The average online attention span is less than eight seconds. A high bounce rate – people leaving your domain after viewing a single page – will hurt your site’s SERP (search engine results page) ranking, not to mention people leaving isn’t the best way to sell a product or share your services. Video is the easiest way to make people stay.

In 2012, Google introduced a new metric into their search ranking algorithm called “dwell time,” which monitors the amount of time users spend on a website after click-through from the SERP. The longer a user spends on a site, the more likely the content is relevant to their query. Google gives relevant sites more clout via “page authority.”

Videos make people click

One online study showed that search results with video have a “41% higher click-through rate than plain text.” this happens primarily because of professional rich-video snippets beside search results.
These video thumbnails advertise quality video content and make results with embedded video stand out in a text-only waste land.

YouTube automatically creates these thumbnails (they understand how powerful snippets are), but don’t rely on YouTube to do the dirty work for you. Rich video snippets from your YouTube channel take users directly to YouTube – not your domain. You don’t garner any SEO benefits from lost traffic, even if you’re getting loads of views.

Videos build links

People are the ones creating links to your content – not bots – and people like video.

In a world where even thoughtful articles get scanned and skimmed, videos are beacons of brevity, but also a signal of intent that yes, I want to communicate something to you. This “content” is going to be something you enjoy. Videos are informative, but easy to consume.