When you want to develop an effective website, video and imagery are two types of rich media that a good Search engine optimization (SEO) plan can’t ignore no matter how your site will be coded. Search engine optimization is the process of maximizing visitors visiting a particular website and ensuring that the site ranks high in the list of results returned by a search engine. Major search engines including Google, Yahoo and Bing have numerous content that includes videos and images which appear in a sequential order based on what the search engine considers to be the most relevant results to the users.
Types Of Rich Media: Why It Matters
Search engine optimization is an essential requisite to a successful marketing plan content. Although most people think about text when SEO plan is mentioned, video and imagery are key features that cannot be ignored in a successful SEO strategy. Research shows that including video and images on the content of social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, increases the engagement with users of which the same is true for search engines.
Research Findings
BrightEdge a leading content performance marketing platform did a survey to investigate how rich media such as videos and images performed against the classical text/web page results. To get an accurate results to this survey, the content performance platform dug into their massive data repository from their Data Cube, and made a record of every click data they were able to for six months across all the available queries.
After their research analysts crunched the numbers at the end of the survey, they found out that Positions 1 and 2, showed a lower click-through rate (CTR) than for the classic results. This was attributed to the fact that Universal Search results including videos and images do not always display in the same area on the search engine results page (SERP). However, from Position 3 through 10, images gave a higher CTR and therefore the image results outperformed the (text content/web pages). The classical results image results versus (text content/web pages) was summarized in a curve such as shown below;
The corresponding video results versus (text content/web pages) was summarized in a curve as shown below;
The research showed that both video and image results were not appearing at the top of the SERP as often as the text content/web pages. The theory that was developed from that findings was that images and videos were not as good as web pages at answering a query. The recommendation to address that was that the images and videos should be optimized for search.
Conclusion
It is of much importance to maximize traffic to search engines because it does not do the owners of a website much good if people do not get to see it. Websites happen to be one of the primary marketing channels for many businesses. For maximum visibility in search results, companies need to extend their focus beyond site’s text content to include videos and images. However, with the other marketing challenges that business owners juggles with, they may not know where to start in order to maximize traffic of their websites. Including valuable images and videos is an important aspect of SEO in that conversion journey. Video and Imagery should be integrated as part of the Search Engine Optimization strategy.
