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Video is becoming easier, and cheaper, for marketers to create or commission. Here, we delve into the top 5 reasons to focus on video content.
Improve SEO
Q: What are the SEO benefits of video content?
A: There are many:-
Video content attracts traffic to your website. Responding to a poll by Hubspot, 65% of business executives indicated that they would be likely to visit a company’s website after enjoying a branded video. Positive exposure to video sparks curiosity and leads visitors to research your brand.
This has a knock on effect on your website authority. Traffic is a significant Google ranking factor. The more you get, the better your chance of appearing high on search engine results pages. The snowball effect created by increased traffic helps your business reach a much wider audience.
Furthermore, Google’s algorithms prioritise pages that display video content. And video has a dedicated SERP, which helps narrow results for people actively looking for video content.
Search engine AI can identify image elements and relevant keywords within a video, so this content is rich in SEO opportunity.
Here’s a quick recap of best practices for video SEO:
- Transcribe your video - This is an important step towards making your content more accessible. It also helps bots to gather more accurate information when they crawl your content.
- Use attractive thumbnails - This is a quick but often overlooked task. Thumbnails are one of the best ways to drive video engagement. Take the time to assign a beautiful and relevant image to your video and it will greatly enhance your CTR.
- Keyword research - titles, video descriptions, subtext and meta tags can all be optimised. This helps provide bots with context for your content.
Reduce page bounce rates
Including video on your page is a creative way to increase the amount of time people spend on your website.
The average visitor spends 88% longer on a website with video. This may be because videos are more entertaining, or because they are more difficult to skim, and take longer to absorb. Either way, people also retain information much better when it is accompanied by visuals. So video not only improves the amount of time your spend with your visitors, it improves the quality of that time too.
Grab attention
Video is more eye catching than text. It's also more memorable. According to Hubspot, 55% of people play close attention when consuming video – which is more than all other types of content. Users are drawn to movement and action, and are engaged by exciting visuals.
A picture can tell a thousand words, so one video thumbnail can convey many things to a user before they even press play. Design aesthetics and branding can help reinforce your brand. And video can carry a great amount of detail and subtext.
Boost conversion rates
Video can do wonders for your conversion rates. Take landing pages for example: including video can increase conversions by 80% or more. Adding video to your emails can also improve your click through rates.
You can use video CTAs to help push those conversion rates even further.
Produce shareable content
Video is a hugely popular content for sharing. It's a lot easier to pass on a video you have enjoyed than it is to describe it. It's that 'you had to be there' kind of thing.
And by sharing your video, users are linking others up to your business brand and advocating your website as a wellspring for great content. Social media video generates 1200% more shares than text or image content combined. So if you are looking to improve your reach, data suggests that video may be your best bet.
So there you have it. Video is a content marketing tool that opens up plentiful SEO opportunities, keeps visitors hanging around longer, captivates the imagination, converts visitors to leads and inspires people to share.
