How can videos be used to improve your SEO strategy

Everybody is talking about marketing and creating videos these days. Marketing benefits are obvious: Videos are easy to share, get engagements on social media, and can still draw attention in a world that is information overload.

Video can also be used to enhance your SEO strategy.

We don’t know all about Google’s ranking signals so we can’t be certain if there is a direct factor. It is still unknown if Google prefers pages with videos to pages without videos.

However, there are other indirect SEO benefits that can be contributed here:

1. SERP real estate

Google’s search results pages on desktop and mobile both show videos a lot. Google uses “video carousels” in order to show related videos to many search queries.

A video carousel can take up the entire screen on a mobile device and it can take quite a while to scroll past for many search queries:

Source: Screenshot taken by the author

According span style=”font weight: 400 ;”>, videos carousels appear to the third of search terms. This is a lot of SEO options to dominate your target SERPs.

A carousel video will help you remind your customers about your brand and increase conversion rates.

2. Rich snippets

Video-rich snippets are enhanced search snippets that display a thumbnail of your link next to it. This is a great way to make your search engine snippet stand out.

Source: Screenshot taken by the author

Video rich Snippets are also very easy to obtain.

Video rich snippets, unlike video carousels send traffic to your website, rather than the YouTube video page. This will make it easier:

When you can grab both, the best scenario is: A rich videosnippet on page 1 of organic results and your own video in the video carousel at the same time:

Source: Screenshot taken by the author

A video thumbnail will increase brand awareness and generate clicks and video views.

You can increase your chances of getting a video richsnippet by:

• Embed video to your page span style=”font weight: 400 ;”>. Although it doesn’t have to be your video, Google will show the channel name under your snippet on your desktop. So it makes sense to use your channel.
• Use video schema. This handy video schema generator will help you do this. This step can also be made easier by a number of plugins.

Source: Screenshot taken by the author

To avoid your desktop video rich snippets looking old, make sure that your video is up-to-date .

Before embedding any video to your page, make sure to check page load speed. Youtube videos can negatively impact page performance even though they belong to Google.

To show the impact, here is my page score without embedding a YouTube video:

Source: Screenshot taken by the author

Here’s another page with a YouTube video:

Source: Screenshot taken by the author

This trick, which I used in my case, can help you to deal with it.

You will see related videos Youtube displays at the end of every video you embed. This was an unexpected benefit. Following the tutorial, I was able to make those related videos disappear while my video showed up.

Last, remember to use Google Search Console for information about how your video rich-snippets are performing.

Create a filter called “Search Appearance Videos” in your “Performance” section to monitor which queries are triggering rich-snippets on your site.

3. On-page engagement

Google doesn’t confirm that on-page engagement is a ranking signal. They have denied that they use such a signal, according to me.

Yet, there are many marketing benefits to getting people to pause and take action on a page. This is a part of any SEO strategy. These are:

• 
  More likely to convert
  
• 
  Less likely they will bounce back to search results. This may or may not be an indicator of their ranking.
  

Videos are great for increasing page engagement. If your page is not triggering any action, embed a video. Remember to pay attention to your web fundamentals.

4. Referral traffic

Referral traffic, just like on-page interactions, has not been proven to be an SEO signal. Google loves when a link gets clicked, but it is not clear if a page that has no referral traffic from outside sources has less authority than one with high-quality traffic.

Yet, referral traffic can increase a site’s chances of getting backlinks or shares. It doesn’t matter if the traffic comes from search engines or other sites, well-converting traffic is always a good thing.

Youtube makes it difficult to generate referral traffic through your videos. Your clickable link can be included in the video description, which is often not read or seen on mobile span>

Youtube can be used to link-build direct traffic. How to make a Youtube outro that is engaging

However, you should find your video interesting and/or great enough to enter your domain name in your address bar after viewing it in the outro.

Youtube can send traffic to your site, but only if you create great videos and use verbal CTAs in the video to encourage clicks.

The great thing about Youtube traffic, is that it can be difficult to obtain, but it’s very relevant. You will therefore see high-engaged clicks that will become subscribers and customers.

Source: Screenshot taken by the author

Conclusion

Videos are a great way to improve your SEO strategy. Although there may not be any direct SEO benefits, there are some indirect SEO benefits to investing in video marketing and creation.

How can videos improve your SEO strategy? Search Engine Watch was the first to publish this article.

Did you miss our previous article…
https://onlinemarketingagencies.net/?p=5283