Google now presents autoplay video preview clips on many Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), as Video Featured Snippets- which gives marketers more opportunities to be discovered in search. This is good news for you, especially if your website is relatively new and not currently high-ranking in search.
This blog post will cover:
New opportunities for improving your website’s SERP ranking.
Video Featured Snippets: What are they; why does it matter; and the best way to optimize your videos for a Featured Snippet spot.
New opportunity for SERP ranking: Google recently announced they will now be ranking passages within web pages, in addition to web pages and sites.
Google will rank passages of web pages for SEO in 2021. Meaning, organizing passages into distinct sections, correctly indicated by H2 and H3 subheadings, can give a piece of content multiple chances to rank for SEO.
With video, you can also create distinct sections, and Google will notice it in your video transcript- meaning you can even rank for sections of your video, not just the whole video.
What is a Video Featured Snippet?
A Video Featured Snippet is often a search result that includes a 6-second section of a video that answers a search query. It is cued to the part of the video that answers the question, so the searcher gets the answer without having to watch the whole video. In the example below, the video is cued to the exact spot when the video creator explains “how to tie a tie”, which was the search query.
How does creating content for a Video Featured Snippet benefit a marketer?
Having Video Featured Snippets allows your content to be more visible to your potential customers. As with the other types of featured snippets, Video Featured Snippets make your content stand out and “rank 0” (meaning, rank higher than #1, because the snippet stands out from the list of ranked content).
With the popularity of video (more on that in the next section), finding opportunities to create Video Featured Snippets could be your gold mine. It’s what consumers prefer and not everyone is creating video content... yet.
Why is video content important in marketing?
Video is important to marketers because it is a growing trend that Cisco suggests will comprise around 82% of online traffic by 2022. It is continually becoming more coveted by consumers. Hubspot suggests 43% of consumers want more video content.
Autoplay Video Preview Clips are being suggested to searchers more often, presenting an opportunity for marketers to gain their target customers’ attention. 55% of Google search results are videos, and most of them are YouTube videos.
The best way to optimize videos for a Featured Snippet spot
If you want a shortcut to a higher SERP ranking, create videos optimized for and posted on YouTube so that Google can find them easily.
YouTube is the second-largest search engine globally, with its parent company (Google) in the first place spot. YouTube is used twice as often as Bing for search. By creating videos optimized for YouTube, you can improve your content’s visibility.
Another way to boost the visibility of your videos is by creating transcripts for your videos. While YouTube can make them for you, they are not always accurate. It benefits you and your viewers to create your own transcript.
Doing so will also make it easier for you to organize your content into subsections. By creating your script before your video, you give yourself a guide to follow during filming and a pre-made transcript to add to the video when you’re done.
To sum it up...
SEO is a marathon, so finding opportunities for shortcuts to ranking in search is a fantastic way to stand out in the meantime. Featured Snippets are that opportunity. Since your potential customers want more video, creating videos optimized for YouTube can give your content the boost it needs to be more visible, more quickly.
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