Do you have a complex business process or industry? Do you constantly find yourself getting asked the question: so what does your business actually do? Sometimes, it’s just easier to explain something with visuals instead of just using words. According to the Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing Survey, 85% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. In addition, 92% of marketers who use video say that it’s an important part of their marketing strategy. Let’s delve into the benefits of video marketing and how you can improve them for better SEO.
Why create a video?
Around nine in ten marketers feel they get a return on investment with video marketing. There are many benefits of video marketing such as:
- Increasing traffic and the average time visitors spend on a company website
- Generating leads and increasing sales
- Reducing the number of support calls received
- Aiding the user in understanding a product or service
- Helping you earn more backlinks to your site content
Looking for some video marketing ideas? You’re in luck. Hubspot has great video marketing campaigns that you’ll actually enjoy watching and can serve as inspiration.
Improving your video for SEO
So now that you’ve created a video whether it be a brand marketing video, an explainer video, or even a testimonial video, you’ll need to figure out how to promote the video and get more people to watch. Often, people create great videos but don’t optimize them well enough so they end up with little to no views. What can you do to get more people to watch your videos?
1. Choose a video hosting platform
Did you know that YouTube is the largest, most popular video hosting platform and the 2nd largest search engine? It’s one of the most familiar video hosting platforms along with Vimeo. Most people would probably go straight to uploading a video on YouTube. However, that may not be a good idea depending on what your business goals are. Even though YouTube is the most popular video hosting platform, most of the traffic will go to that platform instead of your own website. If you’d rather get more website traffic that could create more leads, then you’re better off using a different video hosting platform such as Wistia.
2. Video transcriptions and captions
According to Digiday, 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound. This makes including captions crucial to anyone that wants to get their message across effectively. To include captions, you’ll need to include a video transcript. The great thing about video transcripts is that search bots can scrape up the additional text on the page and make your video easier to find. The text is indexable and will help you rank for more search queries.
3. Engaging custom thumbnail
You’ve probably been inundated with a bunch of videos while on sites such as YouTube. How do you make your video stand out? You can create a video thumbnail that is engaging and relevant that will make people want to click on your video. According to VEVO, updating their thumbnails on thousands of videos resulted in a marked increase in views over a 20 day period, before leveling off to an improved rate of over 5%. Next time you upload a video, make sure that you’ve created a custom thumbnail that is engaging and relevant.
4. Video title and description
In addition to having a custom thumbnail, the video title and description are also important when people are looking for videos to watch. Make sure to conduct keyword research to make sure that you’re targeting the right words. Try to make the title and description interesting instead of falling in the trap of keyword stuffing.
5. Make sure the page is relevant to the video
Another important factor in making sure that your video gets the attention that it deserves is optimizing the page that the video is on. Make sure that the page has high quality relevant content to the video and check that the page has been SEO-optimized. Try to avoid generic language and make the content specific to the video.
Those are just some of the ways that you can optimize your video with SEO. You can also get more engagement and reach on your videos by creating video ads and boosting social media posts that include the video.
Lights, camera, action
So what are you waiting for? Video marketing is set to grow this year with 59% of non-video marketers saying that they will start using video as a marketing tool in 2020. Start investing in your video marketing strategy today. If you ever need guidance on improving your SEO for your videos, feel free to reach out to us.
