Effectively marketing your business products or services is essential to success and the most effective digital marketers are turning more and more to video to achieve their goals.
In a recent post at Search Engine Watch, Brad Miller summed up some of the key reasons:
“A Forrester study from January 2010 showed that a webpage with a video on it was 53 times more likely to gain a page-one position in the SERPs. Additionally, 1 in 3 tech B2B decision-makers are turning to online video for information (Google). Viewers of videos are also 64 percent more likely to purchase after watching a product video.”
The recent and ongoing changes in search engine algorithms have made video a key player in page rankings. How video marketing impacts SEO depends on several factors, but the fact is, if your video meets those it will get higher rankings in searches.
Clearly, video is something that any business marketer needs to consider when planning content or developing a marketing strategy. The versatility of video is also a plus. Videos can be incorporated into websites, used in emails, played at trade shows, and displayed in your office or store.
The key factors to having success with video marketing are:
- Quality is Important – Make sure you have a high quality video. With video, just as with other content in your marketing strategy, quality counts. Sure, there is a place for a relatively informal series or a repetitive, “man-on-the-street” type video, but that shouldn’t be the norm for your company. A clean, professional look is what will distinguish you from your competition and lend credibility to your brand.
- Strategy – Develop a strategy or plan for using your video. Not every company has pockets deep enough to make one branding video after another just to position themselves. Most companies need to squeeze every penny out of their investment and want to know how they can leverage a new video- and what they’ll get in return. What are the goals? What should viewers do after they watch? Can I use the video at a trade show, on my web site, in Power Point, in live presentations? What can I expect?
- Consistency – Getting the first video finished and online is important, but just like posting content to a blog, consistent and frequent additions to your video library is critical. Numerous, regular updates of properly formatted video will have a massive impact on SEO over time. Vision House offers a video subscription service that supplies you with regular, professional content on a quarterly basis to help you stay current and create the content you need.
- Optimization – Make sure your video content is set up correctly. Don’t waste your investment by going just half way. I’ve seen so many clients invest thousands in a video only to distibute on DVD and never post online. Or others who finally post but then fail to set it up correctly for SEO. Just as you optimize all your other digital content, your video needs to be optimized to achieve the search results you want. Include relevant keywords in your video title tags, add keywords to your YouTube and Vimeo summary and tag fields and post close captioning scripts to get search engines to actually pick up the content of the video. Make sure you squeeze the most SEO juice out of your video investment; check out the options you have for hosting and displaying video carefully.
If you start with a high-quality video, develop an effective strategy to deploy it, update consistently and utilize optimization tools, video can become a star in your digital marketing efforts and dramatically boost your SEO rankings.
If you would like to learn more about how video can strengthen your digital marketing efforts, contact us.
