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Video can enhance an organization’s search engine optimization strategy, as it improves web engagement.
The rise of smartphones, YouTube and other social media has made video content an integral part of life. Whether scrolling memes on a lunch break or researching a new ERP system for an enterprise, videos offer people a quick and simple way to consume content. Therefore, organizations that incorporate it into their content can see more engagement and, in turn, higher search engine rankings.
To ensure videos improve search engine optimization (SEO), marketers can use the following tips:
These tips ensure marketers create relevant, engaging videos that complement their organizations’ websites.
SEO is a strategy used to increase organic — or unpaid — visibility on major search engines, like Google and Bing. This strategy aims to rank on the first search engine results page (SERP) for relevant, strategic keywords because these results receive the most traffic.
For instance, a CRM vendor’s SEO team might want its company website to rank first on Google for the keyword phrase CRM systems because people who search that term likely want to buy CRM software. Effective SEO strategies can help marketers create content that ranks highly on the SERP, increasing web traffic and sales.
Video content can enhance SEO because it often improves ranking signals, or criteria search engines use to determine where webpages rank on SERPs.
Common ranking signals include the following:
Although search engines typically don’t use video as a ranking signal itself, video content can improve other ranking signals. For instance, blog articles that include a supplemental video often see greater dwell time — an engagement metric that tracks how long visitors spend on a page.
Videos can also increase domain authority because it’s a highly sharable content format. As reputable domains share an organization’s videos, they create valuable backlinks, or links from third-party websites that direct to the company’s site.
With the following best practices, marketers can enhance their SEO and content marketing strategies with video.
Videos generally improve SEO, but irrelevant content and lengthy load times can do more harm than good. Best practices, such as aligning videos with searcher intent and placing video code at the bottom of the page, can help brands rank on search engines.
Marketers can align their video content with searcher intent — or the main goal a user has when typing a query into a search engine. This approach helps marketers create videos that address the audience’s needs and resonate with their interests. When video content resonates with the target audience, search engines are more likely to rank the content higher.
To align videos with searcher intent, marketers can take the following steps:
Traditional search engines can’t directly index or understand a video’s content. However, marketers can surround their videos with relevant text to help search engines understand them.
For example, journalists covering a conference might want to publish a video of a Q&A session they conducted with a conference speaker. If the journalists embed the video on a blank webpage, Google doesn’t understand the content. Instead, they could add a brief introduction section and place a transcript of the interview on the page to add relevant keywords and improve discoverability.
Although search engines can’t understand a video’s content directly, they can index — analyze and store — the title and description in their databases. This process enables search engines to display the video in search results and can improve a page’s ranking on the SERP.
Best practices to optimize video titles and descriptions for SEO include the following:
Thumbnails are small images that offer a visual preview of a video before users click on it. Marketers can create high-resolution, relevant thumbnails to increase the video’s click-through rate (CTR), which is the ratio of clicks to impressions.
Marketers can also use keywords in their thumbnails or offer a brief, descriptive title to help audiences understand the video’s content. Attention-grabbing and compelling images can help marketers increase their videos’ CTR. Additionally, organizations can use a similar thumbnail style, such as a connected color scheme or one specific font, across all their videos to increase brand recognition.
Search engines prioritize sites that display content quickly, but videos can take time to load. Therefore, if marketers want to add a supplemental video to a webpage, they can place the video code at the bottom of the page to improve loading time.
This approach ensures the main content loads first and the video loads in the background while users engage with the page. However, if the webpage centers around the video itself, marketers can place the video closer to the top of the page because those audiences are more likely to wait a few more seconds for the video to load.
Video content can enhance SEO, as it increases dwell time and backlinks. To achieve these benefits, marketers can follow video marketing best practices, such as aligning videos with searcher intent, optimizing titles and thumbnails, and placing video in the right context on a webpage. These practices help search engines index video content and create positive UX.
Marketers can evaluate their current content strategy to identify video SEO opportunities. Keyword tools and searcher intent analysis can help them reach the right audience.
Tim Murphy is associate site editor for Informa TechTarget’s Customer Experience and Content Management sites.
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