By Hope Horner
Everyone’s talking about video, and that trend isn’t likely to change any time soon. Google’s algorithms are now prioritizing pages with video content and consumers are increasingly preferring video over other types of content, like text and still images. But why exactly is that? Sure, video is more engaging than written text alone, but what is it about video that’s winning over tough-to-crack search engines and finicky users?
Well, turns out video helps your bottom line. There’s a lot you can do to help your site appear on that crucial first search results page – the top three spots get 55 percent of all clicks – but adding videos specifically helps increase your search engine results page (SERP) rank in a couple of ways:
- Increasing your click-through rates: Including video on your page drives a 157 percent increase in organic traffic from SERPs.
- Lowering your bounce rates: People spend over twice as long on a page with video than without.
- Creating quality backlinks: The higher the quality of your content, the more likely you are to get backlinks.
Combine video’s SEO-boosting magic with valuable, high-quality content, and you’ve got a winning combination. That’s when you create that elusive unicorn content – content with a high average position ranking and high click-through rate.
How do you get there? Let’s take a look at a few ways adding video to your website can help boost your SEO.
5 Ways You Can Boost Your SEO with Video
- Use videos on your website.
The first major tip? Actually USE video! Use video everywhere you can think of, from your homepage, to your landing pages, to your blog pages, and beyond. Because videos help increase dwell time, you want to use them strategically on any page where you’d like to see greater engagement. Publish your brand video on your homepage. Publish informational how-to’s and tips and tricks videos on your blog. Publish recruitment videos on your careers’ page. The opportunities are endless, so be creative!
- Optimize relevant information.
Just like you’ve (hopefully) optimized your website’s title tag and meta description, you want to do the same for each of your videos. Make sure your video’s title tag uses the keyword you’re trying to rank for, and include that same keyword in your video’s description, which will be used by search engines to qualify the relevance of your video. Make them attention-grabbing, so users are more likely to click, and includes words that have been shown to increase click-through rate, like “tutorial,” “fast,” “easy,” and “free.”
- Don’t forget the technical details.
Video title and description are hard to forget – lots of video hosts won’t even let you publish your video without this information – but other technical details, like video tags, image thumbnails, and more are often ignored. Don’t forget, these details are reviewed by search engines, too, so ignoring them could be detrimental to your video’s SEO ranking. Make sure to go through them all before publishing your video.
- Transcribe your video’s text on your site.
The reality is search engines cannot recognize the content of your video based on the video’s audio alone. That’s why giving search engines contextual clues is helpful, so they recognize its relevance and the quality of the content. The best contextual clue of all? A complete transcript! Embed a transcript of your video’s audio wherever you post your video. This tells search engines not only what your video’s about, but how it relates to your targeted keyword, your website as a whole, and how to recommend it as a suggested video.
- Use the keyword you’re trying to rank for in your video.
Again, this is all about relevance. Because you’re transcribing your video’s audio, you’ll want to use your keyword in your video’s voiceover or dialogue as many times as you naturally can. That means you’ll embed the keyword text on your website, telling search engines exactly what your video is about and increasing its chances of showing up as a primary result.
Conclusion
With these tips at hand, you’ll be ready to optimize your SEO, bring more traffic to your website, and generate more leads in no time. Whether you create your video in-house – preferably multiple videos! – or hire a video production company to create video content for you, using the right video at the right time and on the right page is paramount for proper SEO. So don’t wait!
Hope Horner is the founder and CEO at Lemonlight. Horner is a three-time entrepreneur that has been featured in Inc.’s Top 25 Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2017, Entrepreneur’s 11 Marketing Experts that Could Change Your Business, and Pepperdine’s 40 Under 40. Horner is a regular contributor at Entrepreneur, Forbes, Inc., and multiple other publications where she shares startup insights and scalable solutions. She is currently working on her third startup, Lemonlight, an LA-based business that produces and distributes branded video content at scale.
Video stock photo by nampix/Shutterstock
