When you think of SEO, videos might not immediately come to mind. After all, SEO is all about stuffing keywords onto pages and hoping you can trick the robots that run the internet into putting your page at the top of the search engine results.

Oh, wait. That was back in 2003. Now, videos are the most effective tool for SEO.

• You want to rank highly for a keyword? Video.
• You want great internet overlord Google to put your page at the coveted top spot in the search rankings? Video.
• You want your brand awareness to skyrocket from a combination of page visits and social media sharing? Video.

Some Relevant Numbers

• YouTube has over a billion users.
• Over 500 million people watch video on Facebook every single day.
• Video is expected to account for nearly three-quarters of internet traffic by the end of 2017.

Video is obviously taking over the internet, which means Google algorithms have started giving priority in SERPs to websites that feature good quality video content. Top of the SERP = more unique visits = high-quality backlinks and social shares = increased click-through ratio = more brand awareness = more leads = more conversions. Simple.

Quinn Dombrowski/Flickr

But, it’s not enough to just have video on your site. If it was, we would all just record some paint drying on a wall and watch our sites climb up the search rankings.

It’s the type of videos that you use on your site that count, too. Consider these numbers:

• Almost 50% of internet users look for videos related to a product or service before even visiting a store. – Think With Google
• Shoppers who view video are 1.81 times more likely to purchase than non-viewers – Invodo
• 51.9 percent of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI – Invodo
• Retailers cite 40 percent increases in purchases as a result of video – Invodo
• 4 times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. – Animoto
• 1 in 4 consumers actually lose interest in a company if it doesn’t have video. – Animoto
• 4 in 5 consumers say a video showing how a product or service works is important. – Animoto

The bottom line is people are much more likely to visit your site if you have a video that showcases your products or services than if you don’t and they’re much more likely to take an interest in your business if you have a video than if you don’t.

The Longer People Stay on Your Site, the Better

SEO is multifaceted and one of those facets is the length of time people stay on your site. Faced with a wall of text, people will usually bolt in well under a minute if they have any trouble finding what they’re looking for.

But, give them an engaging video to watch and they’ll stick around. Wistia mined their own website analytics and found that out of the 100 pages on their site with the highest traffic, the vast majority of them were pages with a video on them. They found that visitors spend approximately 2.6x more time on pages that included a video than pages with no video.

Visitors spending more time on your pages lowers your bounce rate and raises the average time spent on your site, which Google bots love. They will prioritize your site in any searches that contain your keywords because of this. That leads to more traffic, more links, more engagement and even better rankings. Again: simple.

Having a video on your site when your competitor doesn’t (or having a more engaging video than them), can be the difference between who ranks where for a keyword you both want to be ranked for.

Explainer Videos = Conversions

All these numbers and all this theory is great, but the only numbers that count are conversions and theory doesn’t count at all. Only reality does. And the reality is that explainer videos increase conversions. Let’s look at a classic example: Dropbox.

Shunsuke Kobayashi/Flickr

Today, Dropbox seems like a quaint little footnote to the internet that got trounced by Google Drive, but once upon a time, Dropbox was the only cloud storage site on the internet. When it was a brand new concept, people had a hard time wrapping their heads around it.

The company got a handy little animated explainer video made and added it to their homepage and it increased conversions by 10%, a number that doesn’t sound overly impressive until you realize that Dropbox’s homepage had about 750,000 visitors per month, meaning a 10% increase translated to thousands of new sign ups per day. People who didn’t know how the service worked and were therefore reluctant to join suddenly had it all laid out in a simple video and that prompted them to join up.   

Quality Counts

Just as an amazing explainer video will increase your SEO, a subpar one that is made just to take advantage of the SEO benefits can hurt your brand. Improving your SEO should never be the top goal when you get an explainer video made. Improved SEO should be thought of as more of a fringe benefit. The top goal of an explainer video should always be along the lines of increasing brand awareness, explaining how something works (of course) and, ultimately, increasing conversions.

Click here to schedule an appointment with WizMotions to see how we can help you make the perfect business video, increase brand awareness, improve conversions and help your SEO.

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