The Increasing Importance of Video for SEO, Mobile User Engagement, and more.

While video as a medium has been around for a long time, video, not content, truly is king. Faster internet speeds, better handling on mobile and improved user experience on social media are skyrocketing video content’s popularity, as well as its effectiveness for marketers and brands. Video increases user engagement and SEO, driving a 157% increase in organic traffic from SERPs. Video also has scale. YouTube is the second largest search engine, after Google, with 5 billion video views every day. In 2021, video represents 82% of all IP traffic.

On social media specifically, over 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram daily and visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared than any other type of content. What’s more, consumers are seeking more and more premium video content, which by nature is longer. Instagram launched IGTV app in 2018 which allows creators to upload one-hour long videos and marketers to dramatically increase stickiness.

The ease, accessibility and immersion of video means that if you can produce engaging videos, people will spend more time on your website and social media, increasing what is known as ‘dwell time’. Increased dwell time leads to improved search engine ranking. More inbound links and referring domains from shared video content also lead to improved search engine ranking. And improved ranking ultimately drives conversions. Now, any page one SEO strategy must not only include video, but be heavily focused on video.