Here is the second of two guest posts from our digital marketing and SEO guru, Tom Pratt
There are a number of ways video content helps your SEO performance. Firstly, by creating a more engaging experience on your page, people are more likely to stay on your site longer and consume more of your content.
If the video content is entertaining or educational then it is likely to be referenced and shared exposing your brand to a wider audience and at the same time increasing the number of links and references to your site. This is great for SEO as it increases the authority of your site and improves the chances of it being ranked higher within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).
If your video content is optimised for the term being searched for it is likely to be pulled into the SERP as a featured Snippet. A Featured Snippet is a piece of content which is shown at the top of the search results allowing people to access the information without visiting the site. A study by Hubspot found that videos with titles that matched the search term were included in the featured clip:
“80% of the Featured Clips in our study contained the exact keyword in their title.”
The study analysed 165 search terms and found that featured clips appeared more on consumer related terms than professional related terms.
How to optimise video content for SEO
As with content in general, there are a number of basic things you can do to optimise your video content for SEO:
- Create a clear title for the video which is focused on the keywords you wish to target
- Add a clear title and header on the page on your site where the video features – this should be in line with the targeted keywords and the title of your video
- Mark-up the video content with the Video Object schema https://schema.org/VideoObject
- You can add a transcript of the video to the page as well to provide further context, making sure you’ve included the ‘transcript’ element in the Schema mark-up text you’ve added
Summary
In summary, creating video content for your brand or campaigns is something you should be seriously considering. By developing a clear idea of who you are speaking to, what problem you’re solving for this group of people and how best to communicate to them, you can lay the foundation for developing exciting, engaging content which will help fuel the growth of your brand.