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author
Gabby Regalbuto
M Posted 4 years ago
t 8 min read

Over the past few years, videos have quickly risen in popularity across the digital ecosystem. By the end of 2019, video is expected to account for 80% of consumer internet traffic. Videos not only appear on video hosting platforms like YouTube - which is so large that is the second largest search engine in the world - but also across social platforms and branded domains.

Our own research at BrightEdge also indicates that Google continues to place a growing emphasis on video within the SERP. On mobile devices, video now appears for more than a quarter of all SERPs. Google has recognized the appeal of video for users, and brands need to prepare themselves to take advantage of video in marketing.

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Brands that want to tap into this trend have the potential to capture more traffic and engage more users. If you want to get your video production off to a strong start, here is what you need to know about video in marketing and ensuring that your video SEO strategy is powerful enough to drive conversions and engagement.

Forming a video SEO strategy

As video continues to climb in popularity across the web, brands need to pay attention and take advantage of the opportunities that video provides.

Customers appreciate video for reasons such as convenience and the more personalized nature. They give potential consumers the opportunity to hear personally from leaders at the organization and other customers, creating a more individualized experience. Watching someone on a video create a more intimate feeling that simply reading words on a screen. It allows more personality to shine through and gives customers more of a "peek behind the scenes."

It's for these reasons and more that a crucial aspect of your video SEO strategy is the role(s) you want your video content to play. All your video content doesn't have to--and usually should not--fit into the exact same role, but every video you produce should have a role. Here are some examples of roles to categorize your video strategy into:

  • Self-guided information or walkthroughs of product(s)
  • Comparison guides
  • Entertainment
  • Brand building and personalization of brand image
  • Onboarding for new employees or partners
  • Training for new customers or clients

A video strategy allows you to better understand the viewing habits of your target audience and create videos that will engage them. You will develop a better understanding to how your prospective customers engage on YouTube, watch video on social media, and interact with videos within your own domain.

To begin using video in marketing, you will want to gather several types of information.

  1. Know where your audience watches videos
  2. Track the popular topics for your users. Keyword research can help you uncover the video topics people are most likely to appreciate
  3. Learn how to optimize your videos
  4. As you create videos, regularly test the different formats and types of videos to see what your audience responds to best
  5. Tie your video SEO strategy back in with the rest of your content strategy, linking back and forth between video channels and your website to drive traffic and increase engagement

Types of videos to include in your video SEO strategy

A quality video strategy will include a variety of different types of videos, allowing you to engage with audience members with diverse interests and needs. It will also

Here are just a few of the different types of videos you should consider including and where they could potentially fit in your marketing funnel.

Top of funnel

These types of videos are centered more around informational content and tutorials. This video strategy may not even be centered around your product or services, focusing instead on

FAQ videos

FAQ videos offer fantastic potential for SEO purposes because you can target questions around particular high-value keywords and create optimization-rich videos. They also allow you to offer a more personalized means of answering common questions your customers ask.

How-to and explainer videos

How-to videos also make it easy to target high-value keywords. These terms tend to have strong search rates and often correlate with videos that appear on the SERPs.

Middle of funnel and bottom of funnel

Product videos

Product videos might not target keywords with search volumes as high as other types of videos, but they do serve important purposes. Namely, they can help convert prospects at the end of the sales funnel by demonstrating the product’s potential. They also help to keep existing customers engaged and ensure that they get the most possible out of product.

User-generated content

Prospective customers like to hear from existing customers. They want to see real customers who have had success with your product or service. User-generated content, such as testimonial videos, can provide excellent documentation of the value you offer and serve as a final validation to convince a bottom-of-funnel prospect to transact with you or to take the next step.

Optimizing your video SEO strategy in marketing

While posting videos online provides brands with an excellent means of connecting with customers and creating a superior user experience, you must also take steps to make sure that the videos themselves are found. The videos need to be discoverable on both your domain and on any video hosting platforms that you post them on.

Optimizing for the video platform

The major video platforms, including YouTube, work largely as an independent search engine. Since Google also pulls results to display on the SERP from YouTube, well-optimized videos can receive traffic from people arriving after making a standard Google query.

Like any other search engine, YouTube plays close attention to the terms that you use in your video. Although Google cannot yet interpret video itself, it does look at the video title as well as the description and tags you put on the video. To fully capture all the keywords and terms you use in your video, you should include a very thorough description. You should also consider uploading a transcription of your video, if possible.

YouTube also looks at the quality of the video and your overall channel. They judge this by measuring how long people watch your video and how engaged they see with your overall channel. The number of likes your videos get, the number of followers your channel acquires-- these all positively impact the reputation of your channel, and thus the ranking of each individual video.

Keeping your videos relevant

Relevance remains a critical part of optimization for any platform. To keep your videos relevant, regularly perform keyword research to learn more about the topics and terms that customers want to learn about. You can then use them to create videos that will have the most amount of appeal for your users.

In addition to creating scripted videos, remember that prospective customers also like to hear from other customers who have used your product or service successfully. To ensure that these videos also remain highly relevant, consider creating interview or testimonial videos that center around a targeted topic. You can then use your key term in the video description to help drive traffic.

Optimizing for your domain

When you place videos directly on your website, several steps should be followed to ensure that your video and page remain optimized and ready to attract users.

  1. Pay attention to how the video appears on the page. The video should appear clearly and easily play on all device sizes.
  2. Watch your load speed. Make sure your video does not slow down your page load speed, which will result in a higher click-off rate.
  3. Make the video transcript available so that any keywords you use in the video ‘count’ towards your SEO efforts for the page.

For more advice about optimizing for your video strategy for your domain, read our post about SEO and videos hosted on your website.

Using the BrightEdge platform to drive video strategy

As you create your video strategy, the BrightEdge platform has several features that will help you create videos your customers will enjoy.

Keyword research and finding video topics

Google’s SERP continues to change based on what the search engine interprets as the customer intent. For certain queries, such as ‘how-to’ type questions, videos are more common. Knowing which keywords and key terms have videos appear on the SERP will help you target the appropriate queries and create videos that will be more likely to be featured on the SERP.

On the Google Data Cube, you can research target keywords and see what types of content Google displays for people who search for that term. You can then target the optimal terms where you can work to get a video displayed on the SERP.

Knowing how your videos rank

As Google continues to look for ways to improve the user experience, rankings can change in an instant. You want to know about your users’ experience in the moment, how they see and interact with your content live.

With the BrightEdge DataCube, you can easily see how your domain's videos rank across the SERPs, tracking progress as you build your video strategy.

With BrightEdge Instant, you now have that power, thanks to machine learning.

use this video seo strategy for your website - brightedge

With BrightEdge Instant, you can see how your videos rank right now on YouTube, while your users look at them. You can also see how your competitors’ material performs, giving you insights into how you can improve your own standings and boost your video SEO strategy.

You will gain insight into the products, topics, and influencers who are quickly growing in popularity across the YouTube platform, allowing you to capitalize on rising trends and getting your content in front of interested users.

Creating a video strategy and using the BrightEdge platform features can propel your brand forward and allow you to tap into the growing popularity of this type of content. With the BrightEdge platform to keep you on top of your video rankings and armed with insight regarding what your customers want to watch, you will find yourself easily moving forward with a strong video SEO strategy.

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