3 Ways Video Can Help In Your SEO
Media such as videos and images have always been a great way of presenting content to people. Videos, in particular, have been rapidly adopted in digital marketing due to their ability to provide entertaining content.
Hence, it is a great tool for creating engaging content to attract and retain users. But ever wonder how a video can be fully utilised to strengthen SEO services? In this article, we’ll be sharing some ways search engine optimisation can be improved through marketing using this form of media. Here are the 3 area of focus when incorporating videos into your SEO strategy:
- Rich Snippets
- Referral Traffic
- SERP Real Estate
1) Rich Snippets
Rich snippets for video refer to how the video thumbnail would appear beside your video’s link. It is known for providing brief details of a content, usually through interactive or visual elements. Additional relevant information is usually included so that users will more likely click on it to view the content. This is a useful technique that enables your video snippet to appear unique when search is performed.
As a result, video rich snippets are able to drive traffic directly to your website as compared to video carousels. The main difference between the two is that a video carousel focuses on the click rate to your video while a video rich snippet focuses on the click rate to your website. Though both video views and website click rates are of equal importance, video rich snippets would be a more effective way of boosting its rank on search engines
However, to ensure that the best results can be achieved from SEO, there are 2 criteria to fulfill:
- One is that your video’s rich snippet should appear on the initial page of relevant searches as an organic result.
- Another will be that the video carousel containing your video should be displayed within the same search result page as your video’s rich snippet.
This helps to drive the number of clicks and video views as it increases the visibility of your brand.
It is also important to ensure that your video is recent as the video’s date will be displayed on the search page when viewing from a desktop. Monitoring the duration for your web page to load after embedding a YouTube video and tracking the performance of your video rich snippets can help to improve the overall performance of your website’s SEO.
Below are some tips to improve your chances of generating the ideal video rich clip:
| S.No | Tips | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Include video in your website | Though there are no specific requirements for the type of video to use, it is always advisable to include video unique to your company. The primary reason is that the company’s name will be associated and reflected together with the shown video snippet on Google’s result page. It is also a good practice to ensure that the embedded video is hosted on an external video sharing platform like Youtube. |
| 2 | Apply video schema | There are various free online platforms that enable the creation of schema based on your uploaded video. The generated code can be included into your webpage to boost search results. Another simpler alternative will be to look for available plugins to integrate this function. |
2) Referral Traffic
This refers to the instance where a user visits your content not through a direct search on Google, but through other websites. A user is identified as a referral when a link from the current web page is clicked and directs them to a new page. This is a highly important strategy adopted in internet marketing as it brings about prospective customers into the website.
On the different social media sites such as YouTube, the provision of URLs in the description section of a video or “About” page, is one way to receive referral traffic. Another way will be to include your website’s name in the beginning and ending of the video. Call-to-action buttons can also be included where you can embed your website link into your YouTube channel (Check out iClick Media’s YouTube channel here!). All these actions are instances of referral traffic that can help in increasing traffic to your website.
As videos contain more engaging content, it encourages more people to view them which can result in an increase in the number of views. A high view count for the video would indicate its popularity. This will result in Google taking notice of it and prioritizing this video to be one of the first few results shown in the search engine results page each time a user searches for relevant content.
