With billions of users online every day, you need to work hard to make sure that your practice stands out among the crowd. How do you do that? How do you ensure that when patients — and prospective patients — search on the Internet, your website pops up as one of the top results? One way of ensuring that you rise above the rest is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Great SEO means that when someone searches Google (or any other search engine), your website will be one of the first results they see.
There are countless strategies for improving your SEO, including using strategic keywords and adding in-depth information to your website, but an especially powerful method is the addition of video content to your website. Today, we focus on three key ways to use video content to improve your website’s SEO.
1. Integrate video throughout your website
In their article, “How To Use Video To Boost Your SEO“, Idea Rocket Animation mentions that a key metric used by Google to rank sites is the length of time visitors stay on a page. Images and text are scanned quicker than ever these days. With the ever lowering attention span of readers on the web, viewers glance at your images, briskly browse your text, and move on to the next site.
One benefit of adding video to your website is that your viewers’ attention can be held longer on each page as they take the time to watch the videos. With the proper integration of video content throughout your site — not just corralled into a special videos section or linked from another website — you can keep visitors on your site longer, increasing the average site visit time, and over time, increasing your search engine rankings.
2. Tell your visitors (and Google) about your videos
When ranking sites for the web, Google’s web-crawling software (called Googlebot) “reads” your website, so that it can determine what makes up each page. This allows Google to refer your patients to the appropriate sections of your website. Google can’t “read” your video, so it helps to include a text description. This allows the Googlebot to understand what is on your web page. This helps you in two ways: not only will Google understand your videos better, but it can lead to additional mentions of keywords and phrases related to your patient’s search — sure to boost your SEO even higher!
3. Share your videos where your patients are
If you’re actively marketing your practice on social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook, use of video content should extend to these sites as well. As discussed in, “Leveraging the Advantage of Education Videos” by Bob Main, continued linking of site pages — both internally on your own site and externally on other pages — can help boost your search engine results. Improved page rankings will also result when other sites link to that page. By using your own tools to increase exposure, not only will more potential patients see your videos, but your website will seem all the more important to search engines.
How can you get started with adding video content to your site today? If you already have an account with us, you can sign up immediately for free training on improving your SEO by integrating our great library of video content on your website. If you do not have a current account with us, sign up for a free two-week trial of our internet-based software program that makes it easy to use video on your website, to engage patients throughout your practice, via email, and on social media.