How to Boost Your SEO With Video

As you may already know, video can bring endless benefits to your marketing strategy. They’re a fun, entertaining, and informative way of conveying an idea, but what you may not know is that they can actually give you a huge SEO boost.

What is Video SEO?

If you’re unfamiliar with SEO, it is short for search engine optimisation, which is about creating a strategy to increase the search ranking of your content, with the goal of making it more visible. Many search engines (particularly Google) love video content and will prioritise it over text due to videos being harder to make and less common than text, making them a richer form of content.

Video SEO used to rely heavily on rich snippets, which are basically thumbnails with links that show up on the results page. The fact they used thumbnails made videos stand out from other results on the page, giving them a higher click through rate. In July 2014 Google decided to remove this feature, but fortunately, there are still other ways of increasing your search ranking with video.

 

Meta Information

You don’t always have to rely on snippets to get a better click through rate. By creating a compelling meta title and description, you can still inform your search traffic that you have a video.

A lot of marketers go wrong by stuffing their titles and descriptions with keywords, which Google doesn’t like very much. When using keywords, you need to avoid overusing them, otherwise Google will detect it as spam and penalise your ranking.

Quality Content

I know this one goes without saying, but it is so important to make sure that you are creating the right content for your audience. The aim here is get your audience to share your video, which is why you should make sure that your videos appeal to them. If you remember to be useful and provide valuable information, your viewers are a lot more likely to watch until the end and share on social media.

 

Embedding

You should keep your content exclusive to your site. In a post by Phil Nottingham, he stated that you always stand the best chance if you keep the content unique to your site, because it gives Google only one option regarding which page should rank for your video.

If you host on your domain, rather than YouTube, all of that traffic will be going straight to your website, which will enhance the possibility of converting new leads.

 

Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most important factors that contribute to improving your search ranking. The chances of someone else linking back to you are far greater if you are using video rather than just text. Casey Henry at Moz stated that having a video compared to text can almost triple the average number of domains that link to you. This is because using an image or video can give a summary of what the post is about.

Bounce Rate

If someone lands on your page that consists completely of text, it is unlikely that they’ll stay there for long. On the other hand, if a visitor landed on your page and immediately saw a video, it would firstly make the page look clearer, and secondly, if they started watching they’d be hanging around for longer.

If you maintain a low bounce rate, Google will recognise that your site actually has some useful information on it, and will give it a boost.

Keep One Video Per Page

If you spread out your videos and have one per page, it will make it easier to rank for certain results. If you have a range of videos on a page, your keywords may clash, making it harder for search engines to understand the relevancy of your content.

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