Why search engines <3 live video
Live video has one giant advantage right out of the gate. Search engines love it. By its very nature, live content is fresh. It’s new. It’s what’s happening now. It’s everything a search engine wants to surface to a searcher. People want the best, most up-to-date content possible. Engines like Google are happiest providing their users with relevant — a.k.a. recent — articles or news stories. The only thing better is the real thing: live. Disclaimer: throughout this post I’ll refer to Google as our general search engine, since it is our SEO standard here at Vimeo HQ. That being said, these tips are meant to be universal with engines like Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc. One of the major factors affecting organic rankings is something called content “freshness.” It’s an abstract measure of how new and relevant a given piece of content is in Google’s index. Cyrus Shepard over at Moz wrote an excellent post on how fresh content can influence rankings. In it, he outlines how Google — the unrivaled influencer in this space — may determine which search queries surface fresh content by monitoring real-time changes in search volume, social media mentions, and news coverage. The article also points out that web content is given a “freshness” score based in part on its inception date. New webpages get a ranking boost that diminishes as it gets older. Live video is as new as it gets. This gives live video a head start in the SEO game, but make sure you follow the tips below to get your event in front of as many eyeballs as possible.Improve your live streaming SEO
1. Make the most amazing, high-quality content possible
This is the single most important rule in SEO: make high-quality content. Google’s entire purpose is to organize, find, and surface engaging content that people find useful. When someone clicks on an organic link that takes them to a webpage with great content, they don’t go right back to the search results. They stay and they read or watch what’s on the page. This results in a longer “dwell time” — the measurement of how long a user stays on a page after clicking through from a search result. Joshua Hardwick at Ahrefs gives a great overview on how “dwell time” may influence organic rankings. To summarize briefly: when a user spends more time on a page, it’s a strong signal that the content surfaced was relevant to what they were searching for. Great, engaging content is rewarded by search engines with a boost in organic rankings. Live video is no different than a normal webpage in this regard. A professionally filmed and produced live stream with captivating visuals is bound to attract viewers for an extended period of time, which can lead to a higher ranking in search results. If you’re interested in learning more about creating incredible content, check out Rand Fishkin’s “Why Good Unique Content Needs to Die”.2. Make your embedded live stream work for you
One of the tools you get with a professional live streaming service like Vimeo Live is the ability to embed your stream across the web. This can be a powerful way to drive traffic to your own site, rather than simply to a YouTube or Facebook page. For a webpage with an embedded live video, standard SEO practices definitely apply. First things first, do your keyword research. Identify the top words that you want to target with your live content. Make a list of high-value terms along with semantically related ones that are relevant to the topic. This is a huge topic by itself, so if you don’t know where to start, read Backlinko’s guide on keyword research for SEO. Use your target keywords to write a compelling page title and meta description. Check out our post on metadata for more info. A great title and description is valuable to improving your organic click-through rate (CTR), and driving more people to your stream. Organic CTR is one of the strongest SEO ranking factors, so make sure you write enticing copy. Along with your embedded live stream, make sure to include accompanying written content that is useful and relevant to a potential user. You don’t have to write a novel, but don’t phone it in either. Make sure you’re providing useful information to a potential viewer, and not simply stuffing keywords into body content. A simple paragraph with a plot synopsis is more than enough in most instances. This is a great way to target all of the keywords you researched and provide search engines with more meaty content to index and surface. Another key consideration for an embedded live stream page: links, links, links. Links between web pages are the foundation of the internet, and it’s still one of the ways in which Google determines organic rankings. Getting backlinks from other reputable blogs and websites to your embedded live stream page is a key part of SEO. With Vimeo Live you can create a live stream ahead of your actual event. This gives you time to reach out to other fellow netizens and work to acquire quality links for your livestream. That way, when you officially go live, you’ll have already accrued a strong backlink profile that will give you a rankings boost. Check out HubSpot’s article on inbound link building for ideas on how to get started.3. Lean on Vimeo when you need it
Not everyone needs to embed their live stream all over the web. Some people just want the simplicity of streaming directly on Vimeo. We have good news for those folks. We gotchu. Since Vimeo is an established site with millions of quality backlinks and videos, it has a strong domain authority in the eyes of Google. This authority is passed on to all of the videos that lives on our site, including live streams. This helps to push videos up in organic search results.