Engage Your Audience with Video Marketing for SEO

Jasz Rae Joseph — May 31, 2017

Marketers who use video grow revenue 49 percent faster than non-video users. Video marketing can be a great addition to your inbound marketing plan because it boosts engagement, is easy to monitor and allows you to be more creative. However, video marketing for SEO purposes can be a new challenge to many seasoned digital marketers.

Here is what you need to know about video marketing for SEO before you get started with your next campaign.

Video Results in Lower Bounce Rates

Your bounce rate is the number of people who left immediately after visiting your website. Needless to say, our goal as marketers and web designers is to have the lowest possible bounce rate. According to Animoto, 4X as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. This number is especially important for businesses that have an extremely niche or technical product. An explainer video will hold people’s attention for much longer than a paragraph filled with industry jargon.

Video Marketing Analytics

One of the best video marketing for SEO tactics is simply ensuring your video gets seen. Google knows that when your video has a lot of views or is shared and embedded many times, it is probably quality content. A great way to ensure your video is being seen is to keep your buyer persona in mind. Create something they would love.

When Lenovo created “I Fixed It: The New IT Anthem,” the company kept its buyer persona in mind by creating a video that was relatable and entertaining to IT professionals. As a result, the video was shared on numerous industry blogs and social media, increasing its views and brand awareness.

Marketing analytics gurus will tell you that video marketing is the best way to learn about your visitors because you can gather quality data from their behavior.

You can see the exact second your visitors tune in and tune out. You get insight into what your viewers want when you see how many times and for how long a video was played. The number of views on a video gives you a clue as to whether the topic was interesting. The length it was watched indicates whether the video content was engaging. The tailored analytics are extremely valuable to marketers: If 80 percent of your viewers stopped watching after 1 minute and 26 seconds, wouldn’t you be interested to know what was said right before then?

Video Marketing for SEO Best Practices

Keep It Short

Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. Content marketers know the importance of white space, bullets and keeping things to the point, but how does that transfer to video marketing? According to a study by Wistia, 2 minutes is the sweet spot for video length. Wistia found that videos up to 2 minutes long get a lot of engagement while there is a significant drop in engagement on videos between 2 and 3 minutes.

Transcribe Your Script

Search engines cannot watch your video—yet. This means if you aren’t transcribing your videos, search engines have only the title to work off. YouTube has a feature that will automatically transcribe your videos for you. While this is a great starting point, it is important to not rely only on this tool. If your video speaker is unclear or has a slight accent, you may experience inaccuracies.

Create High-Quality Video

Your video quality is a direct look into your business. If people see a poorly made video, they will automatically associate this with your work (even if you’re not in the video-making business). The best way to ensure your video is top-notch is to hire a professional video marketer. But if you don’t have the budget to hire a professional, some low-cost online tools can help.

Don’t Forget Keywords

Treat your videos as you would any other piece of content on your website and optimize them for keywords. Make sure you choose keywords with a high volume of searches per month and a medium to low difficulty level.

Some searches result in more video results on Google than others. YouTube is generally used for one of two things—amusement or instruction. When we searched for “how to kick a football,” two of the first-page Google results were videos.

Google knows that some topics—such as how-to posts—are more likely to get clicks with a video than a blog so the search engine will rank videos among the first-page results. Think about the keywords you are trying to rank for and whether video may be a preferred format.

Once you have chosen your keyword, be sure it is located in:

• The title of the video
  
• The video description
  
• The file name
  
• The tags

Host On YouTube

You may be tempted to host your video on your own site because it feels like you have ultimate control of the video, but you should never host videos on your own website.

This is a bad idea for several reasons. First, hosting videos will slow down your website. The more traffic you receive, the slower your website will be. Secondly, Google has stopped allowing video clips to pop up in its search unless the video is housed on YouTube. Google owns YouTube. If you are hosting your video on your website, you can say goodbye to traffic from the No. 1 search engine. Finally, YouTube is used by more people than your website. By hosting your video on YouTube, you are opening it up to a whole new group of people searching for things relevant to your company. Plus, once your video is on YouTube, you can always embed it into your web pages, blog posts or social media.

According to Forbes, the YouTube algorithm takes into consideration several things when ranking videos:

• How many times has the video been viewed?
  
• How long do most people view the video?
  
• How many positive rankings/comments does the video have?
  
• How many subscribers does the creator (you) have?
  
• How often is the video is added to a playlist?
  
• How often is the video embedded on the web?

The Future of Video Marketing

Video marketing isn’t going anywhere. In fact, according to HubSpot, millennials spend 48 percent more time watching video online than the average internet user. As the internet gets more populated with video content, video marketing for SEO will become essential. With properly implemented SEO tactics, you can create engaging video content that will give you valuable insight into your target audience.

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