With 2 million blog posts being published every day, the internet is quickly becoming saturated with written content.
Every time you go to write an article for your website, try typing your title into Google. I can guarantee you that there are dozens of articles with the exact same title, no matter how creative you think you are being.
For your blogs to gain traffic and drive revenue, they need to be significantly better than what is already out there. For many posts, one way of gaining a competitive advantage over other blogs is to include video content in your article.
Here are some of the ways that video content can make blog posts a true asset for your business.
1. Videos allow your blogs to pick up traffic from Google AND YouTube
A side-effect of there being so many blogs is that picking up organic traffic from Google is very difficult. This is highlighted by the fact that over 90% of posts get zero traffic from Google.
This means that unless you have a large mailing list that you can send your blog out to, or you have established social media followings, you are very unlikely to get enough eyeballs on your blog to make writing it a worthwhile endeavor in the first place.
Given that YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google, having video elements in your blog gives you the advantage of being able to drive traffic to your blog from YouTube as well as Google.
If you have a video, uploaded onto YouTube, that is embedded in your blog, that video can rank for your target keywords in YouTube.
This video can then contain a call to action to click on a link to your blog in the video’s YouTube description.
For now, YouTube is less saturated than Google. It is far easier to rank a video on YouTube than it is to rank an article on Google.
A video that is high-quality and detailed enough to be the “go-to” video on its topic in YouTube can therefore bypass the competitive slog that getting traffic from Google has become.
Here’s how you can add YouTube videos to your blog post:
Related: Google Loves Video and Here’s What’s In It for You
2. How-to videos can allow you to produce the best guides in your industry
One of the most common and popular types of blog posts is the “how-to” post.
These are blog posts that aim to provide instructions for how to do something that people often use Google to find out.
The hope with these posts is that if you rank well in Google for one of these questions, then lots of searchers will start to see you as an authority on the topic that a post is about.
If they have further questions about that topic, they will go back to you for answers because of how your article helped them out the first time around.
Again, the saturation of written content on the internet means ranking for these types of questions is very difficult to do, so you need to provide an answer that blows every other post on the topic out of the water.
For many types of instructional based articles, explainers and how-to videos allow you to clarify things further. Video can show people the nuances of tasks that text alone (or even text and images) simply cannot.
Videos also give viewers the opportunity to pause explanations at points where more clarity is needed.
Here’s a how-to video we made for one of our clients:
Read more: 10 Startups That Found Success with Epic Explainer Videos
Quite simply, the use of video allows you to create better “how-to” posts than competitors who just use text and images. In the blogging and content marketing game, the cream tends to rise to the top, so adding that extra element of quality can be the difference between success and failure.
Want a video for your business?
3. Videos will draw more social traffic to your blog posts
Both Facebook and Linkedin give more exposure to video-based posts than to ones that only contain text and images.
You can take advantage of this to drive more visitors from these social platforms to your blog posts.
It is a good idea to promote your posts on social media anyway, but if you have some video content as part of your article, you can edit out a snippet of that video (around the 30-second mark is advisable) and use that to “preview” your post on your social channels.
Not only does this increase the number of users that see your post, but it will also increase the proportion of people who click through to actually read the article itself. This is because video creates a “pattern interrupt” that is becoming increasingly necessary to pull people out of the scrolling cycle of their social feeds.
4. Embedded videos help with a page’s SEO by increasing user engagement
Google is increasingly deciding what pages it should rank for specific queries based on “user engagement metrics”. This refers to how a user interacts with a page.
If a searcher interacts with a page in a way that suggests that they have found the answer they are looking for, then Google will start displaying that page more prominently for that particular keyword.
Google measures user engagement through a number of different metrics, one of which is the time a user spends on a page.
The more time someone spends looking at the content on a page, the more Google believes that the user in question likes the content. Therefore pages that score well on this metric get slowly pushed up the results page.
Adding videos to your post gives users more elements of your content to engage with. This increases the average amount of time that a user spends on your post giving you an all-important SEO boost.
5. Videos help convert blog readers into customers
Blogging takes time, so you are going to need a decent ROI to make it worthwhile. No matter how proud you might be of your blogging efforts, it means little if you don’t turn readers into customers.
One of the reasons why blogging can get a bit of a bad reputation in terms of driving revenue is that a faceless blog just doesn’t connect with people enough to turn them into customers.
People find your blog because they are looking for a specific piece of information and when they find what they want they leave, never to think of you again.
Using video in your blogs can stop this cycle of people reading and leaving. It can help visitors attach a name, face, and, most importantly, a brand, to your articles. It is only when your blog becomes a known part of your brand does it really start generating and ROI for your business.
But before you grab your phone and hit record, learn the basics of how to film like a pro. In this video, Erin shares useful tips you should consider.
Read more: How to Start a Vlog – An Easy to Follow Guide
This post was written by Oli Graham, Marketing Manager at RightlyWritten