Whether you’re highlighting a shiny new product or creating a resourceful tutorial, video marketing is fast becoming an essential method of winning customers and leveraging sales. 

As more businesses look to establish themselves online in the wake of Covid, the value that can be found in more advanced and engaging marketing techniques can’t be overstated. Fundamentally, if a business strategically utilises videos within their campaigns, it could pave the way for greater engagement, larger volumes of organic traffic, and a better level of trust in the eyes of customers. 

According to recent figures published by Campaign Monitor, the vast majority of marketers are already beginning to recognise the importance of video marketing with a view to incorporating it more into their future campaign efforts. 

However, despite more businesses seemingly becoming aware of the potential that video marketing holds, we still see cases of video efforts that miss out on fully optimizing its SEO capabilities. In this article, we explore seven significant ways in which video marketing is helping businesses to win more customers through search engine optimisation. 

Here, we look to cover the fundamentals of SEO-infused video marketing such as highlighting the importance of video transcripts as well as the more technical benefits of creating content that has the potential to be shared across the web.

1. Video Helps Build Overall SERP Presence

Your Search Engine Ranking Position makes all the difference in terms of winning clicks and converting traffic. As you’ll know, the higher your business appears on the results pages of Google, the more likely it is to earn a click-through. 

(Image: Backlinko)

As we can see from Google’s organic click-through rate breakdown, as much as 31.73% of clicks are earned by the top-ranking result on the page. But how does this affect video content? 

Well, as Google actively optimises its search results to provide the form of media that it believes to be most valuable for the individual making a query, it can mean that videos can jump onto a position of supreme prominence at the very top of the search engine’s first page:

As the image above shows, videos such as ‘how-tos’ and tutorials are excellent performers when it comes to video marketing and click-throughs. However, there are a few things to remember before you can see your content climb to the pinnacle of your relevant SERPs. 

Notably, virtually all of Google’s featured videos come from YouTube. While creating embedded website videos can be highly beneficial for your brand awareness, it probably won’t boost your SERPs. 

Be sure to optimise your content by creating videos that have the potential to pre-empt and answer the relevant queries audiences may have regarding your products or services. Remember, even if your video doesn’t make it to the very top of the first page of Google, video search results are much more sparse, meaning that your content is likely to rank higher than text-based copy.

2. Create Informative Videos That Answer Searchers’ Queries

To reiterate the point we touched on moments ago, it’s vital for your business to create video marketing campaigns that look to add value to your branding. 

(Image: Hubspot)

In the chart above, we can see that the majority of consumers prefer video-based content. The popularity of video content means that it’s beneficial for features at the very top of your sales funnel to be video-oriented. 

While this may seem like a straightforward point to make in terms of B2C companies, it’s also worth sparing a thought for incorporating video into B2B operations too – after all, B2B people are still people. 

Fundamentally, video content can help to keep the audience firmly rooted in their comfort zone, and it can help to command their attention for prolonged periods of time, allowing you to showcase more industry knowledgeability and demonstrate higher levels of value that can, in turn, build trust.

3. Optimise Your Videos

You might have created the best piece of video marketing content in your industry – congratulations! But unfortunately, you’ll still have to do a little bit of work to make sure your video is optimised in a way that makes it discoverable.

One key consideration to make involves choosing your hosting platform. To do this, you’ll need to take a moment to think about the purpose of your video. Are you looking to generate leads primarily? Or to boost brand awareness? 

If you’re more focused on building brand awareness and aren’t too concerned about driving traffic to your pages, hosting sites like YouTube and Vimeo can be strong choices. This means that you could get far more engagements, but they’ll be on the platform, as opposed to your webpages. 

It’s also worth considering using hosting platforms that automatically insert JSON-LD SEO metadata into your content in order to turn your unstructured video data into something easier to read ahead of indexing. We can see a rough indicator of how JSON-LD works in the illustration below: 

(Image: Wordstream)

Another important way of optimising your videos and making them more discoverable online is through editing the data attached to them. Through YouTube, for instance, you can customise your video’s title, the data on display and its accompanying thumbnail. 

(Image: Oberlo)

Many marketers make the mistake of using a screenshot as the thumbnail of their video, but inserting a descriptive and engaging image can pay dividends in not only drawing in more clicks but generating some consistent brand awareness with running themes. 

