Video SEO: Why Google Loves Video & How Can You Leverage It

In such a digital rat race, what can help you stand out in the SERPs and garner more of that traffic? 

Truth be told, there are quite a few tested and effective SEO approaches, content strategies, and other ways that help you increase traffic to your website. 

In this article, we’ll be discussing the power of video SEO and how it can improve your content strategy, especially if you opt for quality content marketing services. 

So, in this article, we’ll talk about the value of a high-quality video content strategy and touch base on the importance of video in the digital sphere, in general.

The Importance of a Video Content Strategy

Before we get into the best practices for video SEO, you should first understand why video is essential to your content strategy.

In essence, every marketing plan has one general aim: to bring more traffic to your website. In that regard, video SEO can go a long way since it will favor Google’s algorithm, help you win backlinks, improve your bounce rates, and, overall, make your website more engaging.

As hinted above, Google loves video because internet users love it too. Research suggests that around 96% of consumers have watched explainer videos to learn about a specific service or product. 

Naturally, Google jumped on the video bandwagon, promoting video-heavy content, which means one thing: websites with a strong video content strategy will get ranked higher. 

On the other hand, video SEO will help you increase your overall digital presence. Think about it: you post a video on your site and provide your visitors with links to your social channels, YouTube account, webinar content, etc.; you are giving them a chance to visit all those platforms via one funnel. As more and more people visit these pages, Google will recognize them and rank them higher. In this regard, video SEO can help you improve your overall presence and can help you earn more customers from all your channels. 

Lastly, video SEO can help you maximize your potential for link building. The majority of SEO experts say that backlinks can be a crucial website ranking factor. Video can help you a great deal in attracting quality backlinks because such materials are regarded as “TOFU content” or top-of-the-funnel content. 

Tips for a Bullet-Proof Video Content Strategy

Integrate Videos

To get started, ensure you integrate all of your relevant videos into your site. Naturally, you can’t just upload random videos and hope for the best. Your content strategy with video will only work if the videos fulfill the following criteria: 

• Relevancy: The videos you post should be relevant to your brand and the specific topic you’re addressing. These can be how-to videos, tutorials, or content that showcases your products.
• Exclusivity: The info you provide can’t be found elsewhere (product tests, insider tips, and so on).
• Quality: The videos you upload should be well-produced, edited, and high-quality.

For more help, consider these video types which meet all three criteria points:

• Explainer videos
• Product demonstration videos
• Testimonials and user reviews
• BTS or behind-the-scenes videos
• Videos that showcase company culture
• Sales video
• Webinars

Apply Video SEO

Again, you simply can’t just add a video to your site and hope for the best. Even a high-quality video needs some “SEO love,” so Google will recognize its worth. 

The necessary video optimization tasks (like adding descriptions, glossary, and creating an accompanying copy) are all essential to give your viewers even more information and to throw in a few links to your products, services, and other web pages. Also, the content will be easily indexable, which will help with your ranking efforts.

Educate Through Video

Every content strategy should educate, entertain, and give users the information they are looking for. 

Here are a few tips that will help with creating engaging and educational content: 

• Explain why you are qualified to make the video
• Cover basic terms and jargon
• Use relevant statistics and other data to back your claims
• Enrich the video with visual elements, like animations, diagrams, overlay text, and so on
• Answer the potential questions your users might have about the topic or your products/services
• Make sure to have an intro and an outro

Be up-to-date with Technicalities

Lastly, you should ensure that the video meets the specifications and requirements of the platform you are uploading it to. Social channels, your website, and YouTube may sport different dimensions and aspect ratios, support various video formats, and so on. 

These may seem a bit nit-picky, but the truth is that people won’t watch low-quality videos that they can’t really make sense of. 

Best Video SEO Practices

Optimizing your videos for search engines take time and effort, but it isn’t impossible. As a matter of fact, there are several easy steps businesses can take to improve the visibility of their video content. 

Using the Right Platforms

For starters, you need a hosting service that’s reliable and will be able to host your video, and will let you embed the video on your platform.

Also, make sure to consider using YouTube or other video-sharing platforms that already have an established name and huge traffic. This way, you are already placing your content in a “busy area” with potential viewers. 

Make Good Use of Closed Captions and Transcripts

According to stats, around 83% of viewers watch videos on mute. This will naturally mean that if you want to keep the traffic optimal, you will need to add closed captions and video transcriptions.

These won’t only come in handy when you want to keep more viewers engaged but will also help you with page ranking because search engine crawlers will scan the text for keywords. 

Use Engaging Thumbnails

Video SEO is crucial, but it won’t help you with your efforts if you don’t get views. Using engaging and exciting thumbnails can help you get more clicks. Simply choose one that grabs more attention and:

• Make the thumbnail relevant to the content
• Align the text to the left
• Make sure the text is readable
• Use brighter colors
• Don’t make it “too busy” – limit it to only a few key elements

Make Good Use of Traditional SEO

Video SEO is a great way to improve your rankings, but that doesn’t mean that you should stop doing other optimization tasks altogether. The truth is, you probably won’t see the benefits of video if the rest of your site isn’t SEO-friendly.

You need to make sure that your pages, tags, content, keywords, loading speed, images, and so on are all optimized.  

Track the Metrics

Measuring the performance of your videos enables you to improve your video content strategy on the fly. This is crucial if you want to improve your visibility with video in the long term. What this means is that you will have to keep tabs on things like:

• The average duration of the video – how long your users spend watching your video
• Watch time – the total time amount people spend watching your content
• Demographics – who are the people who watch your videos the most?
• Conversion rates – how many people have bought your product after watching your videos?
• Bounce rate – the number of people who leave your site after watching a single page or video

By assessing these metrics, you can identify the parts of your strategy that are doing great and the aspects that can do with a bit of improvement. Also, you can get a better idea of who is watching your videos and to whom you should cater to with your video content in the future. Also, you can determine which topic categories perform the best and adjust your strategy accordingly. 

From this point of view, metrics can help you fine-tune your existing approach, making it even better. Also, it can help you fix any unaccounted errors in time. 

Embrace Video Marketing

If you’ve spent any time researching digital marketing, then you know that video is crucial for online success. Users are hungry for video content, and businesses should cater to their needs if they want to remain relevant in the digital world. 

Setting up a sound search engine optimization strategy for your video content isn’t easy, but with the right tools and expert help, your brand can reach new digital heights in both the SERPS and conversions. It’s not something that will happen overnight, but it will help you cement your brand in the ever-growing digital wall, in plain eyesight, helping you reach more and more people.