Importance of Video Marketing
Video marketing recently became the most commonly used mode of digital marketing, with online videos making up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic in the next couple of years. Video marketing has become more affordable, has the potential for extensive outreach, and can be used for a variety of purposes. Whether it is for increasing brand awareness or boosting conversions, SEO video marketing has become a powerful campaigning tool for marketers everywhere.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO, simply put, is the practice of increasing traffic to your website through search engine results. In other words, when you build an SEO-friendly site, it becomes more prominent in the search results of Google or any other search engine. Every search engine uses an SEO ranking algorithm based on which it sorts the various webpages catering to a particular topic.
So, if you want your landing page or marketing campaign to be more visible to people who search on Google, your content needs to be optimized for SEO. For your customers, SEO is necessary because they are likely to trust any site that is ranked higher on Google, even if yours has much better content. Therefore, it is equally critical to create quality content as well as tweaking the parameters for SEO optimization.
Top SEO Tactics for Video Marketing
1. Plan the Content
Before you get your camera and video editors out, thoroughly plan your video: the content and type of video, the target audience, where you plan to share, and any other relevant detail. These parameters will help you narrow down the topic to a small enough sub-category that you can give a suitable title, curate the content to suit a segment of the population, thereby having maximum effect.
You may have to modify the content to suit different platforms. For example, you can afford to put a lengthy 5-6 minute instructional video on YouTube, but it is better to share just segments of the same as Insta stories and add the link to the full video in the comments.
2. Categorization and Description
Every video you put, whether it is a promo video, bonus content, or an instructional video, must have a brief one-line meta description about what it is, as well as a description, which can include other keywords. The video title, description, as well as tags (which should consist of targeted keywords)are the things a search engine will look at to rank your website.
Any beginner’s guide on SEO for Youtube or other video-hosting platforms will tell you that categorizing your video properly can help you get more views. The title should use natural language but incorporate keywords; try to come up with a title that intrigues the viewer to click on the video.
3. Social Media Sharing
While your landing page or website will surely have the video, the best place to share your content is social media. Instagram, LinkedIn, and other sites are encouraging marketers and viewers to share and follow video content because of the information they convey.
Instagram stories (15-second clips that appear on the top of the IG feed) have become extremely popular for video marketing on the platform. The use of hashtags and geotags also boost SEO because your post would show up whenever someone searches for those keywords.
Some third-party tools allow you to share the same content across multiple platforms at once, giving you a broader outreach. However, you must research to find your target group on social media if you want to communicate more effectively to them. At the same time, encourage viewers to share the content through their own accounts, or collaborate with IG influencers to get more views and likes.
4. Make an Eye-Catching Thumbnail
A video thumbnail is typically a static image that the viewers will see before they click on the video to start playing. A thumbnail that catches the viewer’s attention more than the rest will make them more likely to click your video.
A video thumbnail is usually a photo from the video itself or a separate image that reflects the content of the video well. Video editing software applications have a set of standard thumbnails as well, but you can choose a customized one as well.
5. Transcripts and Subtitles
When it comes to textual support for your video, keywords, and descriptions are the primary contributions. However, video transcripts and subtitles go a long way in promoting your video ahead of your competitors.
Video-hosting platforms use transcript content to know what your video is about and can hence help the content appear within ‘suggested videos.’ Transcripts can be time-consuming to do manually, but several AI software applications with voice recognition and speech-to-text technology can listen to audio and automatically convert it to text.
Subtitles and closed-captions do not directly help in SEO, but they make your video suitable to a much larger audience than only those who understand English. Some speech-to-text tools can convert transcripts to closed captions and vice versa, so you won’t have to do either of these manually.
6. Analytics Tools
Technology can do much of your work for you if you know how to use the right applications. Social media platforms like Instagram have their inbuilt analytics tools (Instagram Insights), and several paid versions of third-party analytics tools are available with sophisticated functionality.
For example, Insights gives you information about your audience when they are most active on Instagram and a few other details which help you decide when to post content. SEO-specific tools search the web across thousands of sites to pick out the trending keywords related to your content so that you can incorporate the same in the title or description.
Make the Most of Video Marketing
From real estate marketing companies to healthcare businesses to automobile dealers, video marketing has become everyone’s go-to method of communication to promote their products. People often underestimate the importance of SEO in content generation, but with these tips, your video content can win over that of your competitors and top the search results. Remember, all the effort that went into making the video bears fruit only if people find the content online, so give SEO the value it deserves.
