Video has become an increasingly popular SEO strategy, enhanced by Google’s helpful content update and the addition of video indexing to Google Search Console. Through engaging visuals and audio, you can provide users with video that reflects your brand’s goals, mission, and values for an improved user experience.
SEO Video Marketing
In recent years, video marketing has shown significant growth, amplified through the popularity of social media platforms like TikTok. Even Instagram, originally just an image sharing social media platform, has trended towards promoting more video content through its feeds, explore page, stories, and even paid ads.
Google is no different when it comes to these trends. In July of 2022, Google announced that they would be adding video index reports to Google Search Console. Through the rollout of Google’s helpful content update, you may have noticed that Google has begun pushing more video content within its organic search results.
How Video Impacts SEO
While Google does not have an immediate impact on SEO, we are noticing that it does help. To test how much Google prioritizes video content for SEO, we embedded YouTube videos into blog posts with significant results. In every case tested, a spike in organic impressions occurred for that blog post page within days of uploading the video.
When adding video SEO services to your strategy, you will take advantage of the following benefits:
- Site engagement
- Additional content influencing your ranking
- Improved user experience
Site engagement will increase through the use of indexed, SEO-optimized video content. At first, you will see an increase in impressions. As the impressions begin to increase, you will also notice clicks begin to increase. By adding a transcript to your website for your video content, you will be adding additional keywords, meaning more opportunities to rank for different search queries.
Adding additional, valuable content to a page through videos and video transcripts, you could improve your overall ranking. Video can add an extra boost to your rankings for the keywords that you targeted with your content.
Overall, video can also lead to an improved user experience. Alongside a blog or landing page, video content can provide even more helpful information that you are trying to convey. It also has the adding benefit of providing a more visual representation of the information you want to share with your users.
Does Embedding YouTube Videos Help SEO?
According to Google’s John Mueller in early 2021, there is no difference for SEO betweenembedded videos and natively uploaded videos on your website. However, two years on from that response, this could change.
The main benefit of embedded YouTube videos within your website is that you are sharing that video content not only through your website but also through YouTube’s platform. Because of this, there can be two search engines at play: Google and YouTube. This can lead to a broader audience reach.
In addition, Google’s algorithm is constantly evolving. Only time may show a difference in value between natively uploaded videos and embedded YouTube videos.
Is There Anything I Should Include in Videos for SEO?
When uploading or embedding video content to your site for SEO purposes, you will want to think similarly as you do to a blog. For example, if you are uploading a video to a blog post about conducting a website audit, you would not want a montage video showing website audits. You would want an instructional video that explains the benefits of and how to conduct a website audit. This provides more information and a better user experience.
In another similar strategy to a blog post, including targeted keywords within a video can be beneficial as well, especially if you are uploading a transcript to the site along with the video. That transcript serves as additional written content that Google can crawl to determine where to place your page within its rankings.
Providing Quality Content to Search Engines
Between Google and YouTube, you may be wondering what video content is most valuable for ranking within search engines. While the answer may be simple, it may take more effort to implement. The main goal of your video content should be to provide the highest quality of whatever your topic is.
For example, if you are making a video on how to bake cookies for a cooking blog, you will want to include:
- The listed ingredients that you will be using
- Any special cooking tools you may need (pans, spatula)
- A step-by-step guide both explaining and showing how to bake the cookies
- Presenting the final product
Each of those elements provides additional value that teaches your audience how to bake cookies. Your audience cannot bake cookies if they only know their recipe, and they cannot cook them well if they don’t know how much of each ingredient to include.
Video content should encompass all the valuable information a user might be looking for based on the theme of your video.
If you take a look at the way Google’s helpful content update has changed the organic search results, you’ll notice that now, instead of just links to pages, there can also be video suggestions, a People Also Ask section, paid ads, images, and even products.
How to Start Your Video Strategy for SEO
If you are ready to include video content within your SEO strategy, contact our team at Rise Marketing Group to plan which video content would best serve your business and website.
Video SEO Transcript
Did you know that video can be a big asset when driving organic search and increasing your SEO? My name is Ben Lund. I’m the founder of Rise Marketing Group. In this video, I’m going to share four strategies on how video can take your SEO and search engine optimization to the next level. The third one’s actually my favorite, but let’s jump right into it.
So first and foremost, by creating video assets, I would recommend to create a YouTube channel. By creating a YouTube channel and posting these videos on YouTube, that gives you access to a whole other audience, and it turns out that YouTube is the second largest search engine. That’s higher than Microsoft Bing, that’s higher than Yahoo, AOL, DuckDuckGo, etc. So just by the sheer nature of having video on YouTube, all the people that are searching how to searches or information on whatever topic that they’re interested in, you have an opportunity to rank. So just by that, you expose yourself to a pretty large search engine. So that’s the first strategy.
The second strategy is, once you have that video on YouTube, take it from YouTube and embed it on your website. Now, just by embedding a video on a website, that in of itself will not increase your SEO, and I think Google even several times said that that’s not going to impact SEO. However, what is a ranking factor with Google is engagement and time spent on site. So if you have engaging content, i.e. video, that is going to improve your engagement score. And with that, Google’s going to see that this is a quality site, it’s sticky, people like it, and that can help influence SEO. Now, when you’re embedding these videos, create video content that will align with each page. So if you have blogs, create a video with additional content that might go a little bit deeper than just the text that you have on your site. If you have service pages, create videos on that. There’s a lot of content that you can create from a video perspective. So that’s the second strategy.
The third strategy, and this one’s by far my favorite strategy of video SEO or how video can improve SEO, is you take that video and then you want to get the transcript for it. Now, that could be a manual process and it could take a half hour, even if it’s a five-minute video, because that’s a lot of words. Or there’s a lot of great sites out there like Rev, rev.com I believe is the address or just Google Rev transcript, and what it will do is automatically through their AI machine learning, we’ll get a nice transcript of all the words and all the content, the written content from that video.
Then what I’d recommend is at the bottom of that page or that blog post, put that full transcript below. And then what you can have on your pages, you’d have the embedded video, let’s say that’s up on top or in the middle. And then underneath the video, say a full transcript at the bottom of the page just so that way you don’t mess up with the user experience. And then at the bottom, you have all the words and the written content from that transcript.
Now, how that’s going to help SEO is that’s a lot of content that you’re just putting on your website and the content that you have on video isn’t probably exactly what you have on that specific page. So it might double, even triple the amount of written content that you have on your site, which would help you rank for more search queries that are relevant to that page. So that’s a big one I would recommend. And we’ve done this a lot in the past, and anytime we add video to a page, do the transcript, we see a pretty immediate bump in impressions and eligible search queries.
Now, the last strategy is, once you do all this great work and you update the embedded video on your website, you have the transcript, you need to request re-indexation from Google. If you don’t do that, you did all this work for nothing. So make sure you have Google Search Consolel, request re-indexation, and then that will tell Google to recrawl that page and see all that awesome content that you have, and then that’s where you’re going to start to see an impact.
So I hope this video is super helpful in how video can be a really strong asset for your SEO. If you want to read more on it, if you’re watching this on YouTube, click below in the description, you’ll see a link to our website, to a blog post that provides a little bit more information. And further, if anyone needs help with SEO for video, contact Rise Marketing Group, love to have a conversation to see how we can support your efforts. Thank you.
