Don’t Leave Your Website Buffering: How to Make Big SEO Gains with Video Content
October 14th, 2015 by
Everyone likes watching videos on the Internet—funny videos, cute animal videos, cute kid videos, and cute videos with kids AND animals.
And while there will always be a place for these videos in our hearts and on the web (what would YouTube be without them?), video content has recently found a new, even greater purpose on the Internet. In recent years, videos have emerged as an integral part of any and every SEO campaign. Based on four main metrics, there are several ways video content can help your business and website gain more traction.
- With YouTube rising to the lofty status of the world’s second-largest search engine (behind only Google, which just so happens to own YouTube), videos are getting more screen time than ever.
- Videos have been proven to improve SERP rankings. Because YouTube and Google are in such close cahoots these days, videos from the popular video site are ranking higher than ever in Google searches. The more popular a video, the higher its authority, which affords a greater opportunity of appearing at the top of search pages.
- A study conducted by Forrester discovered that pages with video are about 50 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google search results.
- For that reason, among others listed below, here is Search Influence’s latest video, a brief case study about our partnership with the Audubon Nature Institute in New Orleans.
- This is also why properly optimizing videos is so important—all video content (title, description, transcription, links, etc.) is crawled and processed by the search engines.
- Every business should have their own YouTube channel that is accessible via their website. But to make even better use of videos, embedding YouTube videos directly onto website pages has been proven to be even more effective.
- Embedded videos can improve click-through rate with up to a 41% higher CTR than plain text, according to study conducted by Cisco and aimClear.
- Embedded videos can also reduce bounce rate. The longer a visitor spends on a website, the more authority it is given by Google. Unfortunately, the average online attention span is less than 10 seconds. Video content allows visitors to become engaged with something on your site for a longer period time. The average length watched of a single Internet video is over 2.5 minutes—all that extra time is crucial in the SEO world.
- Videos communicate a lot of information quickly, which lets people sample content without committing to reading lengthy text. Videos are also much more useful in establishing trust with potential customers than written content, especially if the video features the business owner or a client testimonial.
- Finally, video content is much more likely to generate social interaction and shares, which equals quality backlinks. Videos are easy to watch and share, therefore more appealing and likely to be watched (and allowing for more people to discover the video, and by extension, discover the business in general).
- In a fascinating experiment, Gemma Holloway at Koozai compared two posts covering the same exact topic—one featured a short video introduction and the other had only text. The video post received between 200% to 300% more page views and shares on social media than the text-only article.
So don’t leave your website or your business buffering. Incorporate videos into your SEO and Internet Marketing strategy and watch the benefits play out on your computer screen!
