Can You Rank Your Blog Posts Higher With Video And Images?

Can You Rank Your Blog Posts Higher With Video And Images

Search engine marketers know a small little secret – it’s that not all your search traffic comes from regular web searches.

For a few years now, marketers have been talking about the importance of using relevant image and video tags and alt-text to help boost Google rankings.

And after the acquisition of YouTube by Google, video content has started to show up consistently among the top-ranking results for many searches.

So why should you care about this? How can you incorporate videos into your search engine marketing strategy?

You don’t have to create your own videos to rank higher.

One of the biggest hurdles is thinking that you don’t have the time to create your own videos. Well, you don’t actually have to.

Just hop onto YouTube and search videos within your industry. You now literally have a whole catalog of content to choose from.

All you need to do is find videos relevant to your current blog post and simply embed them within your post.

It’s literally that simple. And often Google will give some of the top positions to websites that have a video within their post – giving you double space within the SERP results.

Videos have a higher engagement rate than text.

Whether you like it or not, video consumption is on the up and up. That means more and more people are watching video, and it’s not slowing down. Think about Instagram versus TikTok – it’s a battle of static images vs dynamic ones.

That’s one of the reasons why Instagram is experimenting with video content and trying to find a way to keep users on its platform.

At the same time, TikTok has doubled down on video content. In fact, it’s done what many before (RIP Vine) weren’t able to do. The underlying fact can’t be denied: video outperforms most other types of content – consistently.

More backlink opportunities

Many of us want viewership and backlinks. It’s hard to get both but, at a glance your page has a higher value when it has multimedia content on it.

That’s why experts are always recommending the same things – take the time to deliver a user experience that actually engages users.

This means images which are relevant, external links to proper resources, and videos which keep them on-site longer.

Not only does this help with vital metrics like decreasing bounce rate and increasing session duration – but at a glance it makes your page look higher quality, as if more thought went into constructing it.

And since many of us are doing backlink outreach you can imagine the effect this has on our lizard brains: “Oh, this blog has content, images and video, it must be of value, linking here is a no-brainer”.

So video becomes an easy way to not only better engage users, but also up the odds of getting that yummy backlink.

So what else can you do to increase your chances with video SEO?

This is by no means a complete list, but there’s a LOT that you can do to put the odds in your favor:

1. Post video transcripts for people who prefer to read (and give search engines more context on your video’s content)
2. Add video-rich snippets to your website
3. Edit the meta-data to help search engines find it
4. Let the video creator know you’re featuring them on your website
5. Clip the best parts as necessary for your blog

All this without ever creating your own video.

That’s smart SEO. Because it can get you results with minimal input from your side. Just taking what you have and getting the most value out of it.

So go ahead, and add some images and videos to your next blog post. You won’t regret it.

Based out of San Francisco, Ivan Andrianko is the owner of Rocketwheel. He’s been living and breathing all things video since 2007. When he’s not fine-tuning the team’s latest production, you can find him in his woodshop perfecting his craft, or out exploring in the Santa Cruz mountains.