And SEO benefits as a nice extra
Longstanding content creators have seen the Web explode and grow up over the past 20-plus years.
The rules of how websites are found on the Web have also changed. It’s far more competitive now. Hundred-word opinions masquerading as articles don’t make the cut anymore. That’s barely a tweet now.
Multimedia extravaganzas
Ranking well in search engines takes strategy and effort.
I ran across this insightful article on how Google serves its search engine results pages. Recently there was an alleged “leak” of Google’s search documentation that was massively eye-opening, and the article described.
One factor I glommed onto was the so-called ContentEffortScore, which the author described in this manner:
“Updating and enhancing your current content can be more effective. ContentEffortScore measures the effort put into creating a document, with factors like high-quality images, videos, tools and unique content all contributing to this important signal.”
~Mario Fischer writing on SearchEngineLand
This suggests that varied media in an article, if relevant and well-produced, positively contributes to the article’s ranking.
YouTube was barely a thing when I started blogging.
YouTube launched on Valentine’s Day, 2005. I began blogging at Mighty Bargain Hunter in May, 2005.
I published my first (crappy) video on YouTube in 2016. Very much a late adopter of this. My single channel has 50 videos as I write this, and 22 of them were published after April of this year.
All that to say: I managed to get through most of my blogging heyday without adding a single video on my blog. I’ve added a few here and there recently, but not consistently.
An old home for a new video
Given that Google appears to value, and grade, the effort that’s put into web content, it makes sense to add (embed) relevant videos on some of my better articles.
I did a recent video on what to do with “spenders” after doing a currency hunt (looking for cool bills in a stack of $1s withdrawn from a bank):
After publishing that video, I remembered that I had written a post on the same topic a few years ago, and my thesis hadn’t changed from then.
Naturally, this was a great opportunity to update and enhance that post, simply by embedding the video in the post!
Done, and done.
Now, for the video content idea.
In this case, I recorded the video, and then remembered a place that it could be embedded easily.
But what about the other way around?
Why not look over some of my old but decent posts and use that as fodder for video topics — topics that would fit well into those older, video-less posts?
Picking video topics this way serves two immediate purposes:
- It builds the video channel, works toward monetization or reinforces it, expands the reach of that platform.
- It improves the older content almost for free with additional on-topic multimedia content.
I have been toying with starting another channel now that I’m getting a bit more comfortable putting video content up, editing it, and so forth.
Gathering ideas for videos by looking at old content with good bones could be a nice way to jumpstart that new channel!
Thanks for reading!
Hi, I’m John and I encourage entrepreneurship in people, including myself.
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Header Photo by Ben Collins on Unsplash