What comes to mind when you think about SEO? Do you imagine carefully optimizing your web copy, earning backlinks, and targeting high-performing keywords?
Make sure that you don’t leave videos out of that picture.
All too often, written content gets all the attention in SEO. But that shouldn’t be the case. Despite what some marketers might assume, video can play an integral role in any SEO marketing strategy.
You might think about text-based content when planning your SEO strategy, but the video has only grown to become a crucial part of any digital marketing plan.
Just as the web has changed immeasurably over the past decade, video has become more and more integral to effective SEO. When leveraged efficiently, video can have a massive impact on nearly every aspect of your SEO outcomes. More and more, companies across almost all industries and customer segments are starting to realize the incredible potential of video in any optimization strategy.
The benefits of video are far too many to list in a single article: it can grow your web traffic, boost your user engagement, generate leads, and build more enduring connections with your users. Video has revolutionized digital marketing, and SEO is the next frontier.
If your only SEO experience is in tweaking keywords or optimizing the written content, you might be wondering how you can integrate video marketing into your SEO strategy. Let’s clear up some of your confusion.
In this article, we’ll break down all you need to know about how video can skyrocket your rankings, boost your engagement, and expand your audience.
How Does Video Content Help SEO Marketing?
You might think that SEO is a primarily text-based discipline. And while that might be the case in many cases, there are still countless situations where video content can be precisely what you need to get the results you want.
Whether you’re looking to grow your backlinks, increase your digital engagement, or drive more traffic to your brand, video can help you get the results you want. Here are a few ways video marketing can empower you to reach your goals.
Reduce Your Bounce Rate
One of the most remarkable things about videos is how much longer they hold their viewers’ attention than other forms of content. While it’s not uncommon for blogs and landing pages to have lightning-fast bounce rates, videos tend to keep audiences engaged for far longer. Studies show that users often spend twice as long on a page with video compared to pages that are purely text and visuals.
Keeping your audience hooked to your pages with engaging videos can have widespread benefits for your brand, not the least of which is SEO. Low bounce rates are typically associated with higher search rankings, so if you can increase the time your audience spends on your page, then you’ll be on the right track.
Boost Your Traffic
No one will argue with attracting more traffic to their site! Time and again, studies show that websites with well-made video content tend to gain significantly more visitors than other pages. A 2015 study by Brightcove found that websites with videos on them had a remarkable 157% increase in organic search rankings while displaying double the conversion rate of websites without videos.
Improve Your Site’s Google Quality Score
Google uses many detailed measurements for ranking websites on its search results pages. One of the more elusive stats is “site quality.” While there is a vast range of factors that may or may not affect how Google perceives your pages’ quality, video is among the pivotal elements determining how the search engine giant judges your site’s quality.
Read: How To Optimize Your Videos For Google Search?
Earn Backlinks and Social Shares
Earning backlinks is one of the most crucial yet challenging parts of any SEO campaign. On the one hand, backlinks can have a considerable influence on your site’s ranking. On the other, it can be excruciatingly challenging to publicize your brand enough to get any number of reputable sites to link back to your page.
Videos are one of the most surefire ways for you to increase your number of backlinks. Video is unique among most other kinds of content due to how much more likely it is for your audience to share a video than any different kind of content. In fact, social videos alone garner more than 1200% more shares than text and images, and videos shared on other platforms often see similar levels of success. The more shares your videos receive, the more backlinks they earn. In the process, your SEO ranking will skyrocket.
How Do You Use Video In Your SEO Strategy?
Now that we’ve covered just a few of the many ways that video can boost your SEO rankings, you might be wondering how you can see these benefits for yourself.
Thankfully, incorporating videos into your SEO strategy doesn’t have to be a complicated process. You have a vast array of options at your disposal if you’re looking to include video in your future search engine projects.
Here is just a small selection of the many ways you can leverage SEO in your marketing plans.
Use Target Keywords in Video Titles and Descriptions
Of course, optimizing your content to double down on your target keywords is one of the core activities of effective search engine optimization. While cheap techniques like keyword stuffing will only drag your site down, strategically sprinkling your keywords throughout your website is key to achieving long-term success. While you might keep this idea in mind when writing your text, does it ever come to mind when you’re working on videos?
Be sure to remember your video’s titles and descriptions when you’re working with specific keywords. When Google crawls a page for keywords, it scans it for all the text on the page – including video titles and descriptions. Whenever you’re using video on your website, make sure that it plays into your larger keyword strategy. Putting your keywords in your video titles and descriptions is a surefire tactic to reinforce your keyword distribution further.
Ensure that you take a natural, holistic approach to use keywords in your descriptions or titles. Don’t throw random key phrases at entirely unrelated videos; instead, make it a priority to integrate your keywords into your copy naturally seamlessly. In doing so, you’ll make your page highly readable while also improving readability, as gauged by Google.
