You must be thinking, clickbait 🪝, right?
Well, it kind of is, but also isn't.
I make my website rank on purpose but had an accidental big win on a specific topic.
Let me explain what happened.
Looking through Google search console
Now and then, I like to take a Sunday to go through my search console, Ahrefs, and analytics.
This process includes checking broken links, seeing where I might have missed a broken image, and most importantly, where I can optimize!
On 27 June 2021, I wrote this article about moving from GIF to video format. And this article was purely written to make my website faster.
Which it did! These pages I changed became so much faster, so I was happy.
Back to now, I was checking my Google Search Console and noticed the following:
The screenshot above shows I got clicks and impressions on video content?
And although I did do some twitch before, this never really picked up. So I was surprised where these impressions and clicks came from.
Diving a bit deeper into the reports, I found the keywords used and decided to go through them in the video tab on google.
And on the "Chrome screenshot" query, I managed to find the following video snippet.
Pretty impressive, as this is only an 8-second self-hosted video snippet. (Which used to be a GIF)
Here, you can see it in action: Detecting faces from the webcam in JavaScript.
Conclusion
Moving from GIF to video does not only make your website faster. It even helps get you ranked on video content!
I, for one, was super surprised as I haven't even optimized any on this content for that purpose.
Did you ever have random SEO wins?
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Top comments (2)
This is super cool. I have a plugin on my build to automatically check if a .mp4 or .WebM is available for any given gif on my site. I also self host all 3 versions of every gif.
The article I posted today takes clips from the YouTube video and embeds them in the article. I like how this turned out. Not sure if any are going to rank, but interesting that they could.
waylonwalker.com/jut/
That's really cool!
Def something I want to try in my new website using a image CDN
To auto do stuff like this.