Video has become a very important feature for anyone who is concerned with a good SEO ranking, conversion rates and brand recognition. That’s pretty much all of us.

So how does video marketing affect your website’s SEO, and how can you use it in your content marketing strategy? Below are some key SEO tips, and some practices for using video to climb the search engine ladder:

• Higher CTR
• Lower bounce rates
• Quality backlinks
• Improved SERP rank

Videos Rank in SERPs

Google SERPs prioritise video results. Ranking on Google’s first page is a SEO priority. Pages with videos are 50 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google.

Why is video marketing more likely to rank than say plain text based content? There are a number of factors that influence ranking, one is the recent Google search algorithm update – Hummingbird – which prizes “quality content” over keyword optimisation. It’s all about “quality content”.

Google cares less about whether you have optimised each individual page on your site to using keywords, it’s more about whether your sites content answers the question presented by your  user.

80% of the video content served up in SERPs are informational videos. Results aren’t simply viral lolcat videos, but rather more useful content that answer a user enquiries. And this is where  video marketing is perfect tool for explaining your service easy and eye catching.

Here are some best practices for video SERP:

• Keep Your Videos Short – Keep them around 4 – 5 minutes (attention span fall after 4-5 minutes).
• Create Rich-Video Snippets – This is the thumbnail beside the description of the content on the page. Follow this guide to creating a video sitemap.
• Transcribe Your Script – Google is good at parsing video content for meanings, transcribing text helps the spiders crawl your content for searcher relevance.

Videos Make Users Click

Study show that search results with videos have a “40% higher click-through rate.” This happens because of rich-video snippets beside search results on Google’s window.

These thumbnails show quality video content, and make results with embedded videos stand out in a text-only field.

YouTube automatically makes these thumbnails (because it understands how powerful snippets really are), but don’t rely on YouTube to do the work for you. Rich snippets from your YouTube channel can take your user directly to YouTube – not your website.

If you have worked hard to create a quality video, so sit back and enjoy the rewards by embedding the video directly to your website – like on a home page with a clear call to action, Vimeo and YouTube offer increased reach, but nothing beats the SEO benefits of a home page video marketing right on your site.

Here are some best practices for High CTR:

• Embed Video Directly to Your Site – Don’t slow your site down by uploading video to your server.
• Rich Video Snippets – Entice your users into clicking with an alluring preview.

Videos Can Make Your Site “Sticky”

The average attention span online is less than ten seconds. A high bounce rate is when people leave your website after viewing a page, this will hurt your site’s SERP ranking, and  people leaving isn’t the best way to sell a product. A engaging video is the easiest way to make your customer stay at your page.

Google introduced a new metric into their search ranking algorithm called “dwell time,” this monitors the amount of time a user spends on a website after click-through from the SERP. The longer the user spends on a website, the more likely the content is relevant. Google gives relevant websites more weight via a “Page Authority.”

Page Authority

Visitors who view a video stay two minutes longer and are 65% more likely to buy than other site visitors.” Combine a high time with a low bounce rate, and you’ll have a amazing one-two SERP ranking pull.

Here are some best practices to reduce a bounce rate:

• Embed Video “Above the Fold” – The fold is the imaginary line where a user has to scroll to see more content. On most web browsers it’s around 550 – 600 pixels.
• Make Sure You Use Accurate Video Titles – Don’t trick users with misleading headlines. No one likes being misled, and if they feel betrayed, they will never return.
• Panic Not – A 50% bounce rate is ok.

Videos Can Build Links

Having a video compared to just text will nearly triple the average number of linking sites. Video generate links.

You see people are the ones creating links to your content – not the bots – which mean people love video. Content we create is for the user.

We live in a world where articles get skimmed, videos are lanterns of conciseness, and also a signal of intent that says yes, I want to communicate something to you. This “content” is going to be something you will enjoy. Videos are easy to consume, and that is why they generate audiences.

There is a saying “A video is worth 1.8 million words”. If a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video shoots at 30 frames per second, so a 60-second video really does have the equivalent of 1.8 million words.

People like video because they are useful. People don’t share content that is rubbish. So, to get the success you’re looking for, it’s really important that you really think about who you want to share the video with.

Video can communicate useful information easily, they allow people a chance to sample the content before committing to reading lengthy and sometimes boring content, and a quality video with a specific marketing goal creates high backlinks to your site.

Here are some best practices for Link-Building:

• Embed Your Video – Don’t just add a link to YouTube because it won’t help your SEO.
• Focus The Video on a Single Topic – Keep it simple, but entertaining.
• Create High Quality Video – A Amateur video can make you look unprofessional, and that’s bad for business.

Quality video will improve the way you approach SEO. That in itself is worth more than all the search engine tips you can find.