8 Ways How Will Video Help SEO ranking
There is a high demand for video content on the internet. According to Business Insider, there are about 244 million video viewers in the United States alone. The statistics have pushed markets to involve video in their marketing strategies. The teams explain to the customers about their products and show them ‘how it works’ using video format. Your videos must be different from the rest to have a bigger impact. This article will cover the essentials of video SEO, the quality of good Video SEO, and its effects on SEO ranking.
What is Video SEO?
Video SEO differs from normal SEO due to variations in search intent and keyword research approach. Most marketers implemented SEO when Google insisted on running only helpful content updates. Nowadays, Google shows video thumbnails alongside the post details when users search for information, and it matches the search intent.
When planning videos for your marketing content, do proper keyword research. You must be keen on the search intent. In addition, how you use Google and YouTube keywords. Google provides a video page where you can select a video when you type a query. It provides a different behavior in search engines.
Types of Video in SEO
You can use different types of videos on your site to improve SEO rankings. Some of the common types include:
- Explainer videos: It is a type of video outlining ‘how to do tasks. In that case, you can create an explainer video telling your potential customers what you do. About your team, your location, and other vital details about the company. You can later embed the video on different website pages and see your traffic and conversion grow.
- Product videos: Retailers and e-commerce owners commonly use them. They take videos of their products on how the product looks, operate, and physical appearance. Many customers recently must view the product’s video before making any purchase. Once you start posting product videos on the description page, there are higher chances of a sale increase.
- Landing page videos: When your website has a landing page, add a video on the page to increase engagement time with your visitors. It will impress the customers as you are frank, and they will ultimately like your offer and buy your product or service, greatly impacting conversions.
Qualities of good video SEO
When creating videos for your SEO ranking, you must consider several factors mentioned below:
1. Use of eye-catching video thumbnails
Thumbnails are still images that show the preview images of the video. While most video platforms like YouTube, allow creators to create them from their videos. Most are ugly and may show a useless image that can cost you viewership. Ensure the thumbnail is relevant, beautiful, and compelling to the user. To achieve a good thumbnail, do the following:
- Use bold colors that have good contrast between them.
- Include your title and use a relevant image.
- Choose a better font.
- Be consistent, analyze your competitor’s thumbnails, and outdo them.
- Optimize the thumbnails for different devices.
2. Uploading video transcripts
After creating your video, you need to sit down and write all the text said in the video with its timestamps. The transcript will cover everything you discussed in the video, and you can even cover it in the comments. Most video creators prefer creating transcripts for shorter videos alone, but I suggest you do it for all your videos.
Most creators put the transcript below the video and the timestamp to enable the users to skip to the video part where they need to listen. The advantage of using transcripts is that it allows viewers who may have difficulties watching your video to understand it, and Google bots will crawl all the text, increasing SEO ranking.
3. Perform a keyword research
Keyword research helps you to find topics that users are searching for, their volume, and other metrics like keyword density and cost per click. It will ensure that you create what people want on the search intent, which will help you to comprehend the audience better. Some of the common tools to use for keyword research include Semrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, AnswersthePublic, and Wordstream.
4. Use a good title
When creating a title for your video, ensure it matches what the users search for. For example, if you are talking about how to fix a particular error in Windows 10 and the video talks about Linux. The users will notice that and will end up looking for another video. It can result in Google penalizing you and ranking you low in the search results.
Ensure you avoid keyword baiting and have proper titles for your content. Also, remember to include your main keyword under the title to improve your SEO rankings.
5. Adding a Call to Action at the end of the video
Call to action makes the visitor take action or react as you narrated in the video. For example, if you sell courses, you can tell the users to buy now, for email lists, you can ask them to join your mailing list, for donations, you can explain how it is expensive to shoot a single video, etc. Ensure to select the right CTA that matches your type of content.
6. Length of the video
When creating videos, their length should depend on the purpose of the video. For example, tutorials can last more than 30 minutes, product advertisements can last one minute to five minutes, and a blog post summary can last four minutes. The platform you plan to post to also determines the length of the video.
7. Writing good video descriptions
Good descriptions should be short, have context, be well-researched, have keywords, and match the user’s intent. Avoid luring people into the description and keyword stuffing, as it is against Google guidelines. Google crawls all video descriptions to make them searchable on search engines.
8. Use of tags
Tags improve the SEO ranking of the videos by categorizing them. They enable the viewers to find videos related to that topic. YouTube Studio provides an easier way of adding your tags. You can do it either on your mobile or desktop device.
