When most people think about SEO content, they think about textual content, with many of them not considering video content when crafting their SEO content strategy. Video is a very powerful medium that when used in your SEO strategy can yield amazing results. We are so used to rich media on websites that contextual data no longer keeps us as engaged as it used to, and this is why video is starting to win over textual content. If you are thinking of using video as SEO content, embedding videos is considered a better solution due to how easy it is to implement, and it allows you to avoid all the technicalities and complexities that come with hosting videos on your own server. In this article, we are going to look at how you can use embedded videos to boost SEO on your website.
Prepare The Videos First
Before you can use embedded videos as SEO content, they need to be prepared. There are several things SEOs need to do to prepare videos, so they not only serve as SEO content but also help the web pages they are embedded into rank higher.
Embedded videos need to have titles optimized for SEO and the keywords a business wants to rank for. Care should be taken to ensure the title matches the content in the video because videos that break this rule do not perform very well, as people abandon them if they think the title is clickbait.
The next step in preparing embedded videos for use as SEO content is ensuring they have the right supporting textual content. The two types of this supporting content are closed captions and transcripts. Transcripts and captions make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl the video’s content. This way, adding transcripts and captions increased the number of relevant keywords your video can be ranked for.
Prioritize YouTube
Being the largest search engine, everyone wants to rank on Google. Google has been known to favor YouTube video results, and this is why it is important to prioritize YouTube uploads when you want to embed videos on your website.
The reason why YouTube is the best option for video embeds is because of all the features it gives creators to add technical information to their videos. This includes keywords, proper optimized titles, descriptions and captions, and transcripts as discussed above.
Because of all these, embedding videos hosted on YouTube is the best option for websites that want to use video content to appear higher on search result pages.
Work on the Technicalities
To ensure embedded videos work as expected on your website, you need to work on the technical aspects of embedding the videos. These include enduring the video is embedded right, so that it plays when a user requires it to, and ensuring the video is light enough.
A lot of people are moving to 4K and 8K videos, and although the videos are of very high quality, they are not a good option if you would like to embed them on your website. Such high-quality videos take too long to load, and if you are using an embedded video as a major part of your webpage, a user might be left looking at a blank screen while the video buffers and eventually plays. This will lead to a high bounce rate and negate any gains made by using embedded video for SEO content.
Use Embedded Videos as Additive Content
Search engines rank websites that have high-quality content and that satisfy visitor’s needs higher. The websites that occupy the top spots also provide valuable information. Embedded videos can help you contextualize and explain your content better by making use of other elements such as music and graphics.
While telling people about your products and services using textual data is great, showing them is even better. Not only will people stick around to engage with a high-quality embedded video that provides value, but the content will also stick with them and improve the chances of them becoming paying customers down the road.
Use Videos on Landing Pages
When visitors land on your page, you have a very small window to tell them what you are all about and ensure they engage with the rest of your website. Video is a great way of doing this as it can be used to introduce your business, who you are, as well as what you do. This way, you decrease your bounce rates and increase the length of time visitors stick on your website.
Educational Content
Practical guides and educational content are best presented in a video format. This is especially true for products that need a showcase or a presentation. While you may have a long write-up that tells your visitors about the technicalities involved with using the product, its features, or anything else about it, showing it to them is a lot better. People process and understand information better when it is presented in a fun way, and if you make the educational or presentation video fun, you will be making the best use of your video.
Be Consistent
One of the most important aspects of ensuring embedded videos helps your SEO is consistency. It will take time for embedded videos to start giving you the results you want to see. In the meantime, keep providing embedded video content that provides value to visitors and that uses various keywords that you want to rank for, not just one main keyword.
Work on Meta Tags
Using embedded videos as part of your SEO content strategy might not yield the results you are looking for if no one sees the video. Meta tags make it easy for search engine spiders to crawl your videos and pull the relevant information to be displayed on search engine result pages. If you want more people to see your videos, you need to optimize your meta tags to improve the video’s visibility.
Using videos as part of your SEO content is becoming increasingly common as people realize the value of video over textual content. However, using video has to be done the right way because there are lots of areas where things can go wrong, and you’ll end up not seeing the results you envisioned.