Perfecting your Video SEO strategy

It’s safe to say that video and animation is now an essential part of any modern business strategy. Embedded video content has been proven to attract and keep audiences engaged in your site longer, build confidence in your services and, essentially, increase engagement and conversions for your business and products. 

There are a significant number of reasons why you might want to include Video SEO as part of your wider SEO strategy:

• Video and animated content have a remarkable amount of visibility across Google’s organic search results.
• Well-branded and consistent video content boosts brand familiarity and click-through.
• By using engaging video content effectively, you keep your audience on your site, which of course has a positive knock-on effect on your organic rankings.

However, before you start building or re-examining your Video SEO strategy, it’s worth identifying what your main SEO objectives are for your video. Primarily, are you looking to build links and shares across social media? Or are you looking to increase your conversion rates?

Let’s start with the links

Backlinks are a significant part of how Google decides who goes where on its rankings. The more your content is shared and linked to, the more Google will see you as an authority on that particular search term, which is essential in moving up those rankings. The more content you produce and publish (not just video by the way) the more chances you have of your content being linked to by others, and what’s more shareable than a highly engaging, funny, emotive, video or animation?

Of course, that brings with it, many challenges. You can’t upload any old content and expect it to be shared, it has to be content that will really grab people… make them question how it was done, make them want to find out more, or make them laugh or wow them. (Kevin Parry’s incredible visual effects has been doing the rounds at Slate and Mortar towers recently.)

It has to create a reaction.

Video SEO as a conversion tool

Alongside the obvious benefits of improving the ranking of your site, video is also a great conversion device and you’ll see it utilized more and more across landing pages as both an engagement tool, but also as a sales aid to convince your site visitor to purchase your product or service. So not only will it increase your rankings, it’ll help sell for you too (which is essentially why we are all doing this in the first place!).

If you are selling a service rather than a product, consider an explainer or case study video, or something that simply introduces you and your services in a creative, engaging manner.

Populate your website with quality

So why video, and not just simply a blog?

In the simplest terms, the Google algorithm will look at your website primarily for relevance to the searcher’s enquiry, but it will also look at the quality of the content. A website that includes mixed media, such as text, video and audio assets, improves your quality rating and therefore can provide an increase in your SEO ranking.

Video creates traffic (the good kind)

Google is also looking at the number of visitors you have to your site and the more the merrier. It’s a fairly obvious point, but a particularly effective video is going to draw visitor traffic your way, and a series of effective videos means more regular visitors, and this will push your rankings up even further. There’s also a reason why we suggest multi-format video content to our clients – evidence suggests people are more likely to visit your site after viewing content via an online platform such as Youtube or Instagram, so it’s time to get the ball rolling with Video SEO and blow the cobwebs off your company’s unused Youtube channel!

Why don’t you stay for a bit?

Google also keeps its eye on how long visitors remain on your site, and the longer the better, as this means you have offered content that’s relevant to their search parameters. On the other hand, it’s not ideal if you have plenty of visitors to your site who then disappear from it very quickly. Good quality video is the perfect way to consistently keep visitors on-site and engaged, as people will stay for longer meaning your bounce rate will also reduce.

So with that, we’ll wrap it up for this week, and in our second part, we’ll continue our series on Video SEO, and look specifically at how you can optimise your existing video and animation content for SEO.

We’d love to hear from you