9. Promote your video
Apart from waiting for SEO to show your video to many people. Find other ways of sharing your video, i.e., email marketing, posting on social media channels, and using influencers. It increases video viewership, which can influence SEO ranking. Also, remember to turn on the sharing capabilities to ensure those who are happy with the content can also share it.
Ways on How Videos Improve SEO Ranking
One gets several benefits when one implements video usage to improve SEO ranking. SEO can be challenging, especially when it is your first time working on a project. It can take time for you to start getting results. To speed up results, you will have to mix content with videos. Some of the benefits include:
1. Increase Video SEO Conversions
Many website owners have visitors, but converting them into buyers is hard. Use of videos in your content increases engagement with your visitors, making them love your product and end up paying for it. The common way to increase conversion is by ensuring your videos are featured snippets. To earn a rich snippet, there are some guidelines you can implement to achieve the desired results.
Another way is to ensure the videos are engaging and interesting. Most customers find video content more helpful than text. Using an eye-catching thumbnail and rich snippet earns you more clicks from search engines, maximizing your conversion rates.
2. Video Is a Traffic-Generating Machine
According to CISCO, videos contributed up to 71% of the website traffic. When your platform has incoming traffic and regular visitors, Google treats your site as a trusted site and starts showing your content to many people, increasing your traffic. There are likely cases you may end up appearing on the top pages.
Apart from publishing more videos on your content. You can use video-sharing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo and social media like Instagram and Facebook to send users to websites by clicking the links attached to the video description. The more videos you have, the more traffic you get.
3. Video Helps Improve the Value of Your SEO
Many business and company owners put much effort into search engine optimization to attract new customers and increase sales. To ensure that you enjoy the fruits of SEO, all the incoming traffic should convert into successful conversions. One of the best ways to implement this is to add videos to improve engagement with your clients, making them purchase your goods and services.
Videos will improve every aspect of your SEO if done right. It will also bring you more profit than you can imagine. Despite using other ways to improve your SEO, videos add value to your marketing strategy.
4. Win backlinks
Backlinks play an essential role in SEO ranking. When someone likes your content and links it to their website by adding your link that is a backlink. When you create a unique video that is useful, many people will like it and share it on their platforms, earning you a high number of backlinks.
Since Google treats backlinks as a ranking factor. The links will make them feel like your website content benefits many people. It will lead to higher rankings, making you get more conversions, sales, and visits. For those without SEO knowledge, you can hire someone to help you with backlink strategy.
5. Better User Experience (UX)
Videos improve the user experience of your visitors, which in turn makes them spend more time on your website. For example, if you work on a 2,000-word blog post and insert a video after three or four paragraphs, people will enjoy engaging with your content. It will reduce the bounce rates making Google treat your page as useful.
Once there is good UX, the visitors will enjoy it, and the search engines will get positive signals leading to an increase in ranking. You must also understand how to position the videos to align well with the rest of the content.
6. More time spent on the website
Using videos is one of the best methods to ensure visitors stay longer on a website. Despite the complex algorithm, many experts believe that once Google realizes people stay longer on your site, they improve its rankings. According to Forbes, videos use the Stickiness Factor to ensure people stay on the page up to 88% by making them watch the whole video. To boost site security, the website should have an SSL certificate. A few well-known SSL certs are RapidSSL, GeoTrust wildcard SSL, Comodo SSL Certificate, Thawte SSL, etc.
If the videos are of high quality, you can rank higher. If your business uses plain text to communicate with clients, try twisting it by embedding several videos throughout the post, and you will see the average time spend on a page increase.
7. Lowers bounce rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors that will leave your website pages without any action like subscribing mail list, buying your products, or clicking any links. Usually done by dividing all website sessions by a single session. Bounce rate helps website owners understand their conversion rate and website pages that need improvement and many SEO experts say it is a ranking factor.
Videos convince your users to take action, i.e., clicking links, which reduces the bounce rate. Once Google notices your website has a low bounce rate, they increase its ranking on the search engines. According to Custom Media Labs, each type of website has preferred bounce rate percentages, from e-commerce, landing pages, blogs, etc.
8. Google Values Videos
Google is the largest search engine on the web. When you start using video in your content, Google treats it as useful and increases your search rankings. Google algorithms favor websites that incorporate different types of media in their content. If your website has videos, Google treats them as quality and boosts your rankings depending on the search intent.
Conclusion
Use videos as one of the marketing strategies to improve your SEO ranking. It is a great opportunity, and all you need to do is ensure your video meets the qualities of a good SEO video from the description, good keyword research, optimized titles and tags, good quality, and length. Sometimes it can take a long before seeing the results. All you need is to be patient and keep publishing your videos. Hire a team to help in the video creation processes.