How to improve your SEO by using video content marketing

 Each year we see different trends, some last for a long time while other disappear and get forgotten pretty quickly. One that has stuck around and is becoming more and more relevant is video content marketing.

More video is being consumed than ever before, according to Cisco by 2021 around 82% of consumer online traffic will be video. Omitting video from your marketing strategy means you are missing a huge chunk, so let’s look at how you can take advantage.

First up, what is Video Content Marketing?

The principle reason for video content marketing is to create and distribute entertaining, engaging and useful videos that attract people to your website. This traffic should be of very high quality which will help to turn viewers into paying customers. Gone are the days when an iPhone video will cut the mustard, these days viewers are used to seeing high quality content, it's actually detrimental to your brand to post low quality video. If you plan to post anything low quality, you're better off to not do it at all.

The Process of Video Content Marketing

This is a 3 stage process, follow these steps for the best results and don't miss anything out;

Step 1 - Strategy, ask yourself these questions

What are your goals for the video?

Who is going to be viewing the content?

What are the competition doing?

Have you created an effective marketing funnel and distribution plan?

Step 2 Produce the content

Before production part starts you’ll need to be clear in regards to what you want to accomplish from the video content campaign. Is it simply brand awareness or a specific product or service you would like them to buy? Once you have these answers clearly defined you can start the production process.

Pre-production

Pre-production can be compared to creating the blueprints for a new building, it’s vital to ensure a successful outcome. Do not skip this or any of these stages. Pre-production is where you do your research, hire crews, locations and actors, find music and stock media, write scripts and complete storyboards, amongst other things.

Production

Production is the part where your planning all comes together, you are on location and the camera.

Post production

Post production is the editing stage, graphics and visual effects, sound effects and voiceovers are added and the video is exported at the optimal settings.

Step 3 - Marketing

The final stage once the video has been completed is the marketing. This essential step is quite often either totally missed out or partially completed, meaning the true ROI for the content is never realised.

Here’s 5 ways you can use SEO to boost your marketing reach;

1. Mobile Optimization

Mobile views have now exceeded desktop so if your site isn’t optimised for mobile you are loosing rankings, traffic and customers. Optimising your mobile site can be done fairly quickly without the need to do any rebuilds, it’s often just some changes to the coding that will make big improvements.

2. Include Metadata

Use metatags in the same way that you do on website including meta title, meta description and meta tags. Adding your keywords into the metadata will mean that search engines will be able to spot your video much easier and will rank the video accordingly. It should be part of the process the same as creating an attractive holding image to encourage a viewer to click play, adding keywords to metadata will encourage Google to rank the video higher. 

3. Create Video Sitemaps for your Page

If you site is very video content heavy but you are finding it hard to rank the content, creating a sitemap can help this greatly. The sitemap is a text file with important data about the video content which you submit to Google the same as you would for your website sitemap. Once you submit this Google will pick up the title, runtime, subject matter and target audience. The video will then be indexed by search engines, in short a video sitemap helps Google to recognise which websites contain video content and what the focus of this content is.

4. Share the Video on Various Channels

Think all the main social channels relevant to your business;

YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn etc.

Create engagement by tagging people who follow you and use hashtags to increase the reach. The more people engage with your social content the better authority you will have with Google it trusts social channels like no other.

5. Encourage Users to Comment and Like

Creating a captivating call to action will help with to get users to comment and like. One popular way is creating a competition and getting people to share the post and tag other friends to enter. It will massively boost the video’s authority and Google ranking.

Use all the tips above and you will be well on the way to giving your SEO a boost through utilising video content. Creating strategic campaigns will not only give your audience a more rewarding experience, you will also see better results than your competitors.

The main reason for this? Not many of them are actually doing it, there’s the opportunity! Take it before everyone else figures it out.

Take a look at our video page for more information and get in touch to see how we can help create and push your content to the top of Google.

Video Marketing with Concinnity