How Video Affects Your SEO Ranking

Video has a major impact on your SEO ranking factors. So, if you want to increase your search visibility, integrating video into your SEO strategy is inevitable. Video is an underutilized but highly powerful tool for increasing organic traffic. Getting outstanding scores with video won’t happen overnight but it will be well worth your effort.

So, how can your SEO benefit from video?

Here’s what you need to know.

Thumbnail

Video thumbnail, the main visual element in the SERP (search engine results page), is king when it comes to SEO. They are your passport to the world of play-throughs: whether viewers click on a video all depends on the thumbnail. 

According to Neil Patel, “simple and beautiful thumbnails can increase your engagement by 154%”. Appearing next to search results, these previews let searchers have a glimpse of what the video is about. Thus, when a thumbnail evokes emotion, is compelling, intriguing, and of high-quality, it attracts more clicks than a catchy title alone.

In fact, eye-catching thumbnails perform with a 30% higher play rate, so they can help you drive more traffic to your website. 

Dwell time

Dwell time is the amount of time you spend on a page that you click on from the search results. SEO experts say dwell time is a major factor in showing Google that you deliver value to your audience. Therefore, the more value you deliver, the more valuable your site is. The higher the dwell time, the more search engines like you. 

When visitors find nothing new or interesting on a site, they click away in a blink of an eye, meaning that they did not convert into leads.

However, 80% of marketers claim that featuring video content on their platforms increased their dwell time, reducing their bounce rates.

Social media SEO and video

Social media SEO indirectly improves your organic search ranking. While most of the search experts suggest that social signals don’t have an impact on your ranking directly, social media content helps increase your visibility and website traffic, resulting in a higher on-page SEO score. 

Videos shared on social platforms have a lot of pull in attracting visitors.

Firstly, when a video’s engagement rate is high, it raises interest. Hence, people share your content or check out your website, which improves your chances of closing clients.

Secondly, blog posts with embedded video content can draw up to 3x more inbound links than pages without video.

And inbound links – also called backlinks - are crucial in your SEO strategy as they help you rank better by earning links from other sites. 

Transcripts

Did you know that bots scrape and index the captions and transcriptions in your video? 

Even though videos are not text-based, their contents are infused with relevant keywords which search engines sense. When these keywords are scraped, Google gets an idea of the topic.

Video transcripts are extremely useful for your keyword density and diversity, so creating great video content can highly support your search traffic. 

Titles, tags, and descriptions

Your video titles, tags, and descriptions are gold because they not only inform and engage your readers, but they include precious meta data for search engines about the content of the video. 

If you tailor these three factors to be unique and relevant, more of your content will get indexed and featured on the SERP than before.

The bottom line is that your video improves your overall SEO ranking. Video thumbnails, dwell time, transcripts, and titles are among the top benefits that help you get favored by search engines, so make sure you make the most out of them.

Want to boost your ranking with video? Ask us to create your video content and let your brand rank higher.

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