Do Videos Help Your SEO Efforts?
We all love interactive content such as videos, but do they have an SEO benefit for your website?
Video Transcript:
Bryan: Recently, when you were looking at the… One of the things that you’ve noticed is that Google seems to be pushing more and more video content in the search results. So, what’s your take on that? Most people, for example, tend to have video search results. Should we encourage clients to move toward that?
David: Okay. That’s a good question. So, I hope you’re getting used to my style, and I’m going to ask you some questions to kind of help you think through this. What’s the world’s biggest search engine?
Bryan: Google.
David: Right. Great. What’s the world’s second-biggest search engine?
Bryan: Maybe YouTube?
David: Right. YouTube.
Bryan: Right. I think Bing… Sorry, go ahead.
David: Bing is like three or four, but YouTube is the second biggest search engine. And you know it’s because people sometimes just want to watch a video to do it. Right? And guess what? Google owns both products. So, it makes sense that Google would promote that not just because Google makes money from it because they sell the ads and the videos but because that’s what people want. So, there is some truth to that. But the other thing I’d say with that is it’s kind of like you guard it. You’ve noticed recently that this is happening, so that might be true. And let’s say for every search, now there are videos. Right? Will it always be that way? And so, this is kind of my SEO philosophy. Focus on the tried and true, and don’t chase the latest trends. So, if Google is pushing YouTube right now, that might be a great solution we might find in the future that’s more and more going to be the case. And it may be that one day, YouTube will exceed Google traditional search as a search engine. But right now, it’s not. So, here’s what I would recommend. Number one, don’t chase what appears to be popular now. Focus on good SEO and keep an eye on that. So, what that would mean is, in a practical sense, that doesn’t mean we should stop everything and throw every effort into producing videos.
Bryan: Right. Right.
David: Let’s pretend that we have a client that produces a product that is very useful but kind of boring. Let’s say they produce PVC pipes, which are a kind of plastic pipe used in all kinds of house installations for sprinkler systems. Okay, so that’s a pretty boring product. If we were to say, hey, Google is starting to approve videos, and we start to promote videos, we might say, well, now I have to produce a whole bunch of videos about PVC pipes. That’s a lot of money and a lot of time, especially if the video is going to be any good and we’re not doing it just by phone. But meanwhile, we could be doing, for the time, better landing pages and more content on our website and still be doing a really good job promoting our services. I guess what I’m saying is not every product or service is really conducive to video. So, if that were the case, maybe I would test out a couple of videos. Maybe I’d combine the video production with a blog post I’d write because blog posts tend to be more altruistic and helpful than a sales page that says hey, did you know you can buy a 50-centimeter diameter PVC pipe that’s white? That would make a very boring video. But if you did something like, what are the uses of 50-centimeter PVC pipe? And you had a video to show these in action, well, that could be very interesting. But that would make a better blog post than a sales page. So, if this were the case and I was really struggling with it, and perhaps I did a couple of searches and saw my competitors are starting to do videos or Google’s starting to insert videos in some of my favorite search results for my products, then I might start to think about video as another way of producing content, just like I use blog content on my blog. I might use the same approach to do some videos, but I wouldn’t stop doing good SEO in order to do videos. I kind of was all over the place, but did I kind of answer your question?
Bryan: Yeah.