Benefits of Using Video for SEO

Video may be one of the most looked over rankings factors which lots of people always forget about. Now having the same impact on your SEO as images and their alt tags, videos are a quick and easy way to help both improving your search engine ranking positions as well as overall user engagement.

With this in mind, we thought we’d take a deeper look at videos and how you can use them to improve your chances of ranking higher.

Integrating Video for SEO

Having video integration on your webpage has an effect on one of the most important SEO ranking factors – your webpage’s content. Video content on your website is evidence to Google of quality content. Mixed with images video can help you send a signal to search engines that your website or webpage contains relevant content, thanks to keywords found in the title of a video. Which bring us to our next point.

Keyword labels

By providing more useful and relevant information to search engines you increase the chances of your video being shown in relevant search results. Keywords can be used in SEO fields to help describe your video and its content (including, titles, file names, video descriptions, and video tags) ensuring that your video appears for relevant keywords.

Transcripts

While videos are a great way of providing quality engaging content to your website users, the only downside to videos is that search engines like Google can’t crawl the content of a video, that isn’t its title or descriptions. So while we are waiting for Google AI to get clever enough to watch and find keywords in videos themselves, video transcripts are the next best thing.
Having a transcript of a video available on your website gives search engines the ability to see the spoken content in a video and target any relevant keywords or phrases, and understand the subject matter.

Optimise for Load Time

As well as considering page content when it comes to ranking search results, Google also uses webpage performance to determine ranking positions. If a page has poor load times which affect user experience, this can also affect SEO. MP4 and WebM have become the standard formats for platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, however, WebM files are useful for saving space and loading quicker than file types like MP4.

Video content is only going to continue growing in popularity and accessibility as more and more users choose to favour video over written content. Make sure your website displays videos properly and easily without sacrificing any loading time.

For more info on making your website SEO friendly, get in touch with the team at Hush Digital.