Should You Embed Videos into Your Blog Posts?

I'm Joshua Feinberg from SP Home Run, and I've been embedding blog posts into videos for over a decade, and I wanted to share with you some tips, best practices, and rationale for why video should go hand in hand with your blog posts.

There are basic best practices that go along with this that will help your search engine optimization, that will help your findability on organic search in two big-time ways.

Appeal to People that Prefer to Watch and Listen to Your Content

For starters, by embedding videos into your blog posts, you will appeal to people that prefer to watch your content and listen to your content, as opposed to reading your content.

And we know as the world goes on, the world becomes more video-centric where so many of us are watching so many hours of content every day on streaming video.

We know there are a lot of people that just plain prefer to watch and learn that way as opposed to reading. But you'll also have the content there for people that do prefer to read or prefer to skim or want to read while they're actually watching your video.

Improves the Average Session Time and Impress Search Engines

Second, this helps a lot with search engine optimization because it improves the average session time on that particular page.

For example, you write a 500-word blog post or a 1,000-word blog post, and maybe the average person is there for three or four minutes -- if you're really, really doing well, it's usually probably considerably less.

However, by embedding a related video that can even be the same content that's in the blog post, all of a sudden, you'll get people that are willing to stay on the page considerably longer because you're giving them an easier way to consume that content.

Now, the cool part is, not only does the reader, not only does the visitor have a more rich experience where they feel like they're actually getting to know you in video because they say that a picture is worth a thousand words and a video is worth a thousand pictures. With all that.

Connect on a More Emotional Level

So you're bonding on a much more emotional level.

Well, that sent a really positive signal to the search engines as well.

Like Google, for example, knows how long somebody spends on a page. So they can tell whether someone visited your website and left after a second or two because they were repulsed by your content or felt like you were doing a bait and switch or something like that.

But they also know when somebody lands on your page and they stay for seven and a half minutes. And Google loves to see that the visitor that they delivered to your site through a search engine results page got so much value from that content, they stuck around for seven and a half minutes, so that sends a really positive signal.

Second, it also decreases the bounce rate.

The bounce rate is how Google measures the percentage of people who visit your website and immediately leave.

It's like you walk into a store and you're like, what the like, you leave immediately.

Well, Google knows about that in the same way that the manager of a shopping mall might know about that. And Google doesn't like to see a high bounce rate, and they don't like to see low average session times.

So to the extent that you can get rid of your bounce rate and improve the number of minutes that somebody stays on your particular page, that's generally other things being equal going to help how you are regarded in how the search engines rank pages and your likelihood of your content getting and staying on page one of a search engine results page.

So you'll get more organic search visitors.

These two factors send a really, really positive signal, and they also help with user experience.

Keep Visitors Around Longer to Increase Their Lead Generation Potential

The longer your visitor stays on that page, the more they're likely to notice that. "Wow! This is really helpful! This is really good. I've been looking for something just like this for hours, for weeks. I can't believe I finally found it. Who the heck is this guy? Who the heck is this gal? What else do they have to say? Oh, cool. There's an eBook that goes into some more detail. Oh, cool. They're having a webinar about this next Wednesday. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to sign up for that."

And then you have successfully converted an anonymous visitor into a known contact to a known lead so you can build a relationship with them. Over time.

You can continue to educate and build trust with them and earn their business down the road.

Also, it's very, very powerful for being able to get more attention on your calls to action to promote your content offers that you have that take basically the visitor and turn them into a known lead.



So when it comes to embedding videos on your blog post, I hope you've seen by now that it should be a no-brainer.

Why you should be combining these two different learning formats; these two different learning modalities.


Are you currently embedding videos on your blog posts?

What kinds of videos are you embedding on our blog posts?

And how is that working out?

Let me know by sharing your thoughts in the comments section below. .


And if you're looking for some one-on-one assistance with your content strategy around videos or blogging, feel free to look me up on LinkedIn and send me a message. I'm Joshua Feinberg from SP Home Run.

And I look forward to hearing your success stories about combining videos with blogging.