Video seo stats

[Gordon_Hall]

I've come across various places that give statistics for things like

"Video search results have a higher click-through than plain text results. " and
"Video is 50 times more likely to get organic page ranks in Google than plain text results"

How true are these and does anyone have a definitive guide to video SEO?

[Gordon_Hall]

Hi Phil,

Thanks for the reply. The quote (i've since sourced) comes from Forrester (http://blogs.forrester.com/interactive_marketing/2009/01/the-easiest-way.html) but in checking, even IF there was any truth to it back then (2009), there doesn't seem to be any now.

Regardless, your insights on video are helpful, and along with the info of SERP Turkey, I've got a bit more direction to go in. Thanks again.

[PhilNottingham]

I have no idea where the "video is 50 times more likely to get organic page ranks in Google than plain text results" comes from, but it's completely not true and doesn't even make sense.

I don't think there's a weighting factor that says "if this is a video, it should rank higher", but having rich media like video, on a page, does correlate slightly with better rankings. This does not mean there is necessarily any causal relationship though.

What is true, however, is that having a video snippet can dramatically affect click through rate (both positively and negatively), which can then affect rankings. I don't have any up to date numbers on this, but Im wary of actually listening to the numbers at all for this kind of question, because so much depends on market, the site, the intention of the page and the quality of the thumbnails.

Instead of thinking "if i get video results, will i rank better", you should instead take a step back and work out whether or not it will help from a user perspective to have video on the page, and if so, whether or not video thumbnails will be a virtue or a vice. There is a tool which we use to determine this at Distilled, called SERP Turkey, which was built by our head of R&D - go check it out.

Some general remarks - I think the quality of the thumbnail is a huge overriding factor here that rarely gets talked about. i've seen numerous examples of rankings have dropped when snippets have been implemented and usually this correlates with having very low quality and unappealing thumbnails. If you're thinking of investing in video, I cannot overemphasize how important it is to get a great, eyecatching thumbnail in place, rather than something generic.

You should instead take a step back

[kwoolf]

Phil has a nice write up here http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy

As far as SEO ranking is concerned, structured mark up and time-on-page should increase page rank of the page your video is hosted on, granted you do it right and submit your video site map. Then you'll undoubtedly get social likes and convert more visitors to customers with your video, which I'm sure will also help with page rank (and revenue).

But as far as SERPs go, the simple fact that there are statistically far few videos on your topic than simple text web pages. Make good videos, follow Phil's advice, and you'll certainly see some benefits for your business. That's good all around, but videos cost more to produce. Might want to break out a spreadsheet to run some numbers.