To ensure that your video is well-optimised, be sure to make any embedded links that point to your website lead to a relevant landing page. There’s little point in spending the time and effort on creating a wonderful video only for it to lower your landing page’s rankings by generating bouncebacks from users who feel they’ve been duped. 

If you’re self-hosting a video on your website without using a 3rd party platform, the loading speed may become an issue. There’s nothing worse for conversions than having a website that takes ages to load. 

According to Cloudflare, a 1-second improvement of speed can boost your website’s conversion rate by as high as 7%.

4. Leverage YouTube, but Carefully

There’s little doubting the influential power of YouTube as a social network. In fact, it comes second only to Facebook in terms of usage and is streets ahead of its video-oriented competitors. 

(Image: DreamGrow)

As we can see from the chart above, in terms of mass, there’s little standing in the way of YouTube. This makes it an essential tool for your video marketing efforts. 

However, leveraging YouTube can come with its drawbacks. Most notably, if you choose to publish a video on YouTube first before publishing the same content on to your website, your YouTube video will easily outrank its original source – leading to fewer people landing on your website. 

Be sure to always ensure that if you’re looking to generate more traffic to your website through the use of video marketing, never post your video to YouTube before doing so on your own site.

5. Publish Videos On Your Blog

Publishing videos on your blog is an excellent way of building more valuable in the eyes of your stakeholders while offering users more avenues of accessibility for your brand. 

(Image: Scoop.it)

The data above shows that video content is king among consumers, so incorporating it into your website’s blog is a great way of giving your consumers what they want while filling your website with more discoverable content. 

In terms of the topics you cover, generating video content that revolves around problem-solving, tutorials and product features that visitors may be curious about can work wonders in keeping prospective consumers on-site for longer. 

To publish a video blog post using content you’ve created on YouTube, all you need to do is: 

1. Go to your Creator Studio within YouTube and select the video you want to embed. If the video you want to use has been published through another account, you can easily use the platform’s search function to find the video (however you may need permission to use other people’s content.
2. Copy the raw URL of your video and paste it into the area of your WordPress blog that you would like it to be displayed in the text box of your blog post and that’s it! 

(Image: Theme Isle)

Above we can see the type of URL needed to embed. While WordPress has evolved to make it extremely easy to embed video content, it’s worth noting that many other blogging platforms have similarly straightforward techniques that make the use of videos simple.

6. Create a Transcript of The Video

One of the most enjoyable perks of video marketing is that it has the power to create heavy levels of keyword-rich content without you having to type a single word. 

By creating transcripts for your videos, you’re not only helping to make your content more accessible for users who may be hard of hearing or unable to listen at the time of encountering your page but you also automatically generate scores of textual copy that’s instantly relevant to your intended audience. 

(Image: Neil Patel)

As we can see, the highest-ranking content on Google’s SERPs is, on average, around 1,950-2,000 words in length. Long-form content seems to perform well in the eyes of Google’s crawlers, and there’s no better way to produce high volumes of relevant text than through transcribing your video content and publishing it alongside your video. 

What’s even better is that YouTube is capable of automatically transcribing your videos on your behalf. To do this, simply: 

1. Click on the ‘More’ button below your video on YouTube, and then select ‘Transcript’ from the dropdown menu.
2. After selecting ‘Transcript’ you’ll get a full transcript generated along with timestamps.
3. Ctrl + C to copy the transcript. Once this is done, you’ll be able to paste your transcript anywhere online to publish it.

It’s worth noting that the transcript may come out pretty rough, hence you’ll probably be required to make further edits.

7. Produce Static Content Around The Video

Some marketers can be found guilty of creating blog posts that are solely comprised of an embedded video. While it may be tempting – especially after doing lots of work in terms of producing video content – to just upload it without any further explanation, it can be important to add a little context prior to asking your audience to watch an entire video.

Be sure to introduce your video with a few sentences and summarise it accordingly. This can work wonders in preventing bouncebacks from users who are unsure of why they should give up their time to watch a video that they aren’t sure of. 

The content surrounding your video doesn’t have to be richly detailed or heavily researched, but it should always remain relevant to the content that’s on show. 

As this guide points out, the best balance that you can strike within your video content revolves around matching your videos up with fitting and key-word infused text. In doing this, you can better manage your rise through Google’s SERPs.

About the author: Dmytro Spilka is a CEO and Founder of Solvid, a long-form content creation agency. His work has been published in Shopify, IBM, Entrepreneur, BuzzSumo, Campaign Monitor and Tech Radar.