Did you know YouTube videos can improve your website’s visibility in search engine results, drive more organic traffic to your website, and support your content marketing efforts? Let’s take a closer look at the various ways a YouTube strategy can be used for search engine optimization.
- Gain Visibility in Google Search with Video Content
- Drive Traffic to Your Website with Embedded Videos
- Support Other Content Efforts with Video Marketing
- How to Get the Most from Your YouTube Videos
Gain Visibility in Google Search with Video Content
Search engine results pages (SERPs) are changing at a rapid pace. With ever-expanding features like featured snippets, People Also Ask, FAQ snippets, photo and video results, local search results, news results, shopping results, and more, Google is making it easier for searchers to find the answers they need online. Unfortunately, this also means the traditional approach of getting your website to rank in search results isn’t enough anymore. You need to explore every avenue possible to capture SERP real estate and get found.
YouTube can be a powerful ally here. As you can see below, YouTube videos are being featured in Google search regularly. By incorporating YouTube videos into your marketing strategy, you’re more likely to get your content in front of searchers, particularly those who want video content.
Now, you might be thinking…is YouTube the only way to get this kind of impact in SERPs? The answer is yes. When it comes to search visibility, it’s basically YouTube or bust.
Do you need to host videos on YouTube to rank? Not always, but…
“In a study of 2.1M searches and 766K videos, YouTube accounted for 94% of all video carousel results on page one of Google”
Great study by @dr_pete
via @moz https://t.co/T4p0jLzuJh pic.twitter.com/tE3IpqYF0d
— Cyrus (@CyrusShepard) October 14, 2020
Drive Traffic to Your Website with Embedded Videos
While snagging search engine real estate with YouTube videos is great, you don’t want all of that traffic going to YouTube’s platform, especially if your goal is to get more eyes on your website. By embedding your YouTube videos in your webpages and blog posts, however, you can drive that traffic to your website.
A webpage with an embedded video can appear in search engine results with a link, a description, and a video, which can draw more attention to the result and potentially get more clicks from searchers.
But is it worth it? Does embedding a Youtube video actually provide enough visibility to be worth the effort for SEO? In our opinion, absolutely. For example, by adding videos to 13 high-value pages for one of our clients, we were able to help them see an immediate and significant boost in both video impressions and clicks since the additions were made.
Support Other Content Efforts with Video Marketing
It’s no secret that online audiences prefer video content. In fact, 72% of customers prefer to learn about a product or service through video. So if you’re already creating content on your website to provide helpful information or answer questions for customers, adding a video component could have a positive impact on both SEO and attracting new customers.
Certain content is perfect for video. Recipes, product demos, walk-through tours, “how to” content—all of these appear frequently in Google image and video results because people engage with this kind of content when it’s in video form. In other words, there’s a good chance that creating videos that showcase your products or that share helpful tutorials could give your existing content marketing efforts a boost.
How to Get the Most from Your YouTube Videos
So what’s next? How can you take this information and start incorporating it into your existing SEO and content marketing strategies? Here are a few steps you can take.
Create a Video Content Strategy
Start by identifying important pages on your website. Do some keyword research to discover what questions customers typically ask about the topics those pages cover. Once you know what people are searching for in order to find this content, you can start making videos that target those questions.
Treat Video Scripts Like Text
YouTube and Google know the importance of video and are getting much better at understanding video content. YouTube is automatically transcribing videos, which means it’s listening to the words you’re saying. Like writing a product page or a blog post, you’ll want to include the words that matter.
Take YouTube Optimization Seriously
Optimize your YouTube video like you would when implementing SEO best practices on any other webpage. Make sure that your video title and description utilize keywords your audience searches for, and include links to relevant pages on your website. By doing this, you increase the chances that your video will be served in both YouTube and Google search results.
Add VideoObject Schema
Schema markup helps search engines understand what’s on your webpages—that includes videos embedded on your site. By utilizing VideoObject Schema, you can tell search engines that there’s video content on your website by including details like video title, description, length, and even a transcript. This can help your videos and webpages get better visibility in search engine results, especially in video results.
Interested in incorporating YouTube into your marketing strategy? With a comprehensive approach to SEO and content marketing, Hurrdat can improve your brand’s visibility in search engine results and drive more traffic to your website. Learn more about our Search Engine Optimization services and our Content Marketing services!
