Online video content has grown significantly over the last few years. Based on Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, video content will account for 82% of the total Internet traffic by 2020. Incorporating video content from viral clips to educational and informational videos is already a popular marketing strategy to capture audience attention. Besides this, video marketing can also be used as an effective component of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), to rank higher in organic search results to gain traffic to your site.
How Does Video Marketing Help Improve SEO?
SEO cannot be achieved solely through keyword stuffing and keyword research. Search engines now place more importance on social metrics like audience engagement and user experience. Google likes when visitors click pages to browse and doesn’t leave right away because it is a sign that the page is good quality. So, the primary goal of search optimization is to make pages that have high dwell time. Pages containing video content supposedly hold viewers’ attention two minutes longer than picture-and-text pages.
By making helpful or relevant videos, you can attract many people to it. If people like the videos, they’ll create links to it, which enables you to passively acquire more links to both your site and your video page over time. The videos themselves will also rank in SERPs, thereby creating another channel to your website.
Still need convincing?
Studies show that video content easily outperforms other types by a wide margin, when used right. Based on research by Animoto, 4x more customers prefer watching a video about a product than reading about it and this is especially true for niche or technical products.
Did you know that including video in marketing emails can increase click-through rates by as much as 300%? Moreover, mobile video consumption rates double each year.
Video marketing can increase your chance of ranking on the first page of Google search results up to 53 times to expand your audience retention besides improving click-through rates and bounce rates. Video content also increases the chances of your content being shared across social media channels.
But with such tight online competition to be featured on the first page of Google results, you really need to pull out all the stops to be sure you hit the mark with all your social media efforts.
Video Marketing For SEO Strategies
Now that you know how vital video marketing is for your SEO campaign, you need to get started creating videos to reap major benefits for your business. Here are some key points that you should keep in mind when working on your video marketing strategy:
Simple And Short
With attention spans getting shorter, do not make the video too long. A study by Wistia found that videos of up to 2 minutes length get a lot of engagement and thereafter there is a drop in engagement on videos between 2 and 3 minutes.
High- Quality Video Content
For the content marketing part of your website, such as the blog posts, it is advisable to prepare educational or instructional video content, with purely informative stuff to ensure good page ranking.
But for conversion focused videos that can be found on the sales and product pages or the services page, the production value should preferably be high. If people see a poorly designed video, they will automatically lose trust as they might associate this with your work. Consider budgeting for high-quality conversion focused videos to show you in the best light possible.
Transcribe Your Script
While search engines can somewhat recognize the context of the video and images based on the title, it is still important to add a video transcription for SEO purposes. YouTube has a feature to automatically transcribe videos but there may be inaccuracies, especially if the speaker is unclear or has an accent. So make sure your videos are transcribed properly so that Google can easily crawl through and index it.
Include Relevant Keywords
Optimize your video content for keyword with a high volume of searches and a medium to low difficulty level. Google shows up more video results for some searches, such as how-to topics as it thinks that people are more likely to click on a video than a blog for such information. So the search engine ranks videos among the first-page results. Make sure to include keywords in the title of the video, the video description, file name and tags. Add rich-video snippets so that your audience can also see a thumbnail of the video in searches.
Host On YouTube
Hosting videos on your website is not a good idea as it can slow your site down. Google do not allow video clips to pop up in search results if it is not hosted on YouTube. YouTube is now owned by Google so if you want to rank high in Google, you are better off posting your video on YouTube. This also gives your video more extra exposure as more people use YouTube than your site and it also allows you to show up on YouTube searches. You can include a link to your website on your YouTube channel page to drive more traffic to your site. Hosting videos on YouTube makes it easier to embed it into your web pages, blog posts or social media channels, especially, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, so that more people can like, view or share your videos, thereby expanding your online presence.
With creative and engaging video content and properly implemented SEO tactics, you can stay ahead of the curve with your video marketing strategy. DirectiveGroup has the expertise and experience to draw up an effective digital marketing strategy for your business, while ensuring high SEO rankings.
