Using Video Marketing to Enhance SEO Efforts
March 2, 2021
Video marketing continues to gain momentum. Last year, “87% of video marketers reported that video gives them a positive ROI — a world away from the lowly 33% who felt that way in 2015 (HubSpot).”
While this trend was on the rise before 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the need and want for online videos. “Before March of 2020, Wistia saw an 18% increase in hours watched per week from 2019 to 2020…
[Wistia] started 2019 with an average of 2.2M hours watched per week. This increased to an average of 2.6M hours at the beginning of 2020 (wistia.com).”
If video marketing is a part of your digital marketing strategy in 2021, you are not alone. The key to finding success with this initiative is to research and optimize your videos to be seen by the right users.
Similar to search engine optimization for a website, video SEO is about optimizing your video(s) to be crawled and ranked for relevant search queries. Markentum is sharing four tips to improve your video search rankings.
1. Add a Video Transcript
“Not only do video transcripts make your videos more accessible to a larger audience, they make your videos more scrapable by search bots since there’s additional text on the page (WordStream).”
The video transcript is crawled similarly to a page of website copy with longer videos providing more ranking opportunities.
Markentum Tip: Depending on the format of the video, creating a script for a video can ensure that you include appropriate keywords and phrases for SEO.
2. Optimize the Title & Description
Just like you would a website page, it’s important to optimize the video title and description to include appropriate keywords that are also engaging.
“A study by Backlinko revealed that on YouTube, videos get a small ranking boost if their titles contain an exact keyword match with the user’s search term (cincopa.com).”
Your video SEO strategy should start with research. While you can do your best to optimize videos after they have been created, a more effective approach is to create videos around queries you know users are searching. When you type a query into the search bar, YouTube Suggest will show you other relevant results that people have searched. Use this as a starting point for future videos.
3. Be Mindful of Videos on Your Website
If you add an embedded video code to a website page, you want to ask yourself, “Is this video relevant to the page?” If the answer is no, consider creating a new website page with copy that complements your video’s content.
According to Wistia, “Google typically indexes only one video per page… If you’re including multiple videos on a page, ensure [the video you want to be ranked] is first (WordStream).” It is also not recommended to have multiple videos on one website page unless they all offer focused-content. Having multiple videos on a general website page will likely result in low rankings for all videos.
It’s also encouraged not to include the same video on different pages across your website, as each video location will get crawled, and you will be essentially competing against yourself in search results.
4. Use Other Avenues to Promote Your Videos
Today’s video marketing landscape is competitive, so you should not rely solely on organic video traffic. Statistics have shown that social media videos generate up to 1,200% more shares than texts and images combined, so another cost-effective way to highlight your videos is across your social media platforms.
To further generate views and website traffic, paid advertising efforts allow you to target your demographic and deliver your videos to the right users.
Start Creating…
As a digital marketing agency focused on senior living, Markentum knows the positive impact video can have on your community. We invite you to contact us for a free evaluation and learn how we can implement video and SEO into your marketing strategy.