Non-Textual Content SEO Part 2: Video and Audio

Video SEO

Rich web pages that include a variety of media types tend to rank better and have higher conversion rates. Text and images are excellent ways to deliver information, but they might not suit everyone. Some people may prefer watching videos. Others might respond better to audios. According to Hubspot, video is the number 1 form of media used in content strategy, as of 2021 [24].

Here are some best practices for video SEO aimed at increasing traffic to the page that the video is on:

Terms targeting video rich snippets

Look at the SERPs for the target keyword and consider the type of rich snippets appearing for it. Search terms including keywords like tutorial, review, how to, what is, explanation, demo and video will typically return video rich snippets. Videos will work especially well for web pages that we want to optimize for target keywords that include these italicized terms above.

Decide where to host

We have two options to host the video:

1. Host the video on our own website

2. Choose a third-party platform, such as YouTube or Vimeo to host the video and embed it into our web page.

While many people choose to host videos on YouTube and embed them into their web page, it does not guarantee that all the traffic watching the video is directed to our website. Often, our YouTube domain will rank instead of the website. If our goal is to rank our website and boost conversions, the better option is to self-host the video. With self-hosted videos, it’s certain that:

• Anyone wishing to share the video has to do it from the web page only.

• Anyone wishing to watch the video has to come to our web page to do so, making it easier to lead to a conversion.

• Google has only one URL to rank for our video. There is no alternative page (on YouTube or Vimeo for example) to rank.