2015 was a big year for video and 2016 will be even bigger – Facebook reported that twice as many users now watch video via the platform, daily unique views on YouTube peaked at 1 billion, and marketers predicted that by 2017 video will account for 69% of consumer internet traffic.
As more and more businesses start to develop their own videos to increase consumer engagement, it is important to think about how video can also support your SEO strategy – done correctly, it can make a real difference.
Be useful
Remember search engines want to provide web users with a good experience by producing useful content in response to search queries. This is the same for video, and much like your website, your video will only be well received if it consists of good or engaging visual content or information.
Use your own site
Although YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, with more and more people using it for day-to-day research and tutorials, I recommend that all businesses that have developed video content host that content on their own website. Not only will you increase web traffic as and when you share the video on your social media platforms, but you may also climb a few places in Google, as the search engine rewards your website for hosting good and engaging video content.
Video goes viral
As video is more engaging than written content, it is far more likely to be shared on social media. For the lucky ones, this is the start of something going viral – therefore it is vital to ensure you always include a link back to the source of your video, i.e. your website, to increase both web traffic and your position within the SERPs.
For the techies
Of course there are many more technical things you can do to support your SEO strategy when creating and posting video, from ensuring each one has its own individual landing page for indexing, to adding the video transcript to html of the page where it is hosted.