Social Media or Video: Which is Best in Your SEO Content Strategy?

There are a lot of good reasons to diversify your SEO content strategy and improve your website’s search engine page ranking. In 2018, there’s a smorgasbord of areas of search engine optimization to focus your efforts. It may be hard to determine where to spend the most energy. Two strong contenders to be considered for increasing your page rank are social media and video content.

Ultimately, it’s part of a sensible strategy to employ video content and social media together, but which one is the real performer?

You can probably guess which choice is a sure thing in your SEO content strategy for increasing search engine page ranking. However, there’s valuable information to be gleaned by taking a closer look at them one at a time –and together.

The Power of Video

Out of all the content on the web today, video content is consumed the most. According to MWP, 55% of people watch videos online every day. Video content accounts for half of all mobile traffic, and by 2018, video content is projected to make up a whopping 80% of all consumer internet traffic.

According to IMPACT, video boosts organic traffic from SERPs by 157% and marketers using video content see revenue growth 49% faster than those who don’t. If that’s not enough, 95% of viewers retain a message better when they have watched a video.

It’s hard to argue against statistics like these when it comes to SEO content strategy.

Video content helps keep people engaged with your site while increasing dwell time (the amount of time spent on your page from the moment a user clicks the link to the moment he/she leaves the site). Dwell time is a metric that Google takes into consideration when ranking a website. The more a user interacts with and dwells on your site pages, the better.

That said, the statistics are only meaningful in the world of SEO if the video content is relevant and perceived as valuable to its consumers. Just like written content, if your video content doesn’t deliver what was promised, users won’t stick around on your site. If your bounce rate is high, (when visitors click your link but leave the site quickly without visiting your other pages), some believe that can hurt your page rank.

Google’s algorithm is favoring video in new ways each year. If you’ve performed a search recently, you may have noticed Google is placing suggested video clips on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) when relevant. Usually, these come up when a search string includes words like “how to.”

Videos aren’t just for full websites. Landing pages that contain video content are favored by Google as well.

In a nutshell, you can never go wrong using relevant and valuable video content.

The Power of Social Media

While social media doesn’t have a direct effect on search engine ranking, there are plenty of reasons to incorporate it into your SEO content strategy. In fact, it can be the perfect complement to video content.

One of the ways social media helps your website is through link sharing. Social media is a sharing platform. When your content is shared, it gets in front of a wider audience. The more people see your content, the more opportunities there are for clicks to your website. Direct link clicks help you to rank higher in search engines. If you are incorporating video content on your site, you can harness the power of the social share to get it moving through the web quickly.

Social media can be used to propel your written content in much the same way. If you have a blog, one of the easiest ways to encourage social sharing is through the strategic placement of a preformatted tweet right in the middle of a page of content. The tweet can be a quote from your blog post, an image, or another element –and of course, a direct link to your site.

You can also use social media to build an audience as part of your sales funnel. If you post on social media platforms regularly, you establish familiarity, which helps with your brand awareness.

Conclusion – What’s Your SEO Content Strategy?

After further examination, if you’re still wondering which of these two powerhouses are better for your website’s SEO content strategy and higher rank on a SERP as a stand-alone strategy, it’s video, hands down. However, if you want a comprehensive approach, using them together is even better.