Our Short Answer: Video helps the SEO on your webpage because it adds variety to your content, provides useful information in a shorter format, increases the average time your visitors spend on your site (as known as dwell time), as well as boosting traffic to your site. These are all factors that Google and other search engines consider when ranking your website.

If you had a choice, what would you choose - to read a lengthy blog or to watch a five minute video with exactly the same information? It’s a no brainer because most of us will pick video every time.

Here are some eye-opening video statistics from merchdope.com:

• YouTube has a total of 1,300,000,000 users. 
• Every minute, there are 300 hours of video uploaded. 
• Every single day, people watch 5 billion YouTube videos.

(https://merchdope.com/youtube-stats/#:~:text=Facts%20and%20Numbers&text=The%20total%20number%20of%20people,on%20Youtube%20every%20single%20day)

The world is constantly moving and we are inundated with blogs, articles, case studies and a whole lot more. It’s no wonder why the use of video continues to grow. 

What Is Video SEO (VSEO)?

An important related concept is Video SEO or ‘VSEO’. The objective of Video SEO is to optimize your videos on your webpage, blog content, and landing pages to gain more traffic and visibility on traditional Google search results. You'll also want to optimize your video so you'll rank higher on Google video search. 

Two ways of optimizing your videos are creating a video transcript that makes your videos more accessible for your target audience and easier to crawl for search engines. Another way is by creating an engaging title and description using suitable keywords. 

Here are a few more suggestions why having video on a web page helps your SEO:

So Does Having A Video On A Web Page Help Your SEO? 

Here are some noteworthy statistics that show how video will boost your SEO:

• A Video will add 2 minutes to the average amount of time people spend on a page or its dwell time . 

If people find your video content useful or helpful, Google will notice this and make your web page more visible online.

• According to Forrester “video has an 11,000:1 probability of making it to the 1st SERP (Search Engine Results Page)  on Google, while text-based results have a 500,000:1 probability of making it to the 1st page”.One of things that Google takes into account when ranking a web page is its user experience.
• Adding a video to your landing page will mean that there’s 53% more chance that will be displayed on the 1st of the SERPs.
• 55% of people pay closer attention when watching a video, which is more than all other types of content. 

Web Pages With Videos Boost Your SEO

One of the biggest ways video helps your SEO has to do with Google’s internal algorithm called Hummingbird and how it generates search results. It’s important to be aware that Google values two things: the quality of your content and its relevance to the user’s original search query.

To work this out Google crawls through all the different types of media: video, text and images to determine exactly what you offer. Having a mix of content including written and visual tells Google that your page is informative and varied. 

People often make the mistake of thinking ‘if I optimize all my pages, Google will rank my site higher”, but  it’s not about that anymore. It’s more about how effectively the content on your page answers user’s search queries. 

Types Of Video That Generate More Traffic

WordTracker’s Gareth Davies estimates that 80% of all video content visible on search results pages are information-packed explainer videos.

You may have noticed that if you typed “How-To” into Google that a video appears at the top of the SERP. Google recognizes that the billions of people that search every day want the fastest and easiest answer they can get and don’t want to sift through masses of text to find it. 

If your company wants to offer customers valuable advice, why not upload some tips in video form to a page on your website? This way you are increasing the chance people will find your content through Google. The more valuable they find your content, the more traffic you’ll get.

More Incoming Traffic = Better SEO

A factor in favor of adding a video to a page on your site is the amount of traffic it can generate. The more incoming visitors to your site, the more likely it will help your SEO, as 

It's one of the more important factors for Google when it considers ranking a website. 

If you have informative video content, the greater volume of fast flowing streams of traffic to your page. As PJ Taei from Smart Bug writes, “People are more likely to visit your website by watching a video on YouTube or other social media channels than they are any other type of content”. 

It’s no surprise that all types of businesses are making an investment in more video content. (https://www.smartbugmedia.com/blog/5-ways-video-content-can-improve-your-seo)

One company called Attivio, a B2B financial services company experienced a massive increase of around 200% - 300% more unique visitors to their website because of video. 

Over a time span of 18 months, they saw a 157% surge in traffic from search engines when they began to publish video content more frequently. Their content included multiple types of videos from customer testimonials to product demos.   

Longer Dwell Time = Great SEO

With the average human attention span now shorter than a goldfish at less than 8 seconds, the more likely it is that  someone won’t stick around for long if they aren’t engaged by the content on your web page(s). A higher bounce rate -that’s more people leaving your site - can seriously affect your SEO. Video definitely helps. Research by authoritylabs.com shows that people spend 88% more time on websites that have videos.  

The longer people spend on your site the chances are that your content department is doing something right. Google picks up on this too, and will see your site or web page as having more authority. Here are different periods of dwell time and what they can be interpreted to mean:

2 Second Dwell Time: this means that the person didn’t find what they expected to or wanted to on your webpage; the likelihood is they will go back to Google to find something better.

2 Minute Dwell Time: This could mean that they may have found your site useful enough to have stuck around for a few minutes to scan it, but not to read an entire blog post or view a whole video. The problem may not be the quality of your content, it may be that it’s just not relevant for what this visitor is looking for.

15 Minutes Dwell Time: this means that visitors find exactly what they are looking for and find it super informative and useful enough that they’ll invest more time in reading or viewing content.

Increase Quality Backlinks To Your Site

Today, we live in a world, where thoughtful and skillfully written content gets scanned and skimmed, while video is shorter, easier on the eye and gets the message across just as effectively. More importantly, videos show your intent. You want your videos to send a message to your audience that it’s something you will find engaging and useful. 

To get the most success from video you need to do two things: first ask yourself “who is this video for? Secondly, ask yourself, “who would I like to link to it?”. Video offers an opportunity to communicate helpful information rapidly. 

Your audience can view your video before they read the more lengthy content on your page. The key point here is once you have a high quality video with a particular marketing purpose, it will create even better backlinks to your page. 

Why Are Backlinks Important For Your Site?

Moz.com explains that backlinks are gold for your seo because they reflect someone else’s “ vote of confidence”, by linking to your web page. Ultimately, when someone backlinks to your web page, it communicates to search engines that others affirm that your content is high quality. 

Search engineers interpret this to mean that your content is valuable enough to link to, and this is what helps you rank higher on a SERP, thus increasing your visibility. 

Our Bottom-line: Video increases your website's visibility, user experience, and authority on Google with more people spending more time on your site, encouraging more shared content and more backlinks. Adding video to your web page grows your real estate on the search engine results page (SERP), making it critical for your SEO.