26/04/2018
You can’t ignore the SEO power of video on your website
Posted in: General Blog,
About six years ago, Dollar Shave Club launched a low-cost
(and tongue in cheek) video that went viral. It cost something like £3,225 to
produce and generated 12,000 orders within 48 hours, and since then it has had
more than 25 million views.
Okay, that might be an anomaly but it certainly demonstrates
that you don’t need a big budget to create a compelling video which we’ve seen with the work we’ve been doing with Laughlines, the UK's leading brand of
comedy dinner shows.
According to Cisco, by next year – that’s only eight months
away – video content consumption is set to rise to 80 per cent of all internet
traffic. Why? Well one reason is that 79 per cent of consumers would rather
watch a video to learn about a product than read a text, according to research
by Liana Technologies.
And all this good news about video just gets better because a
film viewed through your website helps create immediate SEO results, especially
if you broadcast via YouTube because the world’s second largest search engine
(yes, really) is also owned by Google, the world’s largest search engine.
#synergy
Ranking on Google’s first page is an SEO person’s top
priority, and even as far back as 2009 one study found that “pages with video
are 53 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google search results”.
In its general search and video search functions, Google
ranks videos using the same factors as written content, that is; content
quality, number of backlinks and RankBrain (a machine-learning artificial
intelligence system that helps Google process some of its search results, in
particular rare or one-of-a-kind queries).
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is
worth much much more. Research and advisory firm Forrester estimates that one
minute of video equates to 1.8 million words of text in the message
communicated.
Video gets us excited because we can instantly engage with it
in a way that we’re unable to do with the written word. Through the words used,
the mood and motion of the visual content and accompanying sounds and music,
you can bond with almost anyone – hence that Dollar Shave Club video; tongue in
cheek but with a good quality product to sell.
The moving picture can also help lower your bounce rate, because
the average online attention span is less than eight seconds so if someone
viewing you site leaves your domain after a single page it will hurt your
site’s SEO ranking. Video, on the other hand, is a very effective way to engage
visitors to your website and have them stay longer.
Including videos in marketing strategies not only increases
the likelihood of consumer engagement exponentially, they will automatically
give you a greater chance of ranking higher in search results.
As we said earlier, videos increase the likelihood of a
front page Google result by 53 times; so better SEO = higher traffic +
increased website engagement by the consumer.
Just make sure your video is entertaining, informative and
consistent with your business goals – nothing is worse than providing little or
no value to your marketing strategy or viewer – and when sharing videos on
social media platforms.
Finally, some do’s and don’ts for videos courtesy of InsightMarketing:
- Avoid having your video automatically start playing when someone visits your website
- Create an interesting title image for your video to entice your visitor to click on it
- Avoid one person, talking head monologues without any changes on screen
- Don’t use cats in your video (unless you’re selling cat nip).
Want to know how more about how video can help elevate your
business? Give us a call on 01423 873009.
