Adding video content to your marketing campaigns can be beneficial in more ways than one. You can do things with video that simply can’t be done with still images or text. You can find whole new ways to get audiences engaged. And you can reach a whole new audience of people who prefer watching over reading content. Adding video to marketing emails is a known way to increase click-through rates. And there’s an increasing market for video consumption on mobile devices. People seem to like video more and more on the go.
But even if you put all those benefits aside, you’ll still be left with a very important way video content contributes to your marketing efforts. It helps with SEO. Search engines tend to prefer pages that contain both video and textual content. And they give these pages a boost when it comes to search engine result pages, helping them to a placement closer to the top. And that’s not even the most important way video marketing helps with SEO.
Video and Backlinks
One of the major ways video content contributes to the overall SEO efforts of your marketing campaign is by providing backlinks. Even though video clips, on their own, will not create backlinks, people who link to your videos will. You can have hundreds or thousands of links, and you won’t have to lift a finger to build them. Apart from what you’d usually do to create and promote content. Of course, this backlinks bonanza doesn’t happen for each and every video you create. Your content has to be interesting and valuable so that people will want to share it with other people, but if you manage to get that down, the rest will fall in its place.
There are a couple of things, besides making sure that you’re creating quality content, you need to take into account. For one, embedding videos into your website is a better idea than posting a YouTube link. Your videos need to be focused – no broad brush strokes, no covering general topics. You need to provide an answer to a question or a need, and that’s it. All the remaining content you think might fit into the video can be a part of another video. And lastly, make sure you follow the current video quality standards.
Videos and Text
You will want to bank on the fact that there are some users who strongly prefer video to text. Your pages can have both, there’s nothing wrong with that. But keep in mind that some visitors will leave a page if they only see text on it. So, make sure that the pages that have video content on them have it placed above the fold, so to say – close to the top of the page, and clearly visible as soon as the page loads. Also, you don’t want to mislead people, so make sure that if you have titles for your content pages, they reflect the content faithfully. Keep in mind that you can also add the word “video” in brackets after page titles of headlines to let people know there is video content on the page.
Some additional advice would be to avoid creating videos that go on forever unless you really want to dive deep into a subject and you can’t avoid a twenty-minute-long video. Try to keep it to a couple of minutes otherwise. And always transcribe your videos into scripts, it helps search engines know what the video is about.
General Tips for Video Content
Some additional things you can do to help video content help your search engine rankings include hosting it on YouTube. You know it’s owned by Google, and you should know that it counts when search results are in question. Avoid creating pages completely devoid of text – you can always use a couple of sentences to provide context or an introduction for your video content.
Your YouTube page should contain a link to your website, and if you create a channel it should follow suit. You can use social media to spread the word about your video content, so don’t be too shy to post your videos on Facebook, or whatever platform you use. Always make sure that your content gives something valuable to the viewer – the information they needed, some to make them laugh, something that helps them solve a problem – because you don’t want them to feel like your video wasted their time. And speaking about time – make sure your videos don’t need too much of it to load, you are fighting for the attention of people who don’t have a lot of it to spare.
