Why Are Videos Essential To SEO in 2020 and Beyond

Video content is all over the internet!

According to Cisco, by the year 2021, the online video content will make up around 80% of the global online traffic.

However, even that doesn't seem to be enough to meet the worldwide demand for video content. In a study, HubSpot states that 43% of people want to see more video content in the future.

However, as always, creating online content is never enough. You have to back it up with SEO optimized practices that make your business and digital content more visible and accessible by target audiences.

Let's find out how marketers can adopt a few strategies to make their video content and SEO practices get in sync for a higher return on investment.

How to get your videos picked up for featured snippets

As video content takes over the digital platforms, how can Google stay behind the trend? Google's algorithm is adjusting and updating to incorporate the new way of how people are producing and consuming digital content via videos. 

Related: 150+ YouTube statistics and facts for 2020

Most of us have seen the video featured snippets on Google search engine results, at one point or another.  

Besides, in "A reintroduction to Google's featured snippets," the tech giant talks about how featured snippets don't necessarily have to be textual. According to the newly launched video featured snippets, the search engine directly takes to the specific point in the video where it answers or provides a solution to your query.

Google is continually working to improve the efficiency, accuracy, and intuitiveness of its search engine algorithm. This means, as a business functioning in the digital times, you have to keep up with the latest industry practices and trends to continue enjoying the attention of your audience and facilitating them.

In 2020, you would see more video featured snippets.  Here are the three most effective ways that will help you get your videos picked up for featured snippets.

Organize your video content into relevant sections

This is very important!

One of the significant aspects of ranking your content high on search engine result pages, like Google, is to deliver value for your readers. You should make it easy and simple for audiences to find the answer to their queries. And a great way to do this is to divide your content into discrete sections that all deliver value for different search queries.

You must organize the video into clear segments and help Google understand what your video is about and how it can help visitors.

For example, a video on the Ketogenic diet may include the following sections:

• What is a keto diet?
• Keto-friendly food items
• Benefits of following the keto diet
• A keto diet plan

Adopting this practice will make it easy for search engines to use specific clips from the video as a featured snippet when relevant to a query.  

Optimize the video for SEO

As marketers around the world are investing more and more into producing video content, not optimizing your videos for the SERPS means missing out on a substantial section of potential viewers.

The title, description, and tags tell Google what your video is all about. This assists the algorithms in increasing the visibility of your video content when it’s relevant to a particular search query.

So, other than publishing your videos with discrete sections, you should also make sure it is optimized for SEO.

Besides, according to research by HubSpot, where they studied 165 videos featured snippets, around 80% of them contained a keyword in the title of the video. This means that traditional SEO practices are also useful and very important for video content.  

Include a transcript for every video

YouTube has become one of the major players in the market for publishing and consuming video content. A lot of businesses these days prefer first to publish their explainer, 2D animation, corporate and other videos on YouTube, and then have it embedded elsewhere.

Even though the captions or subtitles that YouTube generates automatically are quite good, but it's not the best. The platform falls short now and then.

How building your YouTube channel can boost your SEO results

YouTube's popularity as a search engine is going off the charts.

Based on the data from Jumpshot, it is fair to say that we need to broaden our views on what 'search' means for digital users. According to the data, YouTube is the third most popular search engine after Google web search and Google images. It is even twice more commonly used than Bing. 

With 2 billion monthly active users, YouTube continues to grow.

As more and more people start to use YouTube to search for things, it is highly recommended for marketers to publish tailored and optimized content, particularly for YouTube.

It has become too big for businesses to ignore anymore.

Luckily, the increasing demand for producing video content is brilliantly being met by some of the professional video production company. Making it very easy for marketers to create and share valuable, customized video content.

It's very simple. The more videos you put out there, the stronger your YouTube channel gets, and the more visible you become.

You can even direct a chunk of this traffic to your website and nourish them to become your leads and customers.

Besides, you can even increase your organic Google traffic by publishing SEO optimized YouTube videos.

Do you want to know how?

According to Tubular Insights, 55% of the Google search results include at least one video, and 82% of them are originally published on YouTube.

Considering YouTube is owned by Google, in 2020, we should see even more YouTube videos in our search results.

How embedding YouTube videos will help with bounce rate

If people love videos so much, why not give them more of it.

Your website and blog posts are a couple of places where the majority of people come to find out some specific information. Hence, it is highly recommended to embed video content on your website and blog posts, as relevant. Besides, it not only improves the experience of your website visitors and delivers additional value for blog readers, but it also significantly improves your bounce rate. 

There are many reasons for the high bounce rate, including:

• The webpage doesn't meet the expectations of the visitors.
• The web design is not appealing, user-friendly, or intuitive enough.
• The user rather too quickly found what they were looking for and had no reason to continue looking around.

However, one of the effective ways to improve your website's bounce rate is to embed YouTube videos. 

According to research by Wistia, integrating videos on webpages almost doubles the average time spent on the page as compared to one without a video. This means embedding videos on your webpage can help reduce the bounce rate.

Besides, you don't necessarily have to use your own videos all the time. You can embed any YouTube video that is relevant to your content and adds value for visitors, by mentioning the source.

Wrap up

As the people across the globe continue to share and consume information through videos, it becomes more and more important for businesses and brands to tap into the highly aesthetic medium of expression. Falling behind in producing video content, today means missing out on several opportunities of engaging with your target audience and improving your organic visibility on search engine result pages. Hence, make sure you are not only creating exciting videos for your audience but also following these strategies to make the best out of your investment in video content.

Featured image by StockSnap from Pixabay