There is no doubt about video's importance as a form of media—just consider how people spend over three hours watching digital video content in the US daily. Videos also make up more than 82% of all internet traffic today.
The immense popularity of videos among Internet users makes it an excellent tool for marketing your business and bolstering your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. This SEO guide will give you some effective strategies for leveraging video content to enhance your brand's visibility and engagement.
Search engines prioritize pages with content that keeps users engaged. One of the ways they determine this is by tracking how long users stay on a page. The longer visitors stay, the better the page's rank. That's why high bounce rates (the percentage of users that leave quickly) and low dwell time (how long users stay on a page) often lead to lower search engine rankings.
Since videos often lead to longer time spent on a page, search engines consider your content valuable and worth recommending. This can improve your rankings and help your business appear higher in search results.
Additionally, users are more likely to share your video on their social networks. Videos can also be embedded in different websites. Both of these increase backlinks to your site—another factor that boosts SEO performance. Videos aren't just a trend; they are an integral part of a working content marketing strategy.
Harnessing the power of videos takes more than just posting them on your website. Here are some strategies you should consider:
Any SEO guide can tell you that the first step in any video strategy is creating high-quality content that captures your audience's interest and meets their needs. Your videos should educate, entertain, or solve a problem for viewers.
For example, if you're a plumbing business, you could create a video tutorial on fixing a common plumbing issue. Or you could demonstrate the best ways to use common plumbing tools. Alternatively, you could create content discussing frequent causes of plumbing problems for homeowners.
Relevance is key. If your video answers the questions your target audience is asking, it's more likely to help you rank better in the search results.
On the topic of SEO for videos, make sure to incorporate keywords into your video's title and description. These terms help search engines understand and match your content to users' search queries.
Going back to the above plumbing business example, let's say you made a video on "common plumbing issues." You could entitle it "5 Common Plumbing Issues to Prepare for in Winter." For the description, you could say, "Learn about common plumbing issues you're likely to face in winter and how you can prevent them."
This approach not only boosts discoverability but also makes the video more appealing to viewers.
You can extend your video's reach by submitting it to video-sharing platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion. This process, known as video submissions, can dramatically enhance visibility and shareability.
Additionally, you can use video bookmarks to share your content across social media platforms and bookmarking sites. This creates backlinks and generates traffic to your video, further improving its SEO potential.
Platforms like Reddit, Pocket, and Pinterest are great places to start saving video bookmarks. The more your video appears across the web, the greater its value as perceived by search engines.
Embedding videos directly onto your website is an effective way to boost its SEO. As mentioned earlier, videos can increase dwell time and decrease bounce rates—two factors that contribute to better search engine rankings.
Additionally, embedding videos on your site opens more opportunities to rank for various keywords and search phrases. Ensure you're using a responsive video player or platform so that the video adjusts to different screen sizes and devices. This ensures a seamless viewing experience for all visitors, regardless of their device.
Search engines can't watch videos, but they can read text. Enabling transcripts and closed captions in your videos provides text that search engines can crawl, improving your chances of ranking for relevant keywords.
For instance, if your video is about "fixing a leaky faucet," include a transcript of the instructions and dialogue. This gives search engines a better idea of what your video is about and which searches it's relevant to.
Schema makeup is a form of structured data that helps search engines make sense of the content in your pages better. Search engines use schema markups to display rich snippets—enhanced and more informative results—for specific search queries.
You can use schema markup for your videos by adding the VideoObject property, which includes information about the video's title, description, thumbnail image, and duration. This enables search engines to display extra information that could make your video more attractive and appealing to your target audience.
Videos are easy to share, so they are a valuable asset for generating backlinks. Get viewers to share your videos by including social sharing buttons for popular social networks. You can also ask them to do so on your video.
Additionally, you can include a link to your video in relevant blog posts or guest articles on other websites. This creates backlinks to your website that can help enhance its authority with search engines.
Use tools like Google Analytics to track the performance of your videos and see how they are contributing to your SEO efforts. Pay attention to metrics like views, watch time, engagement, and conversion rates.
Based on this data, you can optimize your video strategies by creating more content that resonates with viewers and adjusting your tactics to improve performance.
Incorporating videos into your SEO strategy isn't just about making your page more visually appealing. It's about creating valuable, relevant, and high-quality content that helps your target audience and boosts your website's visibility in search results.
If content marketing sounds overwhelming and you don't know where to start, consider hiring a professional SEO agency. Their teams are experts in SEO for videos and other types of content and can help you develop a comprehensive strategy that aligns with your business goals.
Start increasing your business's online visibility by partnering with an SEO agency today!
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