Can videos improve your SEO? The short answer ‘yes!’ Video content can help improve SEO for your website, but not if you’re just uploading any old video and hoping for the best!
Video SEO should essentially be an extension of your existing SEO strategy for your website. You pack your website with relevant content and key words, and do everything you can to ensure people visit your site and stay there. Video can add to this, but you need to make sure you’re optimising your video to suit your website in order to achieve results.
An online video will bring more traffic to your website, and as visitors are more likely to stay on your page if they’ve got something that will keep them there, a video on your homepage is a really useful tool. However, your viewers aren’t going to stay if your video won’t load, is poor quality or doesn’t get to the point. You need to keep it interesting, engaging and take care to ensure high production values and a proper embed onto your website.
Video isn’t just another tool to get people onto your website, you need to think about what potential customers will think when they see the video. Does it represent your business professionally? Or has it been shot on a mobile phone and looks a little home-made or thrown together?
“Google, just like your audience, give preference to experts in their field” says SEO & Marketing Manager Caroline Phillips Rodin in a recent article for Reel SEO, “so produce content you know about. Be innovative and be creative with how you present your information, but start out by providing good content. Get feedback, find out what works, find out what doesn’t work, and then go from there.
Don’t limit your video to just being on your website. As Google looks at YouTube videos as well, it can be really beneficial to upload your video to YouTube. You’ll need to think about how your video is represented on YouTube as well. Think about content, key words and using relevant tags. You can link your video and website together in an annotation to spur viewers to visit your site after they’ve watched you video, and you can also embed your optimised YouTube video onto your website.
It’s really important to make sure your video is interesting, relevant and content driven, but also be sure to think about quality and how it represents your business.
Your website is your shop window, and if the first thing your potential customers see is a below par corporate video, they’re unlikely to be very impressed.
To find out more, or to talk to someone about having a video made for your website, get in touch with the Holler team on 020 7112 8665 or email hello@holler.video.