Does Video Content Help Your Site’s SEO?

As you’ve probably noticed, video content is becoming more and more prevalent on the web. If you look at any of the major news outlets, including the BBC, you’ll probably find it easier to get information on a story via video than text these days. It is also easy to find product reviews, ‘how to’ instructional pieces, and all kinds of other stuff explained in a video format. Whether you prefer watching a film to reading or not, there is no denying that video is a huge deal online, but can you get the same kind of SEO benefits with your video content as you can with your written work?

How Does SEO Work with Videos on the Web?

Naturally, SEO when you are dealing with written content works because Google and other search engines are able to analyse what your content is talking about, because it can scan your words. With a video, this isn’t really possible (or it isn’t yet, anyway!) and so instead of using the content itself to assess what keywords and searches it might relate to, you have to write meaningful descriptions for your clips and tag them. This is easy, and can actually be simpler than trying to work keyword search terms into written content. As with any text content, the SEO of your videos will also be measured in terms of how many backlinks there are to it, and this means that as your video gets shared on social media sites or linked to from other people’s sites in posts or comments, your page ranking will theoretically improve in the same way it would for a text post.

But That’s Not All…

While you can use keywords to define what is in your videos, so there is no disadvantage to using it over text, there are actually a few advantages to having at least some video content within your online presence. For one thing, you can have your own YouTube channel where you can be found by people searching on the site. YouTube itself is one of the most commonly used search engines there is on the web, and this is something a lot of people don’t realise when they are thinking about SEO. If you have no videos, then you are missing out on a huge potential audience. There is also some evidence that people find video information a little more credible than things that have been written, purely because they can see the people involved. People who are up to any form of no good online, whether it is a serious scam or something like a product review that has been paid for and created by someone who has never actually used the product, are unlikely to want to show themselves!

Video content doesn’t have to be a big, fancy production these days and a simple presentation done in front of a webcam can often be enough. If you aren’t currently using any video in your SEO strategy or your general promotional collateral, it is well worth planning some in for the future.

About Author: SEO specialist Adam Livermore works as the marketing manager at UK internet marketing consultancy firm Consult 3. He is also a regular contributor to blogs that seek to help businesses promote their content on the web.