Is having a Video important for SEO or is it the time-on-site that's important?

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Assuming it's a relevant video, is having a video on your landing page considered a good SEO tactic in and of itself? Meaning, when google crawls the page, will they say "good job, there's a video here."

Or is having a video on your landing page something that helps you improve on other ranking factors like increased time on site? So, it would not be the video itself google "likes" but rather the increased User Experience factors that went up.

(Crossing my fingers I explained this well enough)

Thanks for any input,

Ruben

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Thanks Cyrus. I appreciate the the multi-faceted answer along with the links. I'll see what I can do with this.

• Ruben

[Cyrus-Shepard]

There's a couple of things that can add concrete SEO benefit when adding video to your site:

**1. Video Schema: **This can tell search engines what the video is about and add a ton of relevant information. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/videosearch/schema

2. Video Sitemaps: You can additionally provide some of the schema information here. But at this this can help get your videos indexed https://developers.google.com/webmasters/videosearch/sitemaps

3. Transcriptions: You can see how we do this on Moz with our Whiteboard Friday series. Basically it combines the best of both Video and blog post formats.

So the benefit is 2-fold. When implemented properly, a video can add contextually relevant information for SEO purposes (although "simply adding a video" likely isn't enough. And secondly, the increased user engagement, if/when successful, can add an important boost.

Hope that answers your question. Best of luck with your SEO!

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Thanks!

• Ruben

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Hotly debated. Same with image.. does having images on a website improve its rankings?

The answer is yes and no. I wouldn't say there is a DIRECT correlation (i.e. simply having a or <video> object on your page won't increase rankings). However, if you have properly optimized the image/video, then there is addition relevance and context that gets added to the page that would help with rankings.</video>

At an indirect level, visitor would be less likely to bounce back to serps, spend more time on site, have a better user experience and be more likely to link to the website.