Video content: what it is and how to use it

As Google expands the factors it assesses to determine your ranking, non-text elements of your website become more important. Visual content like images and video can increase the usability and engagement of your website, and if used properly, can have a large positive impact on rankings.

How do I use video?

Using video effectively from an SEO point of view mean more than just pointing the camera and pressing record.

Lets look at some key points to help shape your video content strategy:

• Once uploaded, ensure that the technical side of getting your content noticed is taken care of. Things like creating a video site map, using schema markup and making the content embeddable will all add to the visibility and integrity of your content.
• Get your personality across in an authentic way, a fake personality switches the viewers’ interest off. You will get more positive engagement with honesty and transparency.
• If you’re explaining a product or service, do it concisely. Don’t make any assumptions that people know what your product is or what it does.
• As with written content, make video content relevant by offering the viewer something that adds value to their website experience. Don’t be boring or constrained by what others are doing. Aim to enliven your audience, brighten their day, educate them, make them want to bookmark your site so they can come back.
• Choose carefully where to host your content. Many successful companies host on YouTube and embed the YouTube code into their own website HTML code- this ensures they get the valuable link ‘power’ pointed back to their site. Alternatively, there are paid service providers that host your video content for you yet Google search see the content as being hosted on your own domain.

What are the benefits of video?

It is estimated that one in three Britons view at least one online video a week, that’s a potential weekly audience of 20 million viewers in the UK alone. YouTube receives one billion unique visitors every month,  video content is quickly becoming the key means for people to satiate their appetite for information and entertainment.

When Google crawls your website in response to a particular search term, it’s constantly looking for correlations with their idea of a good site.

Primarily, Google looks for;

• Page quality
• Relevance
• Key word instances- not too few, not too many, but just the right amount.

When you use multimedia content it can add a significant value and weighting to all three of these metrics increasing your website ranking and ultimately your place in SERPs.

Video content increases the time a visitor is on your website, however, it has to be good or the viewer will just watch a couple of seconds and bounce right back off the page, Google will notice and that  will affect your rankings accordingly.

There’s no need to worry about how to approach video content, Edge45 have their own in-house team experienced  in creating high quality photography, PR and video production. You can leave all the technical and creative wizardry to us. Just get in touch and we will be happy to talk you through the options available to you to boost your business.