How Video Can Increase Your Site's Visibility on Search Engines

By Christelle Macri

An increased amount of video content has been one of the most noticeable online trends of recent times. Video now accounts for more than 60 percent of all online traffic, and that number is expected to rise to 80 percent over the next five years, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index.

In addition to offering the benefit of retention of information, video can also improve a company's search engine optimisation. It should, therefore, come as little surprise that businesses have responded, with research showing that the use of online video in marketing has doubled over the last year.

So how exactly can you effectively include video content in your search marketing?

1. Get the Content Right

You could hire the best SEO company in the world, but if the actual content of your videos is poor, that part of your search marketing strategy is doomed to fail. For this reason, producing quality content should always come before employing any SEO tactics to boost search rankings. Video content should aim to solve problems or provide new information; it also should be interesting, entertaining and, ideally, interactive. Based on attention span statistics released by Statistic Brain, videos should also be short, as the average human attention span now stands at just eight seconds.

2. Host Your Videos on YouTube

For SEO purposes, videos should be hosted on YouTube rather than on your own site for three main reasons. First, it will reduce page load times, which is important given that Google's algorithms take page performance into account. Second, a study by Wistia found that more than 90 percent of video thumbnails displayed in Google search results were hosted on YouTube, suggesting strong algorithm bias towards the video hosting site. And finally, although many don't think of it as being one, YouTube itself is a search engine--the second largest in the world--which means it will give you access to a huge potential audience if video optimisation is done correctly.

3. Label Videos and Provide Backlinks

While video content cannot be read by search engine algorithms in quite the same way as text-based content, you can still utilise your existing SEO keyword strategy when it comes to naming videos, providing descriptions and tags for them, and so on. Think carefully about the labels you give your videos. Meanwhile, if you are hosting videos on YouTube, it is important to include backlinks to your website, as some viewers will find the videos through searching YouTube itself, or through social media shares.

4. Provide a Transcript

Wherever possible and appropriate, place a transcript into the HTML of the page where your video is embedded. Transcripts of videos can be enormously beneficial to your SEO strategy, offering visitors an option to read during times when they are unable to watch videos, while also providing search engines with keyword rich content to crawl and index. Moreover, a transcript can be used as a starting point to expand further on the information in a video, effectively making the video and its transcript an introduction to longer, more detailed written content.