How Video Content Can Benefit SEO and CRO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is all too often thought of solely in terms of the words on a page that Google “reads” when crawling a site. While things like title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and written content on a page are certainly important, video content is also important to SEO, and adding video to webpages can do a lot to improve SEO. It’s also hugely important to conversion rate optimization or CRO. SEO and CRO services work in conjunction with one another to drive traffic to a website and then make users take the desired action – called a conversion – and video is crucial to both. How does video help SEO? And what does it do for CRO? Read on to find out!

An understanding of what Google looks for when crawling websites and what factors into their rankings on the SERP (search engine results page) is needed before answering the question “How does video help SEO?” When deciding what web pages show up highly in the SERP, Google’s algorithms value the quality of the content on a page and how relevant that content is to the original search. Thus, SEO services will commonly involve optimizing the existing content on a page by adding relevant keywords, making sure the content is grammatically correct and reads well, and ensuring there is no duplicate content or writing new content that’s quality and keyword-rich, but that’s not all. It’s a common misconception that Google only looks at the text on a page – it also scans for additional media types like images and video to see all that a page has to offer so the search engine’s SERP can be more relevant to users. In Google’s eyes, relevant quality written content is great but relevant, quality content accompanied by graphics and videos is even better. Sites with a mixture of quality text and visuals are varied and informative, boosting SEO efforts. Thus, it’s evident that video and SEO have the same kind of relationship as written content and SEO do.

It’s not all about the relevance and quality of the content though – Google also pays attention to how long people stay on a webpage after they arrive. A webpage could have thousands of people visiting it every day, but if they’re only sticking around for a few seconds, Google won’t rank it very highly in the SERP. It also stands to reason that a web does not have quality content. Consider the fact that users typically read just 20% of content on a page and scan it rather than taking the time to read it thoroughly. This means the inclusion of media like video can keep users on a site longer, thus providing another boost to SEO efforts. As you can see, there are a lot of ways video can help improve SEO.

If there’s more relevant content to engage with on a site, users will stay on it longer. And typically, the longer someone is actively on a webpage, the more likely they are to convert. Video will not only help drive traffic to a webpage but keep users on the page as well because it gives them more content to engage with. In fact, 83% of video marketers report that video has helped increase the average time visitors stay on their page. Even a video on a website’s landing page can boost conversion rates by 80%!

Video also helps CRO because people are more likely to buy a product after watching a video for it. This is mainly because people retain more of a message when they watch it in a video rather than reading it. The human brain is hardwired for visual content and processes it up to 60,000 faster than text, so if you have something important to say about your product or service, saying it in a video will communicate it to consumers much more quickly and effectively than text.

Still not convinced? 54% of consumers say they want to see more videos from their favorite brands, which is by far the best type of content to attract people’s time and attention. Click here to learn more about video and SEO and how Intero Digital’s video services can help your digital marketing efforts.