Video Continues to Grow Rapidly
We are always looking at how to improve SEO for our clients and the best way is to get insights from reputable experts. These people are working day in day out with large corporations looking at ways to improve their search engine results. This blog from Backlinko discusses the use of video for SEO and how your YouTube account is incredibly important.
Online video is EXPLODING right now.
In fact, according to Cisco, online video will make up 80% of all online traffic by 2021.
80%!
And that may still not satisfy the world’s demand for video.
Despite the fact that there are more videos out there than ever, HubSpot states that 43% of people want even MORE video content.
In short:
If video isn’t part of your digital marketing plans, you’re missing out. Here’s how you can use video to improve your SEO this year.
Video Featured Snippets
You’ve probably noticed more Video Featured Snippets in the search results.
In fact, Google highlighted Video Featured Snippets in their “Reintroduction to Featured Snippets” report.
And I expect to see more of Video Featured Snippets in 2020.
From what I’ve seen, here are the 3 most important things to do to get your video content in a Featured Snippets.
1. Organize Your Content Into Discrete Sections
This is huge.
Clear sections help Google understand the content in your video.
Which makes it easy for them to use different clips from your video in a snippet.
2. Optimize Your Video for SEO
Google uses your title, description and tags to figure out what your video is all about.
So besides publishing videos that have clear sections, you also want to make sure that your video is optimised for SEO.
In fact, a small HubSpot study of 165 Video Featured Snippets found that 80% of them contained a keyword in the title.
3. Provide a Transcript
The captions that YouTube automatically generates are REALLY good.
But it’s not 100%.
So to increase the odds that YouTube and Google can understand every word of your video, upload a transcript.
Grow Your YouTube Channel
YouTube is already the world’s 2nd largest search engine.
(In fact, according to a study by JumpShot and Moz founder Rand Fishkin, YouTube’s search engine is 2x more popular than Bing)
Amazingly, YouTube is still growing.
In short, more and more people are searching for stuff on YouTube than ever before.
So if you want to get more traffic from SEO in 2020, I recommend creating and optimizing content specifically for YouTube.
It’s a search engine that’s too big to ignore.
The best part? Most marketers are too lazy to make videos. So it’s pretty easy to get your videos seen (assuming you know how to create high-quality videos).
For example, my channel has 26 total videos. And those 26 videos generate over 224k views per month.
(And as you might expect, a good chunk of those viewers turn into website visitors, leads and customers).
It gets better: when you publish SEO-optimized YouTube videos, you’ll own more Google real estate.
Why? Well, for starters: 55% of all Google search results contain at least one video.
(And almost all of those videos are from YouTube).
And considering that Google owns YouTube, expect even MORE YouTube videos in the search results in 2020.
Embed Video Content Into Text-Based Blog Posts
If people want to see more video content, why not give it to them?
That’s why I recommend embedding video content into your blog posts. And from my own Google Analytics data, I’ve seen that this can significantly improve your bounce rate.
