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Between keywords that attract search bots and establishing your Google EAT credentials (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), your content can help your customers find you by ensuring your site ranks highly on search engine results pages (SERPs).
But when you think about content in this context, what comes to mind? Blog posts? Meta descriptions? Social media? Those are all right answers, but there’s one type of content you may not think of right away… and that could be what’s holding you back in the SERP rankings.
SEO for Videos. How Does It Work?
Did you know that mixing things up with a video now and then can increase organic traffic to your site and help you climb the rankings? Here’s how to use videos to improve your SEO.
At first, the idea of videos having any impact on your SEO might be a little confusing. Some of the most common questions you may ask are:
- Are the search engines listening to your videos to catch every mention of keywords?
- Do I need to upload a script?
Ranking Factors
Relax: it’s not so much the content that is being ranked, but the way the content is presented. Multiple studies have uncovered that people are drawn to search results that include a video. A well-constructed video can instruct, engage, and educate viewers without requiring them to read, scroll, and scan to find the information they need in an article.
That’s not to say blog posts are dead; rather, they’re very much alive. But a how-to video, for example, can be much more helpful to someone searching for help than a “how-to” article.
Other factors that impact a site’s ranking include how long people stay on your page. People should want to stay to watch the entire video, which means search bots will take notice of the fact that people click your link and stay there for a while. In fact, they may share the link to your video with other people, resulting in backlinking to your site. Not only will this increase the number of people interacting with your brand, but it will improve your SEO ranking.
Allegedly, Google is one search engine that places priority on video content over text content. However, since Google is pretty quiet about its algorithms and search engine priorities, there’s no way to officially confirm this. As a business owner, you can run some experiments to determine whether your article on a specific topic ranks higher than a video on the same topic. You might be surprised to learn the answer!
Where to Find Help for Already Published Videos
Many online professionals can perform SEO optimization after the video has been produced and published, by tweaking your title, description, and tags. These three things are also essential for your positioning.
Check some suggestions here below to get started in the next few minutes.
In the next paragraph, we will discuss more in-depth what elements of your video you can improve to obtain a better ranking.
What Should I Include in My Video to Improve My SEO?
As mentioned earlier, the content of your videos isn’t necessarily what’s going to impact the SEO ranking. Your videos don’t need to be stuffed to the brim with keywords in order to gain search engine footing.
Instead, make videos people want to watch. That’s a somewhat nebulous description, because what you include in your videos will vary depending on your products, your niche, and your brand.
Take for example a company that sells high-end makeup versus a company that sells snow chains for car tires. Though there is surely overlap in the audience, the techniques that are used to encourage someone to spend a lot of money on their appearance are not going to be the same as those that encourage a customer to trust their product on an icy road.
Spend some time watching videos from others in your niche. What makes them different from each other? What do they all have in common? How do they incorporate a call to action (CTA)? Check out figures like the number of views, as well as comments and shares: are people watching and interacting with the videos?
Next, consider your brand. What kind of personality does your brand have? If you currently have a high blog readership, try not to deviate too much from that formula. If your written content includes infographics and diagrams, you can include those in your videos, as well.
How to Make Videos That Will Actually Improve Your SEO
The most important thing to keep in mind when creating video content to drive your SEO is your audience.
If your audience doesn’t watch your videos, then they won’t have a positive impact on your SEO. Therefore, you need to create videos that people want to watch: specifically, that the people who buy your product will want to watch.
Again, there’s no proven template that will work with every business, but there are a few general tips to keep in mind.
Tip #1
Make sure your video appears on your website. This may seem like a given, but once you load your video to an online service like YouTube, you also need to embed it on your site and share a link on social media so people can find it
Tip #2
Be entertaining and authentic. Your audience will be able to tell if you just decided to turn your cell phone camera on yourself and read a blog post off your screen. At the same time, if you try too hard to make your content interesting, you may lose focus of the point of your video.
Tip #3
Take your time planning your video. Come up with a script. Select visuals that make sense for your brand. Cartoons, infographics, illustrations, charts and graphs, and real-time demonstrations of products can all play a significant role in your video. Remember, your goal is to have people watch the video all the way through and share it with others!
Tip #4
Don’t be afraid to hire a professional. If you don’t have a working background in video, that’s not a problem. Hop on a contracting site such as Fiverr or UpWork to discover professional videographers who have the skills you need to add video content to your site.
Here below you can find some professionals for this purpose:
Tip #5
Make it a regular thing. One video is not going to change your SEO ranking forever. Add videos of various lengths to your content lineup so that users can interact with your site in a variety of ways.
Video content can improve your SEO, but be mindful to use the same guidelines and incorporate the same passion into your videos as you would any other content on your site. The goal of content is to inform and entertain your audience, which will establish you as a trusted expert in your niche.
Wrapping Up
Your videos can help your business grow by improving your SERP ranking. That means your business can potentially receive greater organic traffic based on the popularity of your video content. However, not all videos are created equally. Spend time carefully considering what content will work best in video format, and incorporate visuals that will help demonstrate your point– just as you would with a blog post.
Ask for help when you need it, and be sure to share your new upload with your current audience via social media and newsletters, as well. You may even wish to request feedback on your early videos so you can learn more about what your existing audience would like to see more of in future videos. All in all, this can be an exciting opportunity to reach a wider group of potential customers for your business.
