A blog or vlog can help bring visitors to your website, engage with your audience, increase your brand awareness, and help showcase your expertise. This is because you can use both to deeply explore topics related to your niche, which helps position your brand as an authority in your field. The blog and vlog can both be useful, which makes choosing between them can be difficult. Here, we will explore which one is better in which circumstances.
Does video replace written content?
The term “vlog” comes from “video blog” because that is pretty much what those are. However, Google does not index your videos when the search engine crawls your site for SEO purposes. The only way that Google can rank pages with vlogs is if you include written content on the page as well, a summary is usually good, so long as you include the keywords you want the video to rank for in the summary.
Sometimes, written content simply makes more sense than a vlog, and there are situations where a vlog makes more sense than a blog. Keeping an active blog on your site can help you attract regular visitors, and you can easily add links in the blog to different products, services, or other pages on your site in the text, something you cannot do in vlogs. It also takes less time to write a blog, and you do not have to pay for special effects or other production expenses.
If you lean more toward vlogs because of the visuals you can include in your videos, keep in mind that you can add images and videos to your blog posts, and you can even make them interactive.
Vlog best practice
A good practice for your vlogs is to include a transcript in the written content, because it not only helps your video show up in Google, but it also helps people who may not be able to hear or understand the verbal dialogue; it makes the video accessible for everyone. Adding subtitles is also a good practice.
You can also make your vlogs based on your blogs and include the video on the same page as the blog. This will help you ensure that the vlog is optimized through the blog post. If you do not have them on the same page, you can also use internal linking — which is good for your search engine optimization — to the vlog and blog on their respective pages.
What to consider in the blog vs. vlog decision
While you debate which format to select, there are a few things that you should consider.
The Topic
There are some topics that are easier to write about and some that are easier to speak about. Typically, more complex topics are easier to explain in a blog because you can succinctly break the topic down into smaller chunks to help someone gain a better understanding of it.
On the other hand, Vlogs should only be a few minutes long; people expect vlogs to be short, which is part of why complex topics should not be vlogs unless you plan to do a series of vlogs that each cover a different subtopic on the subject. This can be much more time-consuming and expensive than a blog, so that is something to keep in mind.
Topics that require a lot of visuals are usually good for vlogs. Adding too many images to a single blog can slow your page speed down. A vlog can help you make a dry topic come to life in a more digestible and insightful way.
The Audience
What is the age range of your audience? When writing a blog or creating a vlog, it is always crucial that you keep your audience in mind. Take some time to conduct audience research to determine what mediums they would prefer to receive from you. If they want more blogs, give them blogs, and vice versa if they want vlogs. This does not mean that you should only produce that one medium, but that you may want to use that medium more often going forward.
Both blogs and vlogs give you an opportunity to strengthen your relationship with your audience and interact with them. For example, your audience can leave comments on your blog or vlog, whether on social media, YouTube, or your site itself. This opens up the avenue for your audience to ask questions and give feedback, which you can — and should — then respond to.
Your Strengths
Some people are great on screen, able to speak comfortably and naturally, while others are just natural writers. Play to your strengths. Is everyone who is involved in the content creation more comfortable writing? Keep writing those blogs. Do you have someone who does great on screen? Keep creating new vlogs. You should still work on creating some of the other content on occasion to give your site variety.
Types of Vlogs
You might not think that a vlog fits your brand, so you have avoided them until now. Or you could be the type of person who gets nervous once you are put on camera. If this is what has held you back from creating vlogs, there are other ways you can create videos. You do not need to be on screen for your vlog; you can use animation or visually guide the viewer without showing them your face. For example, if you are creating a video for a recipe site, you can have a close-up on your hands as you are mixing ingredients, so they cannot see your face.
Your Resources
There is more to making a vlog than picking up your phone and pressing the record button. You will need to take time to think about what you want in the video, putting together a script or at least talking points. You also need video editing skills, a decent camera, and something the ensure your camera is not shaking and everything stays in focus. You want to impress your audience, which means your vlog needs to look great. If your business does not currently have these resources, it may be best to stick with blogging until you can get the resources necessary to make high-quality vlogs.
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