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In this video I discuss how using video can help with SEO. Placing video on your site alone doesn’t seem to influence SEO. However, video does influence a number of different factors such as time on site, pages per session and bounce rate.

Ultimately, using video on your site should educate and engage users. If your video does that then there are many positive user signals that come from this.

The video includes a chart and data created by SEMrush. You can see this chart and the full, report here:
https://www.semrush.com/ranking-factors

Video Transcript:

Hey, I’m Matt Byrom and in this video I’m going to show you why using video on your website is so important for SEO.

New Data by SEMrush

SEMrush recently released their “Ranking Factors 2.0” report based on a study of over 600,000 keywords. You can find a link to the report below this video so you can check it out for yourself.

What I found particularly interesting was this chart.

SEMrush Ranking Factors 2.0

Source: SEMrush

It’s a condensed set of data showing some of the main ranking factors SEMrush identified. You’ll notice that using video on your page is actually the lowest overall ranking factor. This means that placing a video on your page alone doesn’t really help with SEO.

However, don’t write off video just yet as video has many positive benefits that affect SEO.

Time On Site

Firstly, using video on your website often results in a higher time on site. This is because people will watch your video for longer than they would normally browse around a page and read text. As you’ll see, time on site is the 2nd most important factor in the chart so doing everything you can to keep people on your site for longer is extremely important.

Pages Per Session

Video is a great way to explain your product or service. And when people understand what you do more completely they are more likely to perform other actions on your website such as fill in a form, view other pages or download additional content. This can affect the pages per session and in turn bounce rate. These are the next highest factors in the chart.

Content Length

One of the things you can do when you embed a video on your site is include a transcript of that video. This is basically like including the script of the video on the page. This means Google has more information to index and more they can understand about the page. This also helps with total content length which is in the middle of the chart. The transcript can also help with keywords being in the body and perhaps density as well – which are both lower in the chart.

The Result

When you combine all these positive side effects of using video, it’s no surprise that people often see an improvement in their search engine rankings by using video.

To influence all these factors it’s really important that the video is useful, engaging and also used on the right page of your website. Basically it needs to give the user what they want so that they stay and watch it and then ideally take further on your site afterwards.

If you have any questions please comment below. I’d love to discuss this further. Alternatively, please email me at email me here.