As you're forming your content strategy, the topic of video will come up. Can and should it form a part of your content strategy?

In all likelihood you would love to incorporate video into your strategy. The biggest barrier is creating high quality, engaging video is time consuming.

Here are five reasons why you need to get over these thoughts and commit to making video part of your content strategy for search engine optimization purposes.

1. YouTube Is The Second Biggest Search Engine

Google dominates the search engine industry, yet YouTube is a search engine in itself with an algorithm to help the millions of people searching for videos everyday. Having researched 1.3 million videos on YouTube , Brian Dean of Backlinko was able to draw some strong correlations between various factors in videos and higher rankings.

Interestingly, the average video on the first page in the study was over 14 minutes long which confirms what YouTube said ( in 2012 ) that total watch time influences rankings. Take a read of the Backlinko piece for optimising your videos for YouTube search.

By creating video content for YouTube, you are opening your brand up to a whole new search engine where you can start to channel people into your various sales funnels.

2. Video Keeps People On Your Site

Google doesn't release their search algorithm for obvious reasons. Yet it is agreed that the longer someone spends on your site, the more Google realizes your content is useful.

Video can keep people on your site longer due to watching time, therefore helping your SEO.

You have two options on how to host your video. Host the video on your website or embed the video straight from YouTube. If you embed the video from YouTube, the views generated from these page views have the flow on effect of helping your video in the YouTube rankings. SEO flow on effects! 

3. Video SEO Is Open For Exploitation

Video SEO hasn't matured in some industries allowing you the possibility to attain quick success (there are no guarantees in SEO). This is not only the case for YouTube, Google ranks videos in various ways in its SERP's which are also open to exploration.

As more research is completed to determine what influences the ranking of videos there are the usual suspects that can be relied on in the meantime:

• Keyword research, using title tags that people are searching for
• CTR (clickthrough rate) optimisation using creative thumbnails and eye catching details
• Accurate video tags used to help search engines know the content of the video

Completing these simple steps into your video will put you ahead of much of your competition ensuring your videos will be ranking for relevant keywords.

4. You Can Repurpose Video Content For More SEO Benefits

If you create one video, you can repurpose the content. The two common forms of repurposing content are:

1. Breaking the video up into smaller videos for social media use
2. Writing a transcript of the video

Unfortunately, voice to text transcriptions don't make for the best user experience. Rather than straight transcribing the content, look to create an awesome blog post from each video with headers, bullet points, data, maybe more video, and content upgrades where possible.

Both your audience and Google will appreciate these blog posts, the two people you want to impress in your quest for SEO success.

5. Creating Links To Your Site Is A SEO Fundamental

Getting your video out there and seen is another subject entirely, but once your video gets momentum, a great video will see people linking to your site from around the web. It's unknown how much links influence search engines rankings, but there's a universal agreement, organic links help your SEO performance.

If you aren't considering video as part of your content strategy, you're missing out on a huge opportunity. Google and YouTube are the biggest search engines serving video content which is more popular than ever.

Filed in // Search Engine Optimization, Content Development