Video’s SEO benefits to commercial agents

 

You don’t need to be a creative genius to understand that adding video to your website will make it more engaging to visitors. Yet creating video content for your business can also attach more visitors to your company and your website, by making you more visible on Google.

 

No 1 Commercial Agent On Google

We’ve talked about Search Engine Optimisation or SEO at length over a number of articles. Achieving high Google rankings for your business becomes increasingly harder. More chartered surveyors and commercial agents are upgrading their company websites and are now aware of the importance of SEO.

You may have also noticed that Google search results have slowly changed. What you will now see, whatever your search for, are more ‘blended’ results. These results don’t just list traditional web pages but features more images and video results, which are positioned high on the page. But these images and video results reduce the amount of space on a SERP (search engine results page) for the more traditional links.

Yet online video does present an opportunity.

 

Search Engines Love Video

All search engines have an increased love of video, particularly Google who started to develop more focus after they purchased YouTube in 2006. Search engines are about information and with video delivering greater retention of information than text, you can see where the love comes from.

‘Demand’ is also having an influence. When Google looks at the content on your website, its looking for relevance, frequency and backlinks. Yet not all content is equal, because in addition Google ranks ‘in-demand’ content highest. As video now represents over 50% of the content being added to the Internet, Google sees video as ‘in demand’.

Therefore video produced by commercial agents and relevant to the market will attain high search results.

 

Online Video = Quick SEO results

There was an old quote that I seem to remember from Forrester Research. They found that video was 53 times more likely to receive a page one ranking than traditional web pages. So video can be a quick way to get high rankings for your company.

Embedding video on your website couldn’t be can easier by using video hosting platforms like Youtube or Vimeo. Youtube is now the worlds 2nd largest search engine and reaches over 800 million users per month.

 

Optimizing Video

We’ve discussed in past articles the way that search engines find, digest and then rank the content of your website. Principal tool for this is the Bot, or spider or crawler, the little robots that crawl your site reading its content.

The problem that bots have with video is that they can’t actually see it. They need text to be able to understand the context and rank the content against keyword phrases. Here are some pointers:

Keywords - You need to give careful consideration to your selection of keywords. They need to complement your video, but importantly your company website as well.

Video Title – Look for something catchy and relevant to your target audience and make sure that you use those keyword early.

Description and Tags – Take full advantage of these sections creating text that is easy to read and descriptive of the video’s content. Again make these areas rich with keywords but are also common and specific.

File name, URL and Link text – Along with the above, you also need to consider these.

With all of your video tagged and indexed there will be a greater chance that your company will appear in ‘natural’ search results. And if you have also been optimising your company website correctly, you’ll achieve the slam-dunk of a dual listing on the SERP.

Philip Burrows, Marketing Consultant