When optimizing and monetizing our sites, video SEO is not something we consider, yet we really should. Unlike the maple tree market in Canada, video SEO is a largely untapped market. If you want to rank your website, in the long run, you ought to consider more than just building a large number of links; you need to consider venturing into video as well.
A lot of brands try to incorporate online video into their marketing strategies. In many cases though, companies don’t place priority on it like they do basic SEO. However, when video SEO is used correctly, the video is a powerful form of online content. It can definitely make a critical contribution to your brand’s SEO strategy, in more than one way.
The Main Aim of SEO
The idea of adding video to your marketing strategy may seem like an excellent idea. However, you need to make sure that video compliments your SEO strategy for it to generate a Return on Investment (ROI). If you don’t make a point of defining video goals while in the early stages, the video will end up costing your client or you a lot of money.
The money you invest in your video will go down the drain if you fail to define your goals clearly. One of the biggest SEO mistake people make is commissioning the creation of a cool-looking infographic, paying so much for it without considering the overall aim.
It is easy to get blinded by the infographic build links. However, you need to consider whether the infographic will increase high-quality traffic, increase conversions, or simply provide off-page SEO benefits like links.
With video content, you need to make sure you know what you intend to get out of it. If you get into senseless video SEO, it will be difficult for you to conceptualize a successful production that will captivate your audience or achieve your desired goals.
What Should Be Your Video SEO Goals?
Your two primary goals should be:
Increase conversions
Generate social shares and build links
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Increase Conversions
If you want to make video SEO work for you, you need to focus less on increasing rankings and concentrate more on increasing online revenue or sales. Video SEO is a two-part process that focuses on attracting visitors to your website and optimizing the site to make the visitors convert into paying clients or visitors.
The best thing about the video is the fact that you can use it to increase conversions on any website. The primary means of increasing conversions using video is by making use of rich snippets and embedding a video on a landing page.
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Video on a Landing Page
The thing is, when a visitor lands on your website, you only have seconds to impress them and get them engrossed. That’s the idea behind a landing page. However, you might have noticed that text content doesn’t keep the audience engaged like before.
Video SEO is all about increasing the length of time your visitors stick around, and the number of conversions you make to paying customers. Here are some of the ways you can enhance your website’s conversion rate:
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Product Videos
More and more retailers are taking advantage of product videos to increase their conversion. According to Invodo, 52% of consumers said that watching product videos made them feel more confident about making a purchase from websites.
All you need id to make a short product demonstration video. Make sure that even though the video is short, it’s clear enough to speak for itself and its product. Check out some of the brands that have increased their conversion rate using product videos.
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Introductory/Explainer Videos
Since not all business with websites has products to sell, those that are service oriented can still increase conversions by using introductory or explainer videos, as you see on my homepage. These videos have varying styles, and it’s still not definite which method works best. It entails making a video that explains or introduces your business engagingly and more efficiently.
Make sure the video you make explains the service you are offering, introduces the guys behind the service, and make sure you show your service in action. If you embed the explainer videos on the ‘about us’ page on your website, you will increase your services’ overall conversion rate.
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Rich Snippets
Using video SEO to increase conversions shouldn’t be about what you show your visitor when they land on your website. It’s about what you are showing them before they even get there. Luckily, these days Google search has significantly increased in the use of video snippets.
Video snippets are embedded on the page to let the visitor know that if they click through to your site, they will find a vide waiting for them. The rich snippets you stand out from other search results on that page. Hence, searchers become more inclined to click yours and increase your website’s traffic as a result.
The video snippet shows the visitor the length and thumbnail of your video. You need to make sure that the thumbnail stands out and that it sums up what the content of your video is about to maximize conversions.
How to Use Rich Snippets
First of all, in order to show rich snippets for your video SEO in the Google search results, you will need to self-host the video. However, if you have WordPress, you could use Yoast Plugin to host the video with YouTube.
However, we highly recommend self-hosting the video since it has a number of other SEO advantages as opposed to using YouTube or any other free video host. Self-hosting maybe a hassle at first, but when you get used to doing it, it gets easier over time. If your website is ranking for high-volume keywords, then the increase in conversions will bring more traffic to your site.
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Build Links/Generate Social Shares
If you do it well, your video will generate a significant number of links to your site. That is about a hundred or thousands of quality links. If you want immense success, then you have to make sure your video is exceptional and that you have a great marketing plan.
You need to make sure that the video has something to offer the visitor. Make sure it either educates them, makes them laugh, shocks them, amazes them, or annoys them. If you can, maybe a combination of a few of these.
Unless you evoke strong emotional reactions with the video, no one will be interested. The aim is to make viewers share or write a post on it with a link back to your website. Whatever video SEO content you create must have a responsibility to successfully attract a number of social shares and inbound links for your site.
Before doing video SEO, you need first to consider if you have enough quality traffic that attracts links automatically. If not, you need to do some conduct outreach, and if that’s the case, how much? However, it matters not how good the outreach plan is, what is important is the video’s quality. High-quality video SEO is what attracts a large number of links.
Creating a substandard video in the bid to try and keep the costs down will do you no good, the video won’t pay off. You need to think of what your goals entail before producing the video. Once you have a high-quality video, self-host on your website in order to get people to link it back to your domain.
