Video or words: which is better for website & blog SEO?
In this article:
Video or words: which type of content is better for boosting the SEO of my website & blog?
What are the SEO best practices for incorporating video in blogs on my website?
How can I download an Instagram video and turn it into text for a blog post?
This article is from one of our recent Content Corners: Content Corner is our weekly Q&A (on Instagram) to help you create great website content that attracts, engages & boosts your SEO.
Got a website, but no traffic or enquiries? Content is the key. We answer your questions on blogging, blog topics, structuring blog articles, improving existing blogs & tracking your progress…
Abbie's already been inspired into action:
"After seeing Wildings Sudio’s brilliant posts on the importance of blogging, I finally carved out some time this week to sit down and create not one, but two new blogs!"
Video or words: which type of content is better for boosting the SEO of my website & blog?
Content creation is all about video these days, particularly with TikTok’s highly tuned video suggestion algorithm and Instagram’s Reels (short form video). Many business owners are tempted to apply this paradigm shift to blogging, such as adding or embedding videos in a blog post with little or no other content.
While I highly recommend repurposing marketing content between your website blog and social media, you will do your website SEO no favours by adding video content to your blog, but ignoring written content.
It’s helpful to remind ourselves what Google says about SEO to ensure your website content is eligible to appear and perform well on Google Search. Google very open about this in its Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide (written for non-experts).
In overview, Google is constantly exploring the web, looking for pages to add to its index – this is called crawling. While there's no guarantee that any particular website or blog page will be added to Google's index, if you follow a few fundamentals, your website is more likely to show up in Google's search results.
The two main Search Essentials, as Google calls them, are:
Create helpful, reliable, people-first content
Use words that people would use to look for your content
If you think you can solely rely on video, think again – you need to get the specific words from your video down on the page one way or another in written form.
Google does mention video content in its video SEO best practices. However, it’s quite specific: unless the webpage’s main purpose is to show users a single video, the video is complementary to the rest of the content on the page. In other words, blogging is about the words first, but you can use video to reinforce the points you make.
To recap, video is moving visual content, whereas a blog is written content – Google is primarily interested in the written content when it comes to indexing and SEO. As such, we can’t rely on a video to boost our SEO (unless you’re creating a dedicated watch page for each video, which is beyond the scope of this blog).
Focus on the words on your blog pages first and foremost, but use video to act as an enhancement.
Read more: 5 tips to commission a great video
What are the SEO best practices for incorporating video in blogs on my website?
As we’ve seen so far, embedding a video or uploading one onto your blog isn’t going to magically improve your SEO. This is because there are no words on page for Google to crawl and then use to index your webpage.
This type of content is what’s known as ‘thin content’, which is to say pages with little to no added value or anything of substance for visitors.
As we like to say: ‘no writing, no ranking’.
When it comes to content marketing, it’s important to tailor your content to the particular platform. As such, if you upload videos on YouTube, YouTube has the means to analyse the content, create captions, generate a transcript and generally pinpoint the keywords so it can work out how it surfaces your content to other people on YouTube (although there’s no guarantee).
If your marketing plan is focused on using YouTube to build an audience, video is a great way to get that visibility.
The same is not true for transferring that video content directly to your blog and hoping for the same results. (The one exception is a video watch page, but we’re not going to cover that in this blog.)
What we need to do when it comes to blogging and using video content is extract the value, benefits and impact of the content and get it into written format on page.
You don’t need to dispense with the video, but you need to focus primarily on the words.
Here are some suggestions:
Get a transcription of the video and turn it into a blog (this is my recommended approach for best results, but the transcript will need some editing)
Embed the video in your blog, but summarise the key points of the video in the blog so that you can still feed into your SEO
Take screenshots and create a step by step ‘how to’ guide in your blog that backs up what’s in the video
Overall, if you want to use video in your blogs, you've got to extract the words and value from it and turn them into words on page.
Read more: 5 tips on planning a must-watch promo video
How can I download an Instagram video and turn it into text for a blog post?
Repurposing video from Instagram (e.g., Reels or Stories) is quite easy and makes it much quicker for creating blog content that you can then improve and develop indefinitely.
Note that last part: a social media post has a limited lifespan, so if it tanks immediately, it’s almost impossible to revive it. Whereas a blog can be published and then updated and tweaked constantly, plus you can see your results in Google Search Console, creating a highly effective feedback loop.
This is my step by step approach to downloading video content from Instagram, turning video into text and then repurposing it on your blog for better SEO.
This approach is designed to be used on a computer or a laptop, although I talk though some scenarios where you would need to first get videos from your phone.
1. Download your Instagram Reel or Story
On your computer or laptop, use a free online app to download your Instagram Reel or Story onto your system, such as:
WARNING: Avoid any app that requires you to sign into your Instagram account
This will only work for Stories if they are still live, otherwise download the Story to your phone via the archive area in your Instagram account settings
Once the video is in the files on your phone, share it to your computer via AirDrop or another means
2. Use a free online app to generate a transcription
Upload the video from your computer to an online transcribing app
These are free, quick, don’t require need an account and are remarkably accurate, such as:
You can also use the online browser version of Microsoft Word to transcribe an audio file (using the Dictate > Transcribe option), but it tends to be slower than the online apps, plus you need a subscription
WARNING: avoid any website with security issues!
Download the text file to your system from the app following the instructions on screen
3. Write up the transcript into a full blog article
Once you’ve got the raw text, you can then create the outline for the blog and flesh it out - check out a previous Content Corner on this topic: How to structure a blog post for better SEO & engagement
Depending on the video you may need to do more or less of this editing and copywriting
Note that we communicate differently via video, so you will generally need to edit and rewrite a transcription so that it makes sense as written content
Pay attention to the Search Essentials from Google when writing your blog:
Create helpful, reliable, people-first content
Use words that people would use to look for your content
Place these keywords in prominent locations on the page (title, main heading, alt text and link text)
Make your links crawlable
Tell people about your site
Follow specific best practices if you have other content (e.g., images or videos)
Lastly, I would suggest embedding the video if it’s an Instagram Reel; alternatively, upload the video to YouTube and then embed it with the content you’ve written as the blog.
Read more: 5 essentials of a powerful, effective promo video that engages with your audience
