Using Video to Improve Your SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) refers to the complex process of increasing the ranking of a website based on a number of different and varying factors determined by the search engine’s algorithm. For website owners, it is a way of driving higher levels of traffic organically to their site without having to pay for advertisements or incur significant marketing costs.

However, while there are specific methods that are widely acknowledged to have a positive effect on a website’s ranking, the way search engines prioritise each method has a tendency to change. A secure and accessible website that loads quickly has always been right at the top of the agenda, yet other factors, such as adding infographics, featuring written content and including backlinks on third-party websites have all oscillated in their importance to SEO.

That being said, one significant area that has been somewhat overlooked by SEO strategists in recent years is the use of video content in attaining a higher ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). If harnessed correctly, video content can become a powerful SEO tool in improving visibility and driving traffic to a website. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, experts predict that, in just two years, as much as 80% of all consumer traffic will be from videos, making it the single most important form of content on the internet.

How does this affect SEO?

Video marketing has long been an effective strategy for raising brand recognition, providing target audiences with engaging content that is memorable and easy to consume. Yet when it comes to ranking a website, it is not the content of the video that plays a key role, it is the way search engines determine how they manage their algorithms.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing have adapted their platforms to focus their algorithms on what the user is looking for, rather than providing them with results based solely on the keywords they have used. In a large number of cases, a video will solve a query much more quickly than an article and will be more easy to digest; therefore, people tend to prefer watching videos, and the search engine will put these at the top of SERPs accordingly.

For example, if Google decides that a video will do a better job at answering a question, such as how to fry an egg than a detailed article, it will rank the video at the top of the results.

How video content will benefit your website

There are several ways in which using video content will positively impact your website and its ranking on SERPs. These include:

1. Lower bounce rateBounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who visit only one page. A high bounce rate indicates that visitors are not satisfied with your website.

Statistics show that up to 55 percent of users spend fewer than 15 seconds on any one website, leaving a very small window of opportunity to capture the attention of visitors. The tendency of users to skip from one page to another within a short period of time is referred to as the ‘bounce rate,’ and a higher bounce rate does not look good in terms of SEO.

Therefore, because of the effectiveness of video content for keeping people interested, this longer ‘dwell’ time will be reflected in better rankings by search engines that consider your page to be of higher value than one that people quickly leave.

2. More click-throughs

Click-through rate defines the ratio of web users who click on a specific link to the total number of users who view a page. It is used as a measure of successful, particularly for marketing campaigns and advertisements; however, it is also useful for understanding SEO.

As mentioned before, consumers prefer videos to any other type of content, meaning websites that display a video at the top of the page will be more likely to be clicked on than one featuring just an image or an article. More clicks lead to higher traffic, which equates to a better ranking on SERPs.

3. Higher back-link profile

Video content that invokes an emotional reaction in people, whether it’s sadness, laughter, anger or love, is far more likely to be shared across other sites, creating backlinks to the original page of the video. Backlinks are essentially a ‘vote of confidence’ from other people who are confirming that your content holds some value.

The more backlinks to a website there are spread across third-party websites, the better it will rank on SERPs, even if the video is posted first on YouTube as you can earn qualified referral traffic by simply adding a link to your website.