The Exponential Rise of Video Content and How Essential It Is for Your Overall Business SEO Strategy

By Kristen Flores

Did you know that YouTube is the second-largest global search engine platform? It’s second only to its parent organization, i.e., Google, the search engine giant. Over 5 billion videos are viewed on YouTube per day.

From this, you can get a good idea of how popular video content has become in the contemporary era.

Individuals and businesses are creating tons of videos to bank on this growing trend. You will be surprised to learn that most customers look for product videos before buying something online. Furthermore, search engine platforms reward websites containing videos with better ranking.

Read on to learn why videos are essential for SEO and how they can be leveraged to boost organic business growth.

Importance of Video for SEO

Before we jump into why video is essential for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), let’s learn a little about what SEO entails.

SEO is the process of boosting the organic traffic on a website or page by improving its search engine rankings. There are multiple facets to search engine optimization. Various critical website elements can be modified to improve traffic and rankings.

Search engine platforms have specific algorithms for ranking a website. Over the last few years, the presence of video content on web pages has also become a key ranking factor.

Websites with videos have a higher chance of ranking in the top searches than websites without videos. It’s because videos have a higher engagement rate and are a better source of organic traffic.

Higher traffic also helps to improve the rankings on search engines.

How Can Businesses Benefit from Video SEO?

Let’s take a quick dive into how businesses can benefit from video SEO in the contemporary period.

Search Engine Platforms Support Media-Rich Content

Search engine platforms like Google and Bing favor media-rich content like videos because most people search for that.

Statistics show that over 96% of customers watched an explainer video to learn about a product or service. These videos are highly informative and explanatory. One can demonstrate the utility of a product or service easily.

In the eCommerce era, most people make purchase decisions after watching a video. Delivering a great user experience is the most crucial objective for platforms like Google.

Therefore, they rank websites with videos on top.

Videos Content Can Be Repurposed to Improve Marketing

Videos can be used in a lot of different ways.

For example, you can repurpose a product explainer video for advertisement on social media platforms. Similarly, it can be added to platforms like YouTube, which can drive a lot of organic traffic.

You can easily provide the customers with a direct link to a YouTube video. When more people visit your channels, search engines will show your website in the top results.

More Opportunities for Backlinking

Link building is a crucial part of the SEO strategy that businesses rigorously work towards.

So, what exactly is a backlink?

Well, backlinks refer to links from external sources to a given website. So, for example, if you have a website ‘X’ and get a link back from website ‘Y’ for a webpage on ‘X,’ it will be called a backlink.

Backlinking can help to boost the SEO score because search engine platforms find websites authentic when they have a higher number of backlinks. It means more people trust your web source for a given query.

Videos can help you improve backlinking prospects. More people link back to videos than other content.

Best Practices to Ace Video SEO

Now that we know how important video content can be for SEO let’s learn some practical ways to boost organic growth with video SEO.

Webpage Integrations

Integrating the right videos that match the required quality standards is critical for SEO.

Adding random videos to a website will never improve its SEO because people will bounce back when they don’t find relevant information. You must work on choosing videos that are relevant, exclusive, and professional and editing videos using a quality video editor can help give a professional touch to videos.

Some popular video categories you can opt for include explainer videos, testimonials, webinars, how-to videos, behind-the-scenes, and product demonstrations.

Choosing the right video is contingent on your final objective. For example, product demonstrations and testimonials are suitable matches if you want to convert visitors into paying customers.

Put Videos in The Right Context

Adding context to videos is highly important, or else people won’t understand why you have added it to a webpage. Also, adding context helps to improve SEO rankings.

It is highly recommended to add a catchy title to attract website visitors. Adding a video description is essential to build the correct narrative.

Many times, videos are lengthy, and people don’t have the time to watch them fully. Timestamps play a great role in helping people navigate through different sections of the videos. They can find the relevant information quickly and jump on that part.

Related videos can also be added to channel more traffic. However, it’s crucial to make it appropriate for the users.

Be Mindful of The Technicalities

You might have the best video on a webpage that is highly relevant and professional and still not get the desired traffic.

Wonder why? You have likely missed checking the technical elements.

These elements play a vital role in the ranking of your webpage and can drastically influence rankings and traffic. They include the aspect ratio, resolution, dimensions, video format, length, etc.

All these elements must be as per the standards of the digital platform where you have uploaded the videos.

Don’t Compromise on The Hosting Service

The hosting platform is responsible for showing the webpage content to your audience. Any glitch can impact the user experience. It is vital to choose the right hosting platform which doesn’t cause any delays.

Many hosting service providers are unable to handle a large amount of traffic. As a result, the website crashes when traffic is high.

You must ensure that the hosting platform being used can handle decent traffic and offers a high loading speed.

Use Powerful Captions to Increase the Reach

Most viewers watch videos on mute. It means that your audio might not have the required impact on viewers.

Therefore, looking for alternative methods to communicate the right information is best. This is where closed captions and video transcripts come into the picture.

People are more likely to watch complete videos when it has captions.

Attention-Grabbing Thumbnails Are a Must

What is the first thing that you look at before playing a video? Well, in most cases, it’s a video thumbnail.

Most users decide which video to watch based on the thumbnail used. Therefore, it’s critical to use engaging thumbnails for videos.

However, it should not mislead the audience.

Be creative with the thumbnail and add visual stills from the video to keep it relevant. Use bright colors and attention-grabbing texts to entice the audience.

Final Words

Videos have become immensely popular in today’s digital marketing strategy for businesses. It has redefined the parameters for search engine optimization. To boost organic growth and gain more traffic, it’s crucial to create compelling videos and optimize them for search engines. The right video SEO strategy can be a game-changer for businesses.

Kristen is an avid tech blogger and loves to write on upcoming new technologies. Her core interest lies in the field of SEO and in-depth understanding of different ways and techniques one can use to make a website rank high in SERP. She has written and published many articles related to seo.