Brighton SEO 2024 - How videos can elevate your Google rankings and improve your EEAT
Audio Summary
(Kelvin introduces me with this slide)
"Thanks Kelvin. Yeah, today I want to talk with you about the topic of video."
"As an SEO you might wonder why should I bother about videos at all? Well, I want to show you in detail why video is getting more and more important."
"Let's start with the obvious. Mobile traffic is increasing year after year. This is how it looked in 2020."
"This is how it looked in 2023. You can see mobile traffic is on the way."
"And another reason why videos are getting more and more important is because of content goblins. Content goblins destroy the fun of navigating a website. Recently I wanted to bake a cheesecake and was looking at Google for cheesecake receipt. Wonderful. I found the first result with video. I thought amazing. Let's see what they have."
"And after I open it, first things first. Content cookies. All right. I can accept that."
"Well, then the SEO part started. A lot of internal links. Nothing telling me about the cheesecake receipt. All right. All right. Let's see what else they have."
"Oh, there are videos. Cool. Let's see them. Oh, it's the latest videos. It's nothing about the cheesecake receipt. And in this video, they had like 10 ads. What is going on here? And then I continued. And I have seen only advertisement. And this is where you can see that content goblins destroy the fun.
"I guess Google was warning me already with the seven hours and 45 minutes. It's probably the time I need to find the recipe."
"And this all doesn't surprise me when news like that come out of it. Gen Z is seeing TikTok as a new search engine as an SEO. You are, of course, a bit suspicious of news like that. But things are changing."
"Of course, Google isn't sleeping. Google is also introducing video features to the SERP."
"And recently, short videos have made their way into the SERPs. And this is, of course, an answer to the changed user behavior."
"Mobile phones, vertical videos, short duration. This is Google's answers to the increase of mobile traffic and vertical videos."
"Even Gary from Google said it in the search of the record podcast that once they see that the search engine is picking it up. They were talking about the topic of vertical video. Then they want to present it in some way and then maybe will push for it."
"And they said this all in March of 2022. So you can see vertical video is also on the radar of Google's eyes."
"So let's dive in and see how you can use video properly."
"First, we're going to talk about what the Google Quality Rate Guidelines are telling us about video in the eyes of Google and how it is impacting your EEAT."
"Then we will see how you can use video in your SEO strategy."
"And then we will see how the future of video will look like."
"But first things first, let's have a look how video is seen in the eyes of Google."
"Have a look at the Quality Rate Guidelines. You can see that video is mentioned 106 times. So this is not a small note on the side. This is actually a big topic in the Quality Rate Guidelines."
"And it's very important to know that in the eyes of Google any content is created equal. It doesn't have to be a text content. It can be an image. It can be a PDF and also a video. Google is rating everything in the same way."
"And if you look at the topic EEAT, especially experience is really picked up when it comes to social media posts. There it said they are often high quality when they involve people sharing their experience. So even social media posts, which can also have videos in them, are a way of expressing experience in the topic of EEAT."
"And digging deeper into the examples that Google shows in the Quality Rate Guidelines, you can see that cats are definitely experienced. Yes, the examples are all cats. And you can see here that when it comes to experience, it can be even a funny video. But Google is fine with that."
"If you have a humorous video talking about your experience with cats, I can highly recommend this video. It's quite funny. It's a bit older, but it's well enough for Google to say this is a video that shows pure experience of cats."
"If you want an even higher rating of EAT, then you need award winning cats. This cat has won the Golden Gitty award for the best cat video on the internet. And therefore, it is right is the highest EAT score. All right, this is the way how Google sees it."
"Interestingly, nowhere shown in the Quality Rate Guidelines is high quality equipment. This is what I always hear when I talk with customers. They always say, oh, we have to record this in a shiny way. It needs to be super ad-sy. And this is how Google doesn't care at all."
"Videos are as much rated and evaluated as your regular website content. There is nothing different. Google is not not evaluating them, but also not in a special way. It's the same way they are judging your content as your regular text content."
"Videos are as much rated and evaluated as your regular website content. There is nothing different. Google is not not evaluating them, but also not in a special way. It's the same way they are judging your content as your regular text content."
"So therefore, you should always use the same quality of the strategy you use for your website text content as also for your images, PDFs and videos."
"And please, don't be a content goblin."
"Looking a bit deeper, when you see when it comes to classifying EEAT automatically, co-occurrences of an entity that can be your website, your Instagram channel, your YouTube channel can help Google to classify you in a thematic context. That means if you're interlinked or you have the same username, this can help Google to understand who you actually are."
"And this can also help them to evaluate your content against each other. That means if you have a regular website with a great running TikTok channel, the algorithm understands that you are a co-occurrence, then they can connect that and evaluate you in a different way you thought. So this is something interesting to see. So it's written by Olaf Kopp on search engine land that I can really recommend this article where he dig deeper into patent from Google and have looked about the EAT evaluation."
