Yes, video can help with your search marketing efforts.
And video is perfect if you offer something that can be demonstrated visually - from plumbers to home-ware, food and technology. Here's how.
Do:
- Try it – you won't know if video content works for you until you get into it and create a few videos, then see if they work for your business.
- Make it quality -and the audio is just as, arguably even more, important than the visuals.
- Make it engaging and compelling.
- Share it - get it out on your social networks, out to your email contacts and on your blogs. Share your video with everyone - if you have content worth sharing, they will share it and you will grow your audience, getting more exposure for your brand or service.
- Make it short - a maximum of two minutes – and even then it has to be worth watching. The average length of time people watch a video is one minute thirty seconds. The exception is the 'How To' video. Although it needs to be as long as it takes to demonstrate your point, it still needs to be concise and succinct. If it is going to be longer than, say 10 minutes – think about breaking it up into parts.
- Be different and unique.
- Create video on a regular basis if you can. Create them using the tools you have at your disposal to increase the chances that you'll be able to do it on a regular basis.
- Be real and authentic – this way you'll come across as honest and it will also be easier to create video when you are talking about a topic you genuinely know about and are passionate about.
- Include other people – have guests come in and talk about something related to your business that you are an expert in.
- Watch other video's to pick up inspiration for what works and what doesn't work.
- Include a special offer to drive traffic to your website.
- Include your branding.
Don't
- Don't pitch - even if your video is only one minute long, if it's a sales pitch the viewer will go elsewhere. If you are overtly promotional, people won't watch it.
- On the other hand, don't forget that the point of it is to market your business so take the time to work out what you are trying to achieve and focus on that outcome.
- Spend a whole lot of money, unless you have deep pockets and high production values are important to your brand.
- Try and go viral deliberately. You might as well go buy a lotto ticket. Who thought a grumpy cat would be an internet sensation? Ok, it is a cat and the internet is big on cats, but still.....
- Put a whole lot of video on You Tube and expect it to be viewed immediately by thousands.
- Forget to include a call to action – either at the end or throughout the video.
- Forget to measure the results -you need to know what is working and what is not
- Don't make it too long-winded or pile too much information into the video.
- Don't forget to optimise the page you embed the video on so it will be found!
Basic steps to 'SEO' your video
- Plan first - Define your goals so your content matches your business goals and your audience needs. This is a precursor to SEO but still a vital piece because if these aren't aligned, your SEO efforts will be wasted. Check the keywords you are targeting and that they are the right ones (i.e relevant, profitable, reasonable volume with low competition)
- Create compelling content that is informative and relevant to your brand and service offering.
- Once your video is uploaded to your video hosting solution of choice you need to add information to help your video get found. How you do this will be different depending on what platform you use, so check help for each one if you need it. This will include a catchy title that grabs attention, tags (i.e. keywords) to help your video be found and a great description that accurately describes the content.
- When embedding video on your website, surround the video with relevant content. Consider providing a transcript of the video content. Make sure you optimise the page itself using regular SEO techniques such as title tags.
- Create regular video content that builds an audience over time. Like non-video content, sharing counts. Comments, shares and likes will see the video rank higher as does the number of subscribers to your channel.
- Create links back to your website using annotations*. If people are sharing your content but the links all go back to You Tube, consider reaching out to those people and asking them for a link directly to your website.
- Submit a video site map to Google so you can have a rich snippet show up in Google's search results.
Expert Resources
Here are some additional articles that go into more detail:
