How to Improve your SEO Ranking with Online Videos

 

SEO. Anyone who works with online content creation is bound to have heard of it at least once. Marketers worship it, writers frantically keep up with its latest trends, and web users reap its benefits. But what exactly is SEO?

 

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation.

Search engines of the likes of Google, Bing, and Yahoo! display their results based on what sites they believe to be providing the most relevant information in response to the user’s original query. They achieve so by sending out what are commonly known as search engine bots or spiders, which crawl the web and gather all sorts of data.

 

The more a page is optimised for a search engine and the higher the chances are it’ll be ranking among the first few results. This translates into greater exposure, more visitors, and higher conversion rates. As a business, that’s precisely what you’re striving for.

 

 

 

The million-dollar question is: how do you get to the top?

One effective way to improve your SEO ranking is to share video content on your company website. Here are some quick facts:

• Video content increases the likelihood of your site showing up on the first Google results page by 53 times
• 81%
• of people choose to place their videos on their business’ website
• Video content brings about a 157% increase in organic visitors from SERPs (aka Search Engine Result Pages)
• 7 out of 10 marketing professionals now engage in SEO with optimised videos

 

It’s no secret that video has been gaining huge popularity and it’s fair to predict this is not a passing trend. It’s been reported that the volume of content uploaded in just 30 days exceeds the one produced by major US television channels in 30 years. That’s why search engines have had to adapt. Since 79% of consumers prefer learning about a product by watching videos rather than studying a text description, search engines try to feature them on SERPs whenever appropriate.

 

In 2013 Google released Hummingbird – a new algorithm that enables a more ‘conversational’ search. Google’s algorithms are the engine that powers and directs the user’s query.  In other words, they’re the ones that ultimately establish and determine what results will be displayed and in what order. Hummingbird focuses on the underlying meaning behind each word of the query and the sentence as a whole. It’s therefore able to provide a more complete and logical answer – similar to the one you would be likely to get in a conversation with an actual human being. This allows for videos providing an effective answer to a specific question to be incorporated in the search results.

 

But how exactly can you boost your SEO ranking with online videos?

 

Lower your Bounce Rate

It’s been proven that people spend on average 7 minutes and 21 seconds on pages containing videos – 2.6x more compared to pages without.

Ensuring visitors spend some quality time on your website and don’t bounce off after a handful of seconds is essential if you plan on earning a high-ranking position. Keep in mind that SEO is primarily about optimising your content. But when a visitor leaves your site in a matter of seconds, Google gets the impression that the content you are providing is not as valuable and therefore not worthy of being featured on the first results page. This is where videos come in handy and prove to be an extremely powerful tool.

Research shows that the way our brain assimilates information largely depends on how it is presented to us. According to Paivio’s dual-coding theory, the human brain processes text and pictures by implementing two different coding systems.

A textual message is processed sequentially and requires us to inspect and make sense of each item one by one. Visual information is encoded in parallel, allowing us to scan and filter through its elements at a quick glance. Hence, image processing demands less effort and proves to be superior in terms of intellective effectiveness and attention span.

 

Overall, videos make it easier for the human brain to decode information and refocus attention. This allows for increased page views and a lower bounce rate.

 

Increase your Click-Through Rate

Featuring online videos increases web traffic by 41%. The human brain is naturally drawn towards visually appealing images. Catchy visuals also contribute to expediting web searches and screening the data displayed. This proves to be particularly true for enhanced thumbnails.

As users navigate Google in search of information, they tend to click on results that feature videos way more often. Since SERPs are designed to display snippets of the sites’ content (e.g., thumbnails), visitors are able to see which pages contain videos.

 

Maximise your Inbound Links

It’s been reported that 69% of people are more likely to play a video that’s been shared by their friends, while blog posts containing videos gain 3x more inbound links than the ones without.

As we’ve learned before, producing high-quality content is a key aspect of optimising your page for search engines. Content sharing is another crucial ranking factor. People love reposting videos they find relevant and enjoyable, while other websites become more likely to link to them. The more a video gets shared in someone’s network and the more valuable it becomes in their eyes.

Several marketing studies have demonstrated that visual content contributes to a more concrete sensory experience compared to text. Images can also help resolve consumers’ uncertainty over the quality of the products displayed online.

Therefore, videos facilitate product assessment and improve user feedback, which in turn allows for increased shares and organic inbound links.

 

About the author Gaia Stasi

Gaia Stasi has worked as a Marketing Assistant at Simpleshow since June 2018. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Media and Communication from the London Metropolitan University in 2017, she has honed her skills in producing content across various digital channels, experimenting with marketing trends, and driving brand awareness.