Do Explainer Videos Help SEO?
-
My company makes explainer videos. I often come across a lot of (seemingly) inflated & unprovable stats, pertaining to explainer videos, from other companies.
This article claims that "Having an explainer video on your web page makes it 53% more likely to show up on the first page of Google search results"
Is there any real data to back up such a claim? Do explainer videos really help SEO? How?
-
That makes a lot of sense - it's kind of what I figured: videos don't help you rank better by themselves.
I feel like the claim, "Having an explainer video on your web page makes it 53% more likely to show up on the first page of Google search results" is definitely misleading. As an explainer video company, we want to understand these things and provide more clarity to our clients up-front regarding Video + SEO.
-
Thanks for the resources! Very helpful.
-
Thanks for the answer and the advice! We've recently been focusing on SEO and marketing tactics for our clients, as they use their explainer videos that we made for them. We strive to make effective videos, not just "good" videos.
-
I definitely understand the purpose and usefulness of an explainer video. As I mentioned, that's what my company, Wick Video, does
Not to stray off topic, but I think "going viral" is something you can't really plan for - and not really the purpose of an explainer video - the main purpose is to convert more leads.
-
Jeremy,
I'm going to answer "yes", but only because I tweaked your question a bit to "Can SEO help explainer videos reach more people?" As Moosa pointed out, (explainer) videos are just another form of content that search engines and other sites can make readily available to people at a moment when they might be most likely to consume it. As an obvious example, if Google determines that a certain video is among the best answers to a searcher's query, it will list that video more highly in their results and the searcher can click through to experience it.
A difference between video and other content, especially web page content, is that video has places in addition to traditional search engines like Google and Bing, where a searcher may go to find it--places such as youtube, vimeo, facebook, etc. As mentioned in the article you referred to, people spend a lot of time at these sites and spend substantial amounts of time watching videos.
But videos do take some amount of written content and meta data associated with them in order for search engines to associate their message with particular searches. And for even broader reach, videos need to have a reason for people to share them with others. These are the SEO-type factors that many webmasters overlook and the factors that sources such as your article seem to take for granted.will happen. The truth is that (understandably) most webmasters don't have a clue of how to associate their video with proper content/meta data and most explainer videos have little to no "share it others" value--either because tools provided by the video creation platform don't make it possible or because the creator just isn't very good at making sharable videos.
As there are now many, many companies that make explainer videos easily available today, a differentiator between those companies would be if they also promoted a service that maximizes the video's visibility for the client. Such a service would delve into the heart and soul of the question that the video is meant to answer to ensure that it is, in fact, answering the right question for the right audience; it would ensure that the right vocabulary is utilized in associated copy and meta data; it would ensure that it is uploaded to theme-appropriate location on the web; and might even provide outreach to webmasters who might be willing to repost or link to the video--all the the SEO-type things that actually make it possible for a video to reach an audience beyond those who might otherwise just have come across it by accident.
-
Lets look at it a different way.
DOES YOUR SITE NEED OR BENEFIT FROM A VIDEO
if the answer is yes, then create one, if no, then don't.
Don't just create content for the sake of it, that way, when you do create a video and it actually serves a purpose then it has much more chance of going viral.
As the name suggests, explainer videos are a great way of presenting a difficult process, or helping people visualise a journey. Take a look at your support emails or FAQ's, what are the common pitfalls for your customers? could you merge all your FAQ's into an explainer video? Chances are, your competitors will have the same issues and so will their customers, if you solve your problems with an explainer video, you also solve theirs....viola your video is going viral.
Some reading:
-
Yes, I also agree with MoosaHemani.
Additionally, would like to mention few resources which you may find helpful- 10 Video SEO Tips That Can Truly Impact Your Rankings
-
Forget explainer videos, does having a video on the website directly increases the chances to get better visibility in search engines? And the straight answer to that question is, NO!
There are lots of BUT attach with it though!
For instance, that video goes viral and you get lots of link back to the website and that page and as a result you get better rankings. Yes it all happened because of that video but directly that video didn’t really help the page get better rankings.
Another idea could be, people (bloggers within your industry) uses that video and as a credit gives you a link back that as a results help you get better rankings.
What I mean to say is that video itself alone cannot help you get better rankings but its just a content of the website that when go viral can produces links back to the website that have a direct impact on rankings.
