Video Boosts Search Ranking
February 17th, 2009People like video online. The growth of broadband has changed the way we organize content — we’re not in text anymore, Dorothy! But how does it affect your rankings?
Really nicely according to Nate Elliot over at Forrester. His team ran a test on how sites ranked in the major search engines for 40 of the most popular keyword phrases. The basic finding was that where videos existed in the pool of possibilities for a query, video boosted rankings. They did some back of the envelope math and came up with the result that each video in the pool has an 11,000 to 1 chance of ranking on the first page, compared with a 500,000 to 1 chance for a basic text page. Big difference (even if the math is a little wobbly).
The underlying message is that optimized videos are becoming more important — you still need to connect text to your videos in order to get them to display in search results. Elliot offers some basic video optimization tips, which I will not duplicate here since you can read them in his brief post.
I think for most small to medium sized businesses the biggest challenge will be to make the video in the first place. Yeah, I know that any 8th grader can shoot a video and upload it, but that’s not the same thing as having a video that both promotes your business AND is interesting enough to get some viral distribution. Plus, you need to have a good way to display it on your site. It takes a little work — but it sounds like it’s worth it.
