Three Ways to Use Video Content to Improve Website SEO

Intro

Having trouble getting visitors to the website? Well, there can be multiple reasons for that. Primarily, we need to understand the audience's search intent and what we provide them. If our website content is not in-line with our audience's search query, it will not rank on Google's search results.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process that helps our website to rank on Google Search Results. But how? Google search results are populated by the query our audiences put in the search bar. For example, suppose "learn to play guitar" and "how to ski" are some queries our audiences search on Google. And as a responsible guide, Google will only show the best relevant result on the first page. Our goal is to put content regarding them on our website. It is a crucial part of SEO.

Billions of users visit Google daily to get their queries solved. SEO is an excellent part of any social media strategy that helps us to become the most sought-after website on Google. Besides keywords, videos are a great way to get visitors to our website.

In this article, we will learn in-depth about video SEO techniques that will bring more traffic to our website. But before that, we need to know about user behavior and the nature of searches on Google daily.

What Type of Searches do Users Do on Google? What Does It Say to Us?

First, we should know what our audience does on Google. Primarily their search queries can take the form of four simple questions.

Where to?

They need to find out what the actual web address is. They search for the "best video editor" to reach a specific website online.

What is it?

If they are unsure about anything, they can search "what are the best video editors?".

How much?

While purchasing the premium membership of any platform. Audiences can reach directly to the pricing page by searching "video editor pricing."

Which one is better?

And lastly, if they are unsure about their purchase, they may want to compare two products or services by directly searching "x vs. y" on the Google search box.

If we can analyze the search query, we can get an idea of the search intent of our audience. The audience wants to see a website that can solve their problems.

Why Is It Important to Work on On-Page Seo?

What we learned from our audience search intent will help us to build our website content accordingly.

From the audience's point of view, they are willing to get their queries answered one way or the other. We can supply them with audio, text, or video content here. If we are working to solve a query of our audience, we should think from their perspective and curate the content that best serves them.

However, there is another side to it. We are feeding content to the audience and making it for Google crawlers. Google crawlers, better known as Googbots, scan or crawl our entire website to find a relevant solution for any audience query. But how will the Googlbots understand what they are looking for? That is where keywords come in.

Google intends to supply users with the most relevant and valuable information on the internet. So, if they find that information on our website, they will rank us higher on the SERP. Otherwise, our website may not even appear in the search query.

We aim to optimize our website with relevant information to rank it high on Google search results.

How Can Videos Improve SEO Rankings?

Videos should be an integral part of any social media strategy. Apart from all the off-page SEO techniques, we must also work on the on-page side.

Videos are a great way to rank high on SERP. Here's why:

Provides depth of our content

Search Engines are hungry for relevant content. They need those to serve the users better. But if we only focus on the text, it may fall short.

Suppose our website contains a 2000-word article describing a product. Now, if a user comes to our website for the first time, there is a high chance they will only read part of the article and leave it in the middle. It can eliminate future returns as well.

Now, we can put a video along with the article; it will instantly draw the audience's attention as audiences can now see real-life imagery and relate to it.

A great way of getting backlinks

If the audience finds the video attractive, they will likely share the article or video. That way, we will earn more and more backlinks to our website.

Getting backlinks is one of the most challenging tasks in a social media strategy. For SEO purposes getting organic backlinks is crucial as it tells Google that our website contains the most relevant content from which users benefit. As a result, we will get more traffic to our website.

Increase average user time spent on our website

The more time our audience spends on our website tells Google about the website's credibility. The audience's average time spent on websites could be better. There is a high chance of the audience getting bored and leaving the website. Furthermore, returning to the SERP, the audience may prefer our competitor's website. But, if we supply a video along with an article to the users, it will keep them on our website for more time.

So, we can see how crucial videos are for any website's SEO. But there are quite a few things to learn while creating videos with the most popular video editor. We have summarized them in three key points. Here are they:

3 Ways to Use Video Content To Improve SEO

Now, let's look at three key techniques to improve website SEO.

