Using video content has become one of the most effective SEO tactics to increase your website’s visibility, exposure, and SERP rankings.
Over the past few years, Google’s SEO algorithm has changed considerably. It has become a behemoth. Its preferences are built around many different factors, figures, and aspects of web content of which each and every web business needs to understand.
What Google search algorithms prefer equal what ranks well on search engine results pages, or SERP.
The technical aspects of SEO haven’t changed too much. You still need to be able to develop clean, easy-to-crawl sitemaps. Search engine crawlers obey simple rules that any technical SEO officer will need to understand.
What’s different in SEO today is it’s much harder for low-quality content to rank. Even with paid traffic and the “perfect” keyword density, a poorly written, poorly recorded, and/or irrelevant piece of content likely won’t rank these days.
Read More: The Ultimate 2018 SEO Ranking Checklist
Today, SEO strategies prioritize drawing user engagement. This is hard to create with only the old, cheap practices such as keyword stuffing, spamming links, and even tweaking back-end codes.
Nowadays, one website, article, or blog post can rank for a lot of related keywords, not just the ones you used for page optimization. Even video content can affect your page’s SERP ranking and traffic conversions. Now, let’s focus specifically on video content.
The general preference for higher-quality content is true for any type of content. Yet, it’s important to remember that Google doesn’t read videos the same way it does written content.
According to a Cisco report, web content will be 80% video based by 2019. What does that mean?
It means that every business is now a media business. Your company won’t be able to take advantage of content marketing without creating video content.
Luckily for you, we will share how to leverage video to improve your SERP ranking.
5 Ways Video Content Boosts SERP Ranking/Google Listing:
1. YouTube’s Role
Just like Google, YouTube is also a search engine. You probably already knew that Google owns YouTube.
When you hear the word SEO, the first thing that comes to mind is SERP ranking on Google. However, SEO is the process of optimizing content to rank better on any search engine. This optimization can take place within the content itself, within its distribution, or by taking action externally.
For example, interacting with YouTube. You can create content here as a YouTube creator, release content through your business’s channel, or use the comments section on others’ content to gather backlinks.
As a marketer, you should be using YouTube to its full potential.
Your videos on YouTube as well as your channel not only boost your rankings on YouTube’s search engine. In addition, a solid ranking on YouTube improves your chances of ranking on Google SERP.
So how should you tweak your videos? Start by inserting the right keyword planner tools into the description, metadata, title, and tags of the video. In doing so, your content will get far more visibility and exposure.
Read More: 10 Working Strategies to Grow Your YouTube Channel
As for the title, it is important to include keywords that have the potential to rank on Google’s first SERP page. The video’s description should have a minimum of 200 words with the keywords scattered carefully through it.
Your video’s metadata, on the other hand, must have enough contextual information to ensure that your audience discovers your content.
Naturally, however, your video’s content will remain to be the most important. No matter how good your metadata and keywords are, a poorly made or irrelevant video is not going to rank on Google.
If you follow these steps, you will quickly notice a significant impact on your Google SEO rankings. Just remember that this is not an overnight progression.
These things take time to show results. A steady and organic improvement based on well optimized and high-quality videos can be one of the most important tools for online marketing and promotion.
2. Video Watch Time of Visitors and Customers
If a photo paints a thousand words, then a video can do so much more. Quality video content has the potential to improve your brand and enhances your business’ reputation exponentially.
For businesses, your video content needs to be a useful resource for your customers. From Michael Stelzner’s interview with Marcus Sheridan on the Social Media Marketing podcast, think about it this way:
Could someone on your sales team use your video to make a sale right now?
If the answer is no, then your video is useless.
Again, from Marcus Sheridan, start with creating a 80% video. What’s an 80% video?
An 80% video is a video that answers 80% of the most common questions visitors have about your product or service.
Another type of video that can keep users hanging around is a “get to know us” video. By communicating your brand’s values, message, and composition to viewers, you increase user engagement.
One of the most important factors measured in Google’s algorithms is how long a visitor spends on your website or watching your video. The longer users spend time on a page, the more Google trusts that specific webpage. This results in higher SERP ranking.
The benefit of a video doesn’t end there. Search engines also think that a site has more relevant and vital information when it contains a related video. This again increases search traffic and SERP ranking.
As an experiment, post an article on your site and see how much traffic it gains. Then, add a video to your next article and observe the difference in ranking and traffic. It’s likely that your page containing the video will have a far higher ranking than the article without one.
3. Social Sharing
The better your videos are, the more likely it will be watched. The more people watch a video, the more likely they are to share it with their friends, family, or followers.
Before you start creating videos, set your sights on a target audience. If you know who you are talking to, you can design your video approach to cater to this specific group.
Know what you want to achieve with your video. Do you want to educate your audience? Make them laugh, or shock them?
To increase your site’s visibility, a strong social media presence is essential. By generating social media shares, you reach more people who can share your content on their own social media account.
Read More: How to Find Influencers That Will Boost Your Content
Most importantly, keep your videos interesting so that people will keep watching.
A helpful idea for many sites is creating a teaser video for the launch of a new product. New products are exciting, but you can also use this opportunity to give customers detailed information about the oncoming product.
Also, publish videos that contain customer feedback. Include reviews. Provide FAQs to help people solve common issues that they encounter every day (think about that 80% video). One of the best ways to attract new customers or to increase brand loyalty is by making your audience feel as if they are being heard.
Consistent video publishing is vital in maintaining a good relationship with your audience. Create a regular schedule for content publishing.
By publishing regularly, you create a relationship with your audience. Soon enough, your subscribers will anticipate and look forward to your video posts.
However, if you suddenly go on a hiatus or drop your number of postings, you risk losing momentum. A lost audience will quickly be reflected in a significant drop in search rankings.
4. On-site Conversions Increase
The primary goal of SEO is to increase onsite conversion. This means that site promotion and improvement doesn’t end at getting people to click through your site.
Video content can be one of the most effective ways of converting users. This is done by improving your content’s overall quality by sheer digestibility.
What’s more, with videos, you can prompt viewers to subscribe or follow you on social media and even make a purchase. Compared to written text, a video can be far more engaging to visitors and in just a matter of seconds.
It may not contribute a lot to your search rankings, but by placing an interesting video on your homepage you can increase conversions and boost your business.
5. Using Rich Snippets
The search engine results pages of Google are frequently updated through rich snippets. These are additional pieces of information other than the meta description. They’re used to give potential visitors an idea of what they will see when they visit your site.
In these snippets, Google will display your video’s title, thumbnail, and a simple description. It is essential to make sure that your description and thumbnail is fully optimized and accurate and provide well-designed photos and graphics.
Above all, make sure it grabs the user’s attention to increase the click-through rate (CTR).
Rich snippets help secure higher click-through rates. This is because rich snippets give users an additional preview into what your video will be about.
Now What?
In summary, video content is just as important as written content, if not more so. Just take a look at Instagram Stories, Youtube influencers, and Snapchat Ads to see the success and potential that video content can have for your site.
Think of it this way, The New York Times, one of the most well known and widely read news sources in the world, gets around 2 million readers a day. PewDiePie, a YouTube influencer, has over 60 million subscribers. That’s larger than the population of France, Great Britain, and Italy. The time of video content has arrived, and it is one of the most vital ways for you to promote and improve your content.
Using optimized keywords and metadata along with filming high-quality content is one of the easiest ways to promote you and your company in the world today. Just remember, it is about consistency.
Make sure your followers can rely on your schedule and look forward to your content to help brand loyalty, visibility and, above all, Google search rankings.
