and/or the preferences of your audience. Either your site isn’t what they are looking for or it’s not interesting enough to retain them. Since videos are more engaging, including them in your web content will decrease the bounce rate considerably for customers you’re looking to capture.
5. Dwell Time
Dwell time is the actual length of time that a visitor spends on a page before returning to the SERPs. In theory, the longer the dwell time the better, as this indicates that the visitor has consumed most (if not all) of the content on a page before either returning to the SERPs or performing another action on the site. Because of the preference for videos, viewers will spend longer on the page than with text only. Viewers don’t just skim videos either, as is likely with simple text, or even photos. They spend more time absorbing the message the video depicts. If the dwell time is longer than 2 minutes, it’s a sign that the search result is relevant.
In summary, your SEO strategy should definitely include video as a factor. You can’t ignore the statistics that say they improve user engagement, which in turn leads to more traffic and links, better retention, and higher SERP.
Contact Las Vegas SEO for Growth to Enhance Your SEO Strategy
Las Vegas SEO for Growth can help you build an SEO strategy that works for you and your business. We offer a free SEO report that will provide you with report card to serve as a basis for enhancing your ability to get found online. Contact us today to learn more!