How to Bolster Your SEO with Video Content

The still-growing use of mobile devices was the latest thing to widely impact the approach of marketers to the ever-changing digital landscape, and the next thing on the horizon is most certainly video content. It already makes up about 64% of the traffic crossing the internet at any given moment, and by next year, this figure it expected to grow to around 80%.

We’ve all heard the saying that a picture is worth one thousand words. According to Forrester research, a one-minute video is worth about 1.8 million. The simple truth is that video is the most humanized and effective form of content on the web, and it’s also one of the most “effortless” to consume. Think about it: People on the internet all have two things in common, short attention spans and busy schedules.

People are less likely to put in the effort it takes to read through an article when the same content can be delivered to them in a more engaging way through a short video. That’s why incorporating video into your content marketing strategy is paramount to your long-term business success.

In fact, if you add a video to a landing page, you’ll raise your conversion rate by 80% on average. Adding a video to an email will increase the click-through rate by about 76%. Adding video content to your social media channel also makes it 1200% more likely to be shared compared to link and text based content.

Are you convinced yet? Around 93% of marketers are already using video content as a large part of their content marketing strategy. We suppose the other 7% are likely still using fax machines, and haven’t quite gotten the memo yet. But, if you happen to fall into this 7% category, you’re lucky enough to be catching on before the lack of video content brings your marketing efforts to a stand-still.

The reason why using video is so important stretches far beyond volume. Sure, you can say a lot more in a video than you can in an article, but it’s about more than that. Video content is also a lot more memorable than written content. After all, can you recall the last AdWords ad you were presented with? Probably not. In reality, most internet users are starting to subconsciously block out banner ads completely.

Video ads, on the other hand, are super easily consumable. Around 80% of users will recall at least one video ad they’ve seen in the past month while around 46% of them will end up taking some follow-up action regarding that ad, like looking for information on the advertiser even if they weren’t convinced to click-through when they originally watched the ad (maybe they really were committed to seeing that cat video right then and there).

What’s more, other research has found that about 44% of buyers will view an online video while they are in the shopping mindset. After watching a video, around 53% of them will contact the business in question and 51% will visit the website. Around 70% of these video watchers ended up closing the deal with the business they watched the ad for. Those are incredible conversion rates compared to the average results produced by written content about a business or product.

Here are some tips for jumping on the video bandwagon and utilizing it to the fullest extent for your business:

• Integrate video into your content rather than using it as a replacement. It will give a big SEO boost to your written content when a video accompanies it, and this boost is only expected to get bigger as the demand for video continues increasing.
• Transcribe your video content and write a great description to help search engines understand the content of your video.
• Use keywords in an accurate and effective manner to improve your video’s ranking in search engines.
• Host your video on YouTube and be sure to fill in all the boxes. Filling in the blanks presented to you when publishing a video is important as it helps search engines relate your content to searches.
• Embed your content from YouTube into your website. This acts as an inbound link that further boosts your video’s ranking and performance.
• Optimize your videos to help make sure they are fast enough for mobile browsers. If your mobile users have to wait more than 3 seconds for a page to load, around 57% will click back.
• Be the first to share your content and encourage others to do the same. These are considered “social signals” that help Google see how popular and high-quality your content is.

Planning a video campaign? Download the Video Marketing Strategy Blueprint (PDF). It is an actionable document to help plan and implement your video marketing campaign.