We write a lot here on the Sparksight blog about how well-crafted online video can be a powerful tool to help convert prospects to customers. However, what you might miss is that video content can also help to drive a larger audience to your corporate web site by enhancing its searchability. You have the goal of driving as much of your target audience to your site, and keeping them there. On the other hand, search engines have the goal of referring web surfers to content that they find valuable in some respect. Video can help to satisfy both of these goals. Therefore, with a complete digital video strategy, your videos can help to improve your web site’s scores on major search indexes, and drive up your SEO ranking.
Search Algorithms Love Rich Media
Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are very careful to maintain the secrecy of their algorithms for ranking web sites. However, we do know some of the key considerations that go into the search algorithm. The most important overall factor for SEO ranking is the number of inbound links to the page, but also vital is the presence of rich media content on the site. What is rich media content? Pictures and video embedded on the site. When algorithms like Google’s PageRank see this content on a site, it makes note of it, and this in turn helps that page’s score, and your web site’s overall SEO ranking.
Note that if you use links to send your visitors to a different hosting site (like Youtube, Vimeo, or Wistia), you will not see this benefit. However, there are other benefits from this strategy, so it is important to weigh the value of rich media for your SEO ranking against the convenience of other hosting services.
Visitors Spend More Time on Pages with Video
A good online video has the ability to capture the attention of visitors to your web site in a way that even the most compelling text simply cannot. So long as your video loads properly, is of good quality, and is interesting to your viewers, then visitors will spend more time on your page, and are more likely to view other pages on the site. This represents proof that your web content is interesting and engaging to visitors. Search engines use cookies to track this behavior on your site, and will reward you by improving your SEO ranking.
Remember that to reap the benefits of visitors spending more time on your web site, the video content they are presented with must be interesting and engaging. Ultimately, increased time on your site comes from visitors staying. Video is just a great way to indirectly keep visitors on your site and encourage them to view your other pages, which in turn helps your SEO ranking.
Videos are Shareable
The most important factor considered by Google’s ranking algorithm is the number of inbound links that a web site has. Google bases rank on links, content, and RankBrain. Therefore, the more times a link to one of your web pages appears somewhere else on the web, the better your web site’s SEO ranking. Video comes in handy for inbound link generation because it is some of the most interesting and unique content on the web. That means that your video content is more likely to be deemed valuable by viewers. It also means that they are more likely to share links to your page on social media and on their own pages and blogs. Every time one of these links appears on the web, your SEO ranking improves just a little bit.
Ultimately, video is not only a powerful tool for engaging and interacting with potential customers. It can also help to build your web site’s searchability and improve your SEO ranking across different search engines. However, it is also important to remember that much of this value still comes from how your audience interacts with your video content and the web site you host it on. Of course, video is not a quick fix for poor searchability. Furthermore, poor quality or uninteresting video content will lend very little aide to your SEO ranking. As such, it is important to combine high-quality, engaging video content with a clever digital marketing and content management strategy.
