There was a lot of buzz about video and SEO in 2013, but what about video and SEM? If paid search is one of your main sources of traffic and new customers, adding video to your landing pages can help dramatically improve the performance of your campaigns.
Quality Score
Using video, you can help boost critical stats on your landing pages to lower your CPC and improve your ad rank. Bing and Adwords use a similar method to determine how much you pay for different keywords, and where your ads appear on the page. This metric is known as your Quality Score, a measurement of the relevancy of your keywords, ads, and landing pages to different search terms. Search engines take these factors and your other campaign settings like budget and maximum bids into account when determining where your ads will show and how much you will pay for each click.
The key stats associated with your landing page that contribute to your Quality Score include bounce rate and time on site, or put differently, how quickly a person returns to the SERP. There are some indications that Bing gives more weight to these metrics than Google, but both matter for Quality Score, and eventually conversion rates. High quality, compelling video has been shown to improve both these metrics. Distilled recently published an interesting study using data from Moz’s blog comparing different types of media and their impact on page performance. The time on site stats for posts with video are striking:
Moz certainly isn’t the only website to see better engagement from adding video content to landing pages. This type of improvement in time on site, associated with a lower bounce rate, could do a lot to reduce CPC and improve average ad position. That is, if the video content is properly implemented.
The key factors for successfully leveraging video on your landing page is to keep it short, answer the main question the visitor has in mind, and use captivating visual content to keep viewers engaged. Another trick is to take the time to transcribe your video. This gives search engines a way to evaluate the video content beyond the information in the embed code, and can add to keyword density on the page if the video is targeted correctly. Behind the scenes, make sure the embed code is set up properly, the meta description and video tags contain the keywords you are targeting, and that your overall SEO on the page is aligned with a consistent keyword strategy.
Have you implemented video on your landing pages? What kind of results are you seeing? Share on Facebook or Twitter, or let us know in the comments below.
