A long time ago, users only had a handful of options for the services they need, and stayed loyal to them. A while back, users are bombarded with too many advertisements and became indecisive and frustrated with too many choices.
Today, consumers want full control of their buying process and turn to the one place most of us deem trustworthy for their search: Google. If you’ve heard the term Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) too many times, you should also know that SEO is a tough nut to crack – because algorithms are always changing and it is time-intensive to get your website to rank higher in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Did you know that the use of videos could dramatically help with your SEO?
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of optimising your website for an aim to grow your visibility on the SERPs.
SEO dismisses the website traffic coming from a paid advertisement or direct query – users typing your URL directly into the bar. High ranking for SEO is recognised that when users type in a certain keyword in the search bar, and find your website on the first few links of the results page. There is a higher probability of them clicking on the top few links on the web page – thus a good ranking correlates to higher exposure of your brand.
How do you get a good ranking for your website? There are plenty of on-page and off-page SEO techniques to help Google recognise your website as a good search result.
Search engines scan and crawl, index and rank your websites so often that it is almost essential to work on SEO on a daily basis. Search engine optimization, or optimising your website content and structure could ultimately drive more conversions than any of your other digital marketing efforts.
Google is preferring video
Google loves videos. A video is 50 times more likely to appear on the 1st page of search, as compared to a traditional website.
In a recent algorithm change, Google transformed the search landscape to prioritise rich & blended search results, and a video definitely categorises as such. It’s known that video is king today – video content is used with majority of businesses and marketers are engaging more & more corporate video production in Singapore, especially. Videos are great for engagement and can provide value & relevance to consumers in a short amount of time.
How your videos can help with SEO
To be clear, simply adding a video to your website will not highly impact your SEO. It has to come down to the actual content of the video, good video content that attracts your viewers to the video and encourages clicks, views, and conversions.
1. Lower your bounce rates & increase session duration
A new user comes to the website, but you only got a few seconds to capture his/her attention. This is where videos prove to be powerful. Videos are attractive and can help the users understand more about a product, as opposed to text and images alone.
Videos are known as anti-bounce tools that help users stay on the website. Similarly, when people spend more time on your website watching a video, this increases their “dwell time” (or session) and Google takes this factor as consideration to rank your website higher.
Outside of SEO, when people spend more time on your website, there is a high possibility that they will be interested to find out the other pages you have, thus bringing down the bounce rate.
And, naturally, if people spend a lot of time over your content, there’s a high possibility that they will dig deeper into your website and check out what other pages have to offer. Not only will this increase pageviews, but it will also bring down the bounce rate.
The bounce rate is a problem that a lot of us are familiar with. With so many choices online, distracted users will often leave a page within seconds if they don’t find instantly what they’re looking for. This is where you can use videos as an anti-bounce tool. After all, unlike written text, you must watch a video — or at least a part of it — in order to learn what it’s about.
2. Increase your click-through rates
Another important thing to remember is that Google pays close attention to how many times people are clicking within your video. In a section named Making magic with Meero, the whole row is filled with attractive thumbnails with a fairly prominent play-button.
Before anyone clicks on the play button, what they will see are the title & thumbnail of your video – that means that you’ll need a compelling text and image that warrants a click.
Video, on the other hand, will more consistently keep people on your page for longer periods of time.
People are more likely to watch a video than they are to read something like a blog post, even if those two things are trying to get across the same core pieces of information.
By relying heavily on video to increase the amount of time someone spends on your page, you significantly improve your bounce rate, which, in turn, helps search engines like Google and Bing boost your article to the top of their rankings!
3. Increase backlink profiles
Your videos are traffic-generating machines. If your video strikes a chord with your viewers, chances are, they will be sharing and linking out to it, and passively help you get backlinks to the webpage with the video. Backlinks are links that external domains lead to you.
If your video strikes a chord with viewers, they are likely to link out to it — another vital ranking factor. As long as your high-quality, unique video is circulating the web, it will passively get backlinks to the page containing the video.
With that, it’s quite obvious that you’ll need a video for your company, on your website or even on your social media platforms.
Up until now, all of these tips have been focused on the ways in which video gets your site to rank as highly as possible in engines like Google. Those positive SEO gains ultimately mean nothing if you can’t take that relationship one step further toward conversion—which is another area that video has a terrific impact on.
Shoppers are twice as likely to make a purchase after viewing something like a product video than they are without engaging that content, so not only will video help increase your SEO by getting more eyes on your site, but it will also carry the ball farther down the field and help convince those people to actually convert.
This means that at nearly all stages of the process, video provides meaningful gains to your SEO’s ultimate return on investment that you absolutely want to take advantage of.
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