"Alright, so this is most of the stuff we can get from Google and how they see videos in their eyes."
"So let's have a look how we can implement this into our strategy."
"When it comes to a video and SEO strategy, it's actually not that hard. Just take a video and slap it onto a random page with bad rankings. That's all."
"Of course not. Videos aren't mandatory for each page you own. You don't need it on your imprint page and most likely also not on your homepage"
"But there are definitely some pages where you should definitely show videos."
"So let's have a look what those are. To figure out where you should add videos to your page. A simple look at the SERPs gives you the answer. Google is really good at figuring out what the customer wants. And therefore the right feature is being played out for the right keyword."
"And this is very often the case for how to keywords. Check which keywords for your brand, for your topic can be related to the how to keyword and then check how many videos you have there. It's not always purely videos. Sometimes it's also mixed content of text images in videos. And this is there the winner where you can combine your regular website with video embeds."
"One topic for example are ties. How to tie the Windsor knot."
"So normally you have only images. That's how it was at the early days of the Internet. That's how I also learned how to tie a tie. These were quite hard to understand because especially when you go from step five to step seven. It's really hard to imagine how the tie actually has to be moved. So a video as you have seen before is really helpful."
"And even a step further and add it to each image a step by step explanation. So this is I think a perfect combination where video in context of text and image is really helpful."
"If you want to use tools to filter for video results on your SERPs. The common tools like Ahrefs, Systrix and SEMrush. They all offer you to filter your SERP results for videos so you can bug check your keywords and see which keywords actually have in the top three position or top five position or top 10. However, you want to filter it video results and they can really quickly figure out how in your topic videos are being played out."
"If you are a local SEO you most likely know this. But if you upload videos to your Google My Business entry, videos are usually at the second position. So right away on the overview and they are auto playing. So that means the attention of the user is right away grabbed by this moving image. And this is really, really great to get a higher click through rate. And therefore, I think you should really, really add videos to your Google Business profile."
"Okay, you might say, thanks, Ben. That's no news. We all knew this."
"So let's dive in. Here comes the juicy stuff that I recently discovered."
"To really figure out the juicy stuff, the content that is really missing videos. You have to do a video brainstorming."
"Because always keep in mind, there are people that really like to read."
"There are people who really like to watch photos."
"And there are people who really like to watch videos. And those people that really like to watch videos need to also have to fulfill desire of see a video for that query for a topic they are searching for."
"And you can start with yourself. Where would you prefer to see a video rather than images or text? And I can tell you how my last brainstorming session was. I had the task to rewrite the content for our current branches all over the world. And I was thinking, okay, which content is helpful for our customers? And I was thinking of airport rental stations. And I at least have the problem that when I exit the plane, finding the car rental center is sometimes a pain in the ass. Because you have these small directions, they point you somewhere. And the bigger the airport is, the harder it is to find this car rental station. There are stairs, there are elevators, there are too many people. And just it's really hard to find those places. And especially some airports have the car rental station outside the airport itself. You need a shuttle bus to get there, which makes things even harder. So it's not always very trivial. And I think a video would be really helpful for that."
"So what you do as an SEO, of course, you start with a keyword research. You want to figure out how much search volume is out there for this idea you have. And then you get results like this. LAX, that is Los Angeles airports, car rental directions, zero search volumes. Also, alternative keywords, all zero search volume."
"Okay, so let's see another airport. It's we have here Orlando, car rental directions, also zero search volume. So as an SEO, you might think, well, I guess I had a stupid idea. Nobody's searching for that. So why should I now do the effort to create a video? But somehow my gut told me, well, it can't be, it can't be the only one with this problem. So I looked a little bit further. And I've seen actually there was somebody doing a video about this exact topic. And guess how many views this video had?"
"I was shocked to see that this one year old video talking purely about the walking directions from the plane to the car rental center had over 23,000 views. And this is the topic where tools told me it has zero search volume."
"And this wasn't only a one hit wonder. It was also happening at Orlando airport. This video had over 10,000 views. So clearly, there is a need if I would go to my boss and tell him, hey, I need the budget and time to create one page with over 20,000 views per year. I would have no problem to get that. But if I show tools with zero search volume, that's kind of hard."
"Therefore, search data is terrible for creative video ideas. Of course, you can use it for existing video ideas. This is great. But if you want to figure out if a creative idea might have some users, it's really bad. And you might say, hey, Ben, but why don't you use the YouTube data? It's just Google. It's a different target audience."
"There is no real YouTube search volume data. There is no API from YouTube connecting us with their data of search volume. And anyway, YouTube is working completely different. So you cannot really compare those two."
"Think like this. Where could the video really help my customer and"
"Where could the video give additional context towards and photos? Gary, again in the search of the web called podcasts, said it really nice."
