Get Ahead of the Competition with Video SEO

Video marketing is more important than ever as we head in to 2023 with 64% of consumers saying they’re more likely to buy a product or service after watching a video about it. Marketers who incorporate video into their wider marketing strategy can see a drastic increase in awareness and engagement. Using a video as part of your landing page experience alone can boost your conversion rate by up to 80%.

Yet, with thousands of videos uploaded to the internet every day, your video content needs to be optimised to stand out. Strategic and engaging video content will contribute to your website’s SEO performance, grabbing the attention of your customers and turning them into brand advocates.

Video for SEO?

Video SEO is the process of optimising your all your videos so that search engines can index them. Using video for SEO will increase the odds of your videos showing up in the search results when people type a keyword relevant to your video content on prevalent search engines such as Google or YouTube…even TikTok and Facebook are now appearing in the organic video listings. This works similarly to how you would optimise a written piece of content using keywords and phrases. This allows your videos to rank on the search engine results pages (SERPS) for relevant keyword searches.

The main benefit of crafting a powerful video SEO strategy is that it can help you build an audience and increase your brand awareness. This will boost your organic sales and allow you to start to move your paid for marketing budget to other areas such as Google’s new performance max ad campaigns (PMax).

For even the simplest of tasks you will find a video on the results page, try searching Google for “how to tie a bow tie” and look at the top results. As you can see, having SEO optimised videos is crucial – you simply wouldn’t get on page one unless you had a suitable video. This is a simple representation of the traffic your website can drive with the relevant video content for those informational searches. Does Video SEO actually work?

It’s commonly accepted that regularly publishing insightful and valuable video content can be helpful to improve your SEO. In a recent Search Engine Journal, it was confirmed that Google uses content freshness as a ranking factor.

Why does video help SEO rankings?

Google will always present (what it understands to be) the most helpful content at the top of the SERP. By using video, large amounts of content can be condensed into short, digestible formats making it more valuable to the end user. When Google shows a video thumbnail aside a SERP, which it does for 26% of search results, users are more likely to click on that result. The presence of the thumbnail makes the result a “rich snippet” – and they have higher click-through rates than standard snippets, making video even more valuable for SEO.

Google has been rumoured to prioritise search results with video above results without video especially those that offer informational gain. While Google hasn’t confirmed this, the SEO community agree and their results suggest this to be correct.

Video and other metrics

Video also helps other metrics that we know Google takes into consideration for ranking. Two of the most important metrics for SEO are the time users spend on your page or site and the number of backlinks referring back to your domain, and video almost always improves both of these figures. Studies show that people spend over twice as long on a page with video than without, and the higher the quality of your content, the more likely you are to get those valuable backlinks.

Video benefits SEO both directly and indirectly – the video alone likely influences your ranking, and it influences other factors that go into Google’s selection system.

In short, Google’s algorithms are increasingly prioritising websites with video content, and that’s not something you want to ignore; 93% of online experiences start with a search engine, so you want to do everything you can to appear on that crucial first page.

If you need anymore information on video marketing and would like to speak to a member of the team today, email info@mediaworks.co.uk or call 0330 108 5977.