Video content is an excellent medium to engage with your audience. Video is extremely engaging and will hold people’s attention for a lot longer than other forms of content. YouTube is the go-to platform when you want to post video content, serving as both a hosting platform and a social media platform.
You can interact with viewers directly on YouTube and you can share and embed your videos on various other sites and social media platforms.
When you’re trying to create a solid SEO strategy, it’s important to create the right content and use the best techniques. But are YouTube videos a good use of your time for SEO? Uploading videos to YouTube can be beneficial to your SEO in several ways, so it’s definitely worth taking the time to understand how they can help you.
Understanding exactly what search engines like Google prioritize isn’t always easy. They aren’t completely transparent about how their algorithm works, but we do know a lot of things about what makes good SEO practice.
We might not be able to calculate exactly how important video content is to search engines, but we do know that it’s a factor that makes a difference. There are several ways SEO and videos on YouTube, as well as other platforms, are connected.
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Videos in Search Results
One of the things that Google does is include videos in search results. A search can bring up video thumbnails at the top of the search engine results page. Sometimes the result may even highlight key moments in the video to expand on what the user can expect to find in the video.
The other key feature is the Video tab on Google’s search results. Users can click this and see only video results for their search. Rather than always send people straight to YouTube, these results will often take the user to the page where the video is embedded.
These are two ways having a YouTube video on your website can help with SEO. Additionally, simply having the video available on YouTube and making it searchable will also help people to find your content. You can then use your YouTube channel to promote brand awareness, link to your website and other social pages, and more.
It also might be the case that Google prioritizes search results with videos over other pages. While this isn’t confirmed, SEO experts have noticed that this seems to be the case. You could see big increases in organic traffic by having video content on your pages.
Additionally, you can also bring in more traffic to your website via YouTube, thanks to people finding your videos both through search engines and directly through YouTube’s search and algorithm.
Video Boosts Other Important SEO Metrics
Video content on your website is also excellent for improving some of the other key metrics that Google uses to rank search results. For example, the amount of time spent on a page is one of the metrics that Google looks at.
When you have a video embedded on the page, you can keep people there for the length of the video before you direct them to look elsewhere on your website. Backlinks are also an important metric for SEO, and having videos on your pages increases the number of backlinks that you should receive.
How to Improve SEO with YouTube Videos
So YouTube videos will help you with your SEO strategy, but how do you make engaging video content to improve your SEO performance? Before you get started on making any video content, you need to think about why you’re making it.
It’s a good idea to have specific goals that you want your video content to help you with. Another thing to keep in mind is the quality of your video content. Poor quality content could damage your SEO rather than help it, so it’s essential not to rush into anything. Fortunately, creating quality video content shouldn’t be too difficult.
The technical aspects are easier than you might think, which only leaves planning your content to ensure it appeals to your audience.
Make videos that educate your audience, whether it’s about your products or services, or something else that they are interested in learning about. As well as uploading your video to YouTube, be sure to embed it on a page on your website. But don’t just leave it as a blank page with a video. Give it some context by adding further content to support it.
Creating YouTube videos and using them on your site can help you with your SEO. Create a video content strategy with clear goals to make video work for you.