Develop Video Transcripts
If you’re concerned about using videos in your SEO strategy due to their lack of written text, then here’s an easy solution for you: develop written video transcripts. Not only can transcripts provide your page with more optimized content for Google to crawl, but they can have massive accessibility benefits and allow a broader audience to enjoy your production.
In the eyes of search bots, video transcripts are essentially the same as traditional web copy. Transcripts aren’t costly or time-consuming to produce either, as many video applications come with the ability to create transcripts already built into the software. Using transcripts enables you to use your videos as a seamless and effective way to boost your keyword density and distribution of any page.
Best of all, captions and transcripts make your content accessible to audiences that may not be able to watch your video directly, expanding your reach in the process.
Make Your Videos Relevant To Your Target Audience and Keywords
You already do it with your blog posts, so why not your videos?
Relevance is another one of the pivotal aspects affecting your search engine ranking. When Google determines how to rank your page for any given search terms, it crawls through all the content of your site to assess how relevant it is to your audience’s target search terms. It looks through your web content, image alt texts, and yes, your videos.
With that in mind, it’s essential to ensure that your videos are explicitly relevant to your target demographics and keywords. Not only are videos important for SEO ranking on their own, but when considered along with the rest of your site’s content, they can help dramatically boost your site’s overall relevance.
As you develop your video’s content, title, and description, don’t forget to consider its overall relevance. Every aspect of your video should be explicitly or implicitly tailored to your audience’s specific wants, needs, and expectations.
Read: Video Marketing: Do You Know the Myths of It?
Use Videos to Drive Traffic and Conversions
Videos boost both traffic and engagement on websites – that’s simply a fact at this point. You can take advantage of this phenomenon in your SEO marketing by strategically placing videos on your landing pages, home pages, and any other site that needs a boost in clicks. Better yet, since videos tend to demand attention more than any other form of content, making use of video can even spark growth in your conversion rate.
Sprinkling videos throughout your site will not only grow traffic and engagement on your pages, but can also improve your site’s overall ranking. As videos bring more users to your website and foster more engagement with your offerings, you can expect to see your Quality Score and your position on results pages increase. While the correlation between these elements isn’t always explicitly clear, there is still a clear connection between using well-made videos and increased site traffic.
Post Videos on Public Platforms
Videos not only attract traffic when they’re part of your site. They’re also incredibly effective at directing traffic to your site from outside sources. Posting and promoting a high-quality video on a popular public platform like YouTube can have a wide range of SEO benefits. Creating a YouTube video with a link to your site in the description will automatically generate an inbound link for your organization. Since videos already have high conversion rates and generate significant referral traffic, you can boost your traffic significantly.
There are plenty of public forums for you to post your videos, such as Vimeo or your own site, but when it comes to SEO, no option can ever beat the monolith that is YouTube. YouTube already enjoys monumental amounts of traffic every month, and since Google owns it outright, YouTube videos tend to have higher SERP rankings than videos on other outlets. While it doesn’t have to be the only place you post your videos, it should undoubtedly be one of the first places you consider.
Use Videos on Social Media
No marketer can afford to leave out social media when promoting content, and video is no exception from this rule. In fact, video is among the most high-performing social media content out there, often outperforming text-based posts by exponential factors. Once you’ve finally crafted your videos, don’t hesitate to promote them across your brand’s relevant social channels such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
Social videos do more than generate traffic – in fact, there are strong connections between social shares and SERP ranking, so it’s worth cultivating a solid presence across your social platforms to pursue your optimization goals.
When the time comes to share your videos on your social feeds, ensure that you allow enough time to tailor your content to your respective platform. Consider that native videos uploaded directly to a social media platform’s video functionality tend to earn dramatically more shares than simple YouTube links.
Social media is a crucial part of any SEO strategy, so you’ll set yourself up for greater success if you take the time to optimize your videos for your chosen social outlets.
Promote Your Videos via Email
Posting your videos to YouTube or social media isn’t the only method at your disposal if you’re hoping to promote your videos. It might not be as flashy as social media marketing, but promoting your videos via email marketing is a tried-and-true method to get them in front of as many eyes as possible. Like every other promotion method, building video traffic through email marketing can help you boost your SEO goals.
Time and again, data shows that video marketing and email marketing are meant for each other. A 2016 study by Syndacast found that promoting videos via email marketing could boost CTR by 65%, cut unsubscribe rates by 26%, and expand open rates by 19%.
The message is clear: put your videos in your email marketing blasts, and your video metrics, SEO statistics, and email stats will all serve to benefit.
Leverage Video Marketing to Achieve Your SEO Goals
Video marketing can play an integral and versatile role in your video marketing strategy. It might take a little getting used to if you’re more comfortable with text-based SEO, but when leveraged appropriately, video marketing might be just what your SEO strategy needs to reach the goals you and your organization need.