How to Make Video SEO Work
For your video SEO to secure high-ranking listings on the target keyword search, you need to optimize, link and build independent pages on your own domain, while intertwining with YouTube’s robust video presence. Here are some of the approaches that will work:
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Taking Ownership of the Videos on YouTube
When it comes to video viewing on the internet, YouTube is the most popular platform. Therefore, consistently uploading new commercials, or brand-oriented videos to YouTube will help you access the general public, which is what I do with my video reviews that I do for DrennonMarketingReviews
YouTube will provide you with a “content identification and management system” that will help you track branded content across the website. It will also help you monitor the ownership of products, and the video distribution contains infringement. It also offers another way to take and find ownership of content pertaining to your brand.
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Optimize Key Site Elements for Targeting Keywords
When you maximize the video for its visibility, you increase the video’s chances of being discovered on various search engines. How well the video ranks depends on a combination of social outreach (for subscribers, flags, views, ratings, shares, etc.), user channel design, and the organic linking.
To achieve that you have to add title tags, branded channel information, and branding box. When you describe the channel focus, make sure it is optimized with the necessary target keywords about the content in the video SEO.
Most search engines, use the first 150 characters of the first sentence of the META description. That’s why you should make sure the targeting keywords are definite to help the visitors decide whether to click on the link. The content has to make hem interested.
You can also take advantage of YouTube’s branding box. The branding box will enable you to specify your promotional text and also provide links that are associated with your brand. The title can run approximately 100 characters in length within the branding box, while the main text can go up to 4500 characters, inclusive of the links implementation and specific HTML markup.
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Leverage Controlled Domains and Embedded Content
If you host the video assets on your own domain, then you are good to go. However, if you decide to use YouTube as your video host, then the video gets uploaded and distributed to YouTube, and at this point the viewership is social and massive.
Once you embed the video the YouTube domain, you automatically create an incoming link to the video on YouTube. That means that you have passed the incoming link equity authority from your domain to that of YouTube. However, it also illustrates that information about the video SEO content to search engines.
Make sure you build individual pages for the available videos if you want to implement this strategy. Surround the video with an optimizing title, descriptive text, META descriptions, use target keywords in the URL structure, and an <H1> header tag.
If you embed your video on another domain, you have two options. You can either include separate building pages for each video asset in the commercial directory. If you opt for this choice, then you need to pick the target keywords using “video” to modify the keywords as to ensure that the keywords match relevant search queries.
The other option is to embed relevant subject videos into optimized, established pages on your own domain. This permits an optimized page, and the flow of a substantial link equity to not only host the video SEO but to also point to the same video in the YouTube domain. This means that the video asset, and future video assets, will be placed on the relevant landing pages.
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Create a Media Site Map (media RSS)
Once you put the core optimization steps in place, you need to let the engines know that the resources exist. Creating a media sitemap for the video you host on a marketer’s site is an effective strategy for optimizing the video SEO.
By doing that you organize and identify all the video pages on the website by syndication. A media RSS allows your videos to parse directly without being hidden behind JavaScript for Flash. Once you revisit and implement these important optimization strategies will help you improve communication with various search engines and also enhance the visibility of your video SEO. You can also check out other video sites available for viable online distribution.
How to Engage Your Users Using Video SEO
To make sure that your video SEO ranks you need to add user engagement. You need to aim at seeing your users are actively engaging with the video, not just sitting back and watching it. You need to measure how people like, comment, subscribe, share, and also add the video to their playlist. The more signals you will see the more you’ll know the video is engaging the users. Tips to help you maximize this:
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Request people to comment on the videos
Even though people love sharing their opinions, they also hate having to think about them! Make it easier for them and also increase the odds of people commenting on the video by giving them a particular topic to comment on.
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Add a “Subscribe” CTA to your script
Don’t be afraid to ask people to subscribe to get your videos. You could add a clear call-to-action at the end of every video,
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Reply to the comments
By responding to the comments, you encourage the users to comment. If your video gets more comments, it gets more engagement, hence higher rankings for your video SEO.
Video Promotion Strategies to Incorporate
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Announce New Videos
If you utilized basic SEO well then by now, you have email subscribers. So whenever you are about to release a new video, make sure you let your email subscribers know. This will help the video to generate many high-quality views.
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Share the Video on Social Media Platforms
Share the video SEO on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
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Embed the Video on Your Blog Posts
By embedding the video, you also make your video rank. This is because you create a backlink to the video and it’s also a YouTube ranking signal. It’s also a subtle way of keeping your readers aware of the videos you let out.
Conclusion
The popularity of video SEO presents a tremendous opportunity for you to get very create and achieve results. Even though producing video SEO won’t be cheap, it will be worth it. If you have ever commissioned or marketed infographics, then you can definitely afford some video SEO. This will help you generate a good ROI for you and your clients as well.
By incorporating video SEO, you will improve conversions, especially if the video sitemap is submitted to get rich snippets. The video will also increase your brand’s awareness through inbound channels. You will also increase the brand’s awareness by using paid advertising.
If you want to improve your domain’s overall ranking with a rich snippet, don’t put your video on YouTube or other domains. You stand the best chance if you keep your video content unique to your site. Give Google one option, which is the page that you want to rank.
Keep the video SEO short and to the point as possible. If you are aiming at convert consumer purchases off your video, however, put quality first. Quality is paramount when it comes to online video SEO as it is when producing any other SEO content.