1. Highlight the Search Query

Whenever a user lands on our website, our goal should be to give them what they want as fast as possible. Usually, audiences leave a website if they need help finding their search query highlighted in any form. So, we need to be on point with the search query.

Create content that matches the search intent

When solving an audience query through video, we must highlight the problem scenario or the query that landed them on our website. For example, if a user comes to our website looking for a Guitar lesson, it's our primary purpose to give them that without them looking for it. We may lose a potential client if the audience can't find what they want.

Also, it is crucial to stay on point. If we feed them anything other than Guitar lessons, they will lose interest in the video and leave.

Make the Video the Focus of the Page

Numerous websites perform great on SERP. Why? Because these websites make the videos the main focus of the page. We have seen multiple websites with hidden or languishing videos at the bottom of the page.

Instead, we should make the video the main attraction of the page. As mentioned before, the audience will only spend a little time looking for a video or reading a whole write-up. So, if we feed them with the video instantly, we can keep them on the website longer.

Search engines also like videos to be right in front of a page so they can index them easily.

Choose the Right Video Hosting Platform

Apart from a video's content and placements, the other crucial factor is its hosting platform. Luckily, we can decide that ourselves.

Social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube are ideal if we focus on brand awareness. But they take our traffic away from the website.

So, if we focus on getting more traffic on the website, we need to opt for platforms that structure video data for our audience. For this, going with JSON-LD is preferable.

2. Tailor it To Best Serve Our Audience

We need to make the video as easy as possible so our audience can grasp it quickly.

Insert a Video Transcript

Crawlers love detailing, and the same goes for the audience as well. While putting a video on our website, we must provide a video transcript. It is a great way to simultaneously serve a large audience with video and text. That way, it becomes easy for them to consume and understand the content.

Crawlers tend to lean towards the additional textual information it gets from the video transcripts. It helped our video to compete well against other videos on similar topics on the web.

Make Sure the Thumbnail Image Is Engaging

Another great way to improve SEO with video is creating an original thumbnail to go along with the video. Suppose the audience is searching for a Guitar lesson. If we can show a human playing a guitar on the thumbnail of a video, it will appear to them more than downloaded thumbnails. The most popular video editors let us create a thumbnail within them.

Also, indexing our website on the Google search result will appeal to the audience more.

Work On the Title and Description of the Video

Lastly, we should focus on the title and description of our videos. There are certain things here to keep in mind. We need to understand the problem scenario our audience is having. Based on that, we need to do keyword research. Those keywords will help us create content and give us an idea to curate engaging titles and meta descriptions.

Googlebot and other search engine crawlers feed on these. If we can master this, it will be highly beneficial for our website's SEO.

3. Make Sure to Prepare the Video Indexing-Ready

Lastly, we must be adrift of some of the most common errors on the web. For that, we need to learn how the search engine crawlers behave after encountering a video.

Embed the Video Ranked First on the Page

Focusing on a single video instead of multiple videos should be the most common practice. Crawlers usually stop crawling after encountering a video on a page, so we need to focus solely on the first video on our page (if we have more than one video on the same page).

Also, keeping only a single video on a page is essential for indexing. One crucial thing we must keep in mind is avoiding repetition. We must only place the same tape on one page.

Keep the Page SEO Optimized and Relevant to the Video

Apart from all these relevant video tunings, we must also focus on overall website SEO! Even if we have a video fully optimized and ready to be indexed, crawlers may find the webpage SEO needs to be better and discourage our video.

We need to keep the technicalities of the SEO of our website up to date and ensure the videos are relevant to the website data.

Take videos to our audience.

Whenever other websites link our videos to our page, it improves our website's credibility and helps our SEO. But for that to happen, we need to share the content with our audience. Mostly, we can reach our audience via social media. We must develop strategies to use the platforms smartly to attract more website visitors.

A video created to solve audience queries should be made using a good video editor before sharing them on social media. Also, they must be formatted appropriately depending on the platform.

Final Thought

And that wraps it up. A detailed guide on how to use video content to improve website SEO. We have covered everything in this article, from using video editors to create engaging videos to providing necessary details about placing them on the website. If followed correctly, these tips will surely help our website's SEO.