Adding video to your website is a fantastic way of interacting with your audience and “informing” or “selling” to them. Beyond the benefit of a video being informative and engaging for your audience, video is important for website SEO in many other ways.
There are a couple really important elements to video beyond information, in simplest terms, search engines will often “time” how long a person stays on your website or on a particular page, the longer they are on the page the more value the search engine will assign to that particular page. If you’ve got a quick 30 second clip on your site that people watch or even watch a part of it means they are spending more time on that particular page thereby giving your page more value to the search engines.
BE SURE that when you create your video, if you choose to host it on a video hosting site that you link back to your content from the video webpage. In most cases this is free.
- Time on site
- Go beyond this simple value and then consider the audience a video has on one of the existing channels like YouTube or Vimeo. If you can get a video that gets searched and trends well you can gain an auidence from these channels who could translate into visitors to your site.
- Video in Search Engine Results
- Yet another reason why video is important for website SEO is the gact that search engines are putting videos into their organic search results a lot more than they used to and they are ranking them higher. You’ll often see when you do a search that there will be a little thumbnail of a video that’s on YouTube or some other site that’s showing up high in thesearch rankings. As a side note, people are often more inclined to click on links with images that are displaying from keyword searches than on regular text links.
- Inbound Links from Videos
- If you’ve progressed to incorporating videos into your website you will likely already know that inbound links to your website from other sites is really important in establishing “popularity” which is highly valued by search engines. The more related sites that point to your site the more important the search engines think your site or page is. Each video you create can have inbound links to your website thereby increasing “popularity”.
- Video Can Go Viral with Social Sharing
- If done well, a video can generate a large number of links from other websites but also you get the value of social sharing where people see the video and share it out amongst their friends, whether through Facebook or video ranking or some other means. A simple example is a funny video shared virally by people simply by them emailing their friends with the link or using a social share widget or tool embedded on your video page. People don’t link or share rubbish though so put some effort into the video to make it look good. A really good example of this is the dollarshaveclub video that went totally viral as a result of the amusing concept – it even hit the news Forbes, BusinessWeek and other sites. They went from a couple hundred people a month to hundreds of thousands. Their backlinks went from 0 to over 90,000 in a 12 month period.
- Site Engagement
- When a person comes to your website you’ve got seconds to impress them and get them engaged with what you have to offer. This is the point of the landing pages you are creating. Adding video to a landing page engages your visitor much quicker than a raft of wordy content.
- Videos Can Make Visitors Feel More Confident
- According to Invodo, 52% of consumers say that watching product videos made them feel more confident about the product they were buying.