"He was talking about cooking receipts. And he says with video, you can actually see the speed. You can see the motion. He was talking about how to stir soup and you can see exactly how it is. And that's why he also understands that some people prefer in some cases video over images and text."
"Again, think like this. Where could the video give additional context towards and photos? What is a video? What is possible in the video to show that isn't possible to be shown in the words and photos? This is the gap you have to find. And with those videos, you can reach a lot of people that are certain that are hungry for your content, but really just want to see a video."
a photo of this prompt I just created. And just exchange the underscore text with your information. For example, I work at the current company six and I was looking for something that is trustworthy and authoritative in the field of current fields, particularly when renting a car at LAX airport. Then it gave me a huge list of ideas. And then I told it, hey, summarize it to the top three ones. I have no time, no budget."
"And guess what? The number one point is navigating to your pick up location at LAX. So this is great to figure out what chat GPT thinks is the topic your users want. So this is a way to figure out what we use. You could create"
"Now let's talk about the technical setup of your videos."
"Rather simple. Upload each video on YouTube. Yes, you can host them yourself on your website. You can use other channels too. But when it comes to playing video results out in the SERPs, it works best with YouTube. Google loves Google. We all know this. And the connection between YouTube and Google is also lightning fast. So definitely upload your video to YouTube."
"You don't have to worry about this guy. Luckily, Reddit videos aren't really properly indexed yet and they're also not played out as a video snippet. And I hope it really stays that way. If somebody from Google is here in the audience, please do us a favor and never ever index Reddit videos. We have enough of this Reddit crap. Thank you."
"Clear audio is also very important. Not only because the user really wants to know what you say, also the algorithm really wants to know what you say because they're really great at understanding what you're actually saying in the video. It gives them context what the video is about. So we have clear audio. They can understand it all better. The user and algorithm"
"But also think of keywords in the script because then also the algorithm and the user will know right away, especially at the beginning what your video is all about."
"So here again is an overview how to figure out what videos are making sense in your SEO strategy."
"And this is it for the SEO and video strategy part"
"Now let's have a look into the future of video."
"Images like this. Carrie Rose standing in front of Google and saying TikTok is a search engine. Well, I cannot blame her. We have seen at the beginning why people are going to videos and TikTok in general. And this is not only opinion. Data is also approving this."
"Studies show or surveys show that 51% of Gen Z women prefer TikTok, not Google for search. Why? Because of the video format and especially those video formats are more relatable and personalized answers to the question or the query the user is asking. So people are more connected to it. This is the next generation of users that are hungry for information. And this is what you have to keep in the back of your mind that user interaction. The way the user is accessing information is shifting for some topics, sometimes more, sometimes less. But keep this in mind when you plan your SEO strategy."
"But let's have a look into the future of Google. What are with the change there in the point of your video? Well, there you think about SGE and are good news. SGE also still plays out videos here. For example, we have a TikTok video."
"But as I said before, YouTube, Google, Google has more real estate on the Serbs and can also use snippets from that. And what we see here is something genius, something super important that most people haven't grasped yet. And this is what I'm going to show you now."
"Video content can't be stolen. Your written SEO content is being crawled, eaten by some AI being spit out in a completely new and different way without crediting you the author. But videos, they cannot be ripped out and then rephrased and reframed by some AI and a lightning time of second and then spit out in a new way. No, they have to take your content and show it to the user. It's not being altered. It's still your face. It's still your brand. It's still your words. And this is genius. So therefore video content can be stolen. This is also future proving your content. Keep this in mind."
"And also when it comes to judging your content, we remember EEAT. The video part in EEAT. The V in EEAT.
"Just as a short reminder, EEAT stands for experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness. "
"And video is playing its card really well in the part of experience. Videos transfer the experience in a way photos and text really can't."
"And in a time where AI spam is ruining the internet and fake reviews, fake experience in text form, this is getting bad.And it's even worse because Google cannot understand it. AI spam sites beat Google much spam update."
"And also images are fooling people. So eventually in the near future, the users and the quality reader guidelines might visit your website and think"
"Video or it didn't happen."
"So that's why I'm telling you start with video. If you haven't done it yet, upload your first video today. Do a summary of your Brighton SEO visit. Tell the people what you really liked about these two days. Do it in a video form and see the magic of video. Maybe you will even rank in the Google SERPs. So therefore I can highly recommend upload your first video if you haven't done that and do today and implement video into your SEO strategy."
"So there's one more thing I want to give you today."
If you scan this QR code, you will come to my link tree page where you can connect with me on LinkedIn. That would be happy, very happy. I will update about my new findings in the topics of video. But I also have a small startup with a small project and case study that I'm working on currently where I will heavily lean into the part of video so you can get updates there."
