When it comes to deciding what type of content is most likely to get picked up by search engines and, as a result, get seen by your potential audience, most of the focus is centred around creating text that’s optimised for search engines.
However, over the past few years, SEO has moved away from simply being text-based, and has moved on to other media. One of the most popular of these, both with internet users and search engines, is video.
It’s no surprise that, as the internet has become more widespread and accessible, the attention spans of users have, on the whole, decreased. A lot of this is down to the increased speed and interactivity of websites. Whereas, in the past, a lot of sites relied on blocks of text (essentially mimicking a book), to inform the reader, this is no longer the case. Nowadays, viewers’ attention is constantly flicking between one thing and another, deciding what they should spend their precious time reading or viewing.
For this reason, short, attention-grabbing videos are hugely popular online. They don’t require much of the viewer’s time, and many also relay a lot of information quickly – ideal for the time-strapped browser.
As a result of this popularity with users, search engines now prioritise video content, especially that which has been proven to retain the attention of the viewer. Ultimately, search engines want to prioritise what their users prioritise, and this is why video is becoming increasingly popular.
Of course, it’s not just the video itself and the viewership that attract search engines and make them prioritise certain video content over the rest. The interactivity of the video also matters – the way in which the video is able to grab the attention of the user and make them want to interact with the site afterwards. For this reason, content with a popular ‘comments’ section is likely to fare better with search engines than videos that do not encourage interactivity. Of course, it’s still important to use traditional text-based SEO with titles and blurbs, but video should also now be a priority.
