Video Content and SEO
For nearly a decade, it’s been clear that video has become an increasingly important part of the content formats produced by brands. However, it is much more recent to see the impact of this format in the SEO strategy of these same organizations.
There is a lot of video content being produced around the world, and in many cases, on overlapping topics. It is in this context that discoverability and distribution strategy of a brand’s video content becomes so important.
Budgets allocated to video are increasing, but we find that few brands are really thinking deeply about leveraging and maximizing the impact of all this new content on their target audiences.
In some cases, distribution will be via the brand’s owned channels. An invitation to watch in a newsletter, content deployed on a website to inform and educate customers on a particular product feature, etc.
However, in many cases, the video content produced deserves to be considered for discoverability via search engines.
Indeed, search engines are offering more and more screen space to results with a video component. They offer side-by-side results of web pages and relevant native video.
Google and YouTube are even offering to watch a specific segment of a video if it deals with what the user is specifically looking for.
More and more, the platforms where you upload your videos analyze their content by indexing what can be heard (by analyzing automatically generated subtitles, for example) and seen (by analyzing the text displayed on the screen).
And these two aspects (screen space in search results and analyzing the content of your videos) are only 2 examples of what makes optimizing and thinking about the impact of search engines on your video content so important.
Other interesting things (and examples) can be found in an article from Search Engine Land, which also highlights the impact that video content has on your brand’s website ranking.
So, in the annual planning you’re currently working on, is there any thought given to the optimization and discoverability of your video content?