Hope this helps!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Which seo firms produce the most authoritative SEO studies?
I'm not talking about conjectures or guesses -- but SEO studies that is actually backed up by hardcore data. Which SEO firm produces excellent data-driven studies you always trust?
Algorithm Updates | | Brand_Psychic0 -
Dramatic drop in SEO rankings after recovering from hacking
A few months ago my client's website was hacked which created over 20,000+ spammy links on the site. I dealt with removing the malware and got google to remove the malware warning shortly within a week of the hacking. Then started the long process to do 301 redirects and disavowing links under Webmaster tools over these few months. The hacking only caused a slight drop in rankings at the time. Now just as of last week the site had a dramatic drop in rankings. When doing a keyword search I noticed the homepage doesn't even get listed on Google Maps and for Google Search instead the inner pages like the Contact Us page show up instead of the homepage. Does anyone have any insight to the sudden drop happening now and why the inner pages are ranking higher than the homepage now?
Algorithm Updates | | FPK0 -
Is it bad from an SEO perspective that cached AMP pages are hosted on domains other than the original publisher's?
Hello Moz, I am thinking about starting to utilize AMP for some of my website. I've been researching this AMP situation for the better part of a year and I am still unclear on a few things. What I am primarily concerned with in terms of AMP and SEO is whether or not the original publisher gets credit for the traffic to a cached AMP page that is hosted elsewhere. I can see the possible issues with this from an SEO perspective and I am pretty sure I have read about how SEOs are unhappy about this particular aspect of AMP in other places. On the AMP project FAQ page you can find this, but there is very little explanation: "Do publishers receive credit for the traffic from a measurement perspective?
Algorithm Updates | | Brian_Dowd
Yes, an AMP file is the same as the rest of your site – this space is the publisher’s canvas." So, let's say you have an AMP page on your website example.com:
example.com/amp_document.html And a cached copy is served with a URL format similar to this: https://google.com/amp/example.com/amp_document.html Then how does the original publisher get the credit for the traffic? Is it because there is a canonical tag from the AMP version to the original HTML version? Also, while I am at it, how does an AMP page actually get into Google's AMP Cache (or any other cache)? Does Google crawl the original HTML page, find the AMP version and then just decide to cache it from there? Are there any other issues with this that I should be aware of? Thanks0 -
Our company is mentioned on some high-traffic, authoritative sites and some of our products are linked as well. If we link to those pages, does it affect our SEO? How can we take advantage of those mentions?
I heard that if you link to another site, when Google indexes your site, they crawl that page that is referenced. By whatever metrics they use, if that site has your name or a link to your site, Google would rank it higher. I am not sure how true that is, but what value does another site mentioned our site have on our SEO?
Algorithm Updates | | JonathonOhayon1 -
Getting listed in the Google local result - help!
Good day, I'm really struggling to get a client to appear in the Google Local map snapshot (on the right of the SERPs), even when their company name is Googled. I've tried everything including getting the main Google Local account verified, had some reviews put up, all the required and relevant info has been completed, yet their location and the map never appear. Any help out there as to how I can remedy this? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Martin_S1 -
Guest Blog Post or Article Content Should be Do-Follow or No-Follow Link ? Help Plz !
Many SEO writers and blogs after Google Matt Cutt said, You should not allow no-follow link in Guest Post. What should we do. ? I am allowing Guest post - what they ask in return a do-follow link to their site or blog. other articles or post i wrote about inspiration collected from different source or single portfolio site - i credit them(as blogger - we should respect them). What i am doing right or wrong ? Please advise and help me on this ! http://searchengineland.com/google-guest-blogging-for-links-you-better-nofollow-those-links-166218
Algorithm Updates | | Esaky0 -
The Impact of Attribute REV in SEO
Hi, I'm looking for information about rev="" attribute in SEO. What do this attribute communicate to search robots? Does it Impacts in the positioning of pages / keywords? Does anyone have information that could help me?
Algorithm Updates | | webg0 -
Does my overly dynamic website hurt my SEO?
I have heard from a couple of people that my overly dynamic URL's hurt my SEO tremendously. Can anyone verify that? Of course my provider says it doesn't matter but I take what they say with a grain of salt. Another thing, my web crawls show a TON of errors for duplicate page title and overly dynamic url and duplicate page content. How big of a deal is this? http://www.nvclothing.com
Algorithm Updates | | sviohl0