How Video Marketing Can Improve Your Google Rankings

Video marketing is one of the best ways to improve your Google rankings and drive traffic to your website. Videos are compelling and people enjoy watching them. They make the information more digestible and present it in an interesting way.

As a result, they are a highly effective way to foster engagement, generate backlinks, and increase your visibility on Google. In fact, 82% of businesses find videos to be crucial to their marketing strategies.

But deriving SEO benefits from a video isn’t simple. A few videos on YouTube aren’t enough to generate impressive results. Your video marketing needs a focused approach to ensure that your message resonates with your audience.

Let’s take a look at a few points that will help you bolster your video strategy for better SEO results:

1. Create Useful and Informative Videos

Not many people will watch and share your video if it does not offer any useful or interesting information. You need to create a video that provides your audience with the information they want or like.

I recommend that you research ideas before creating a video. Find out what kind of information your audience is looking for. Identify the commonly-used search terms and keywords on Google. Think about how you can use your expertise to help your audience with their searches or solve their problems.

Only then will you be able to produce a useful video that your audience will enjoy and want to share.

Also, do not limit your video to merely being informative. You should make an effort to create a video that is entertaining as well as moving. Emotional and interesting videos are known to drive better engagement.

Home improvement brand, The Home Depot, posts attractive videos of their products on their Facebook page. For instance, there’s a video showing the attractive home paint colors available at the store. The compelling video exhibits how it’s child’s play to clean the walls when they get dirty. The video uses beautiful visuals and connects instantly with the audience.

Image via Facebook

2. Embed Videos on Your Website

Websites are one of the best ways to make a connection and build relationships with your visitors.

No matter what industry you belong to, a video on your website is a great way to attract traffic. Videos compel your visitors to spend more time on your website and give your content more exposure. This signals to search engines that your site has quality content and deserves a better ranking.

Embed exciting, engaging, and valuable videos on your website to encourage regular visits from your audience. This will ensure quality engagement and help you establish deeper relationships with them.

Consider these two points while embedding videos on your website:

• Make sure that your video is placed above the fold on your web page so that it’s properly visible.

• Your website video should offer a real understanding of what your brand is about. These can be product videos, “behind the scenes” videos, testimonial videos, or any other videos that reflect your brand values.

For instance, Amazon uses animated videos on their homepage to advertise different categories of products.

The ecommerce website is known for their extensive collection of products and their videos helps strengthen this message.

3. Maximize Engagement With Social Media

With 2.6 billion social media users worldwide, and 70% of the North American population on social media, you can be assured that your audience is on social media. That’s regardless of the age group they belong to.

So, if you want to connect with your target audience, it’s better to meet them where they are.

Social media channels are known for generating high user engagement through likes, comments, and shares. Your videos can drive far more traffic and backlinks through these channels, which will ensure better rankings in Google.

You should get creative with video content to engage more and more people. You can also partner with influencers in your niche to create videos that have a potential to go viral.

Many brands leverage influencer collaborations to create impressive unboxing videos of their products. Such video campaigns can help you create a buzz around your product.

Image via YouTube

To run smooth campaigns, you can use powerful influencer management tools such as Grin. This platform can help you manage everything from briefing influencers to paying them with free products.

YouTube is one of the best options for hosting videos to gain better rankings. With more than 1 billion users, the platform is the second largest search engine. And since it’s owned by Google, the search engine is more likely to consider YouTube videos before other videos when ranking them. Depending on your target audience, you can consider Facebook or Instagram videos too.

The cookie brand, Oreo, creates simple videos on various social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. The videos from the brand are fun, creative, and short. The videos help drive high user engagement, as you can see in the following screenshot from the brand’s Instagram.

Image via Instagram

4. Optimize Your Videos

Optimizing your video and video pages is a step that is often overlooked. Search engine optimization improves your visibility and helps your audience find your website. SEO not only drives direct traffic to your videos, but, if done efficiently, it also drives traffic back to your site.

Optimizing your videos for better rankings involves taking care of the following points:

• Use a catchy and apt title that sufficiently describes the content of the video.

• Use proper tags to increase the reach of your video.

• Don’t make your video unnecessarily long.

• Include rich-video snippets on your videos.

• Create a compelling and relevant thumbnail for your video.

• Include a video transcript to clearly explain the subject to Google.

• Enter the right information on the backend so search engine crawlers know how to categorize and prioritize your video.

Also, ensure that your video page is optimized for SEO and relevant to the video embedded in it. Again, it is a good idea to keep your page focused on one video. Google is known to index only one video per page. If you want to include many videos on a page, ensure that your most important video is placed first.

5. Optimize Your Videos for Mobile

Mobiles are continuously becoming an indispensable part of our lives. In April 2018, mobile internet traffic accounted for 51% of the total internet traffic worldwide. And 90% of consumers like to watch videos on their mobiles, whereas only 60% prefer to watch videos on their desktops.

Also, it’s much easier to watch a video than to read text on the small screens of mobile devices. Therefore, as a brand, you can’t afford to ignore this important viewing platform.

Optimizing your website for mobile also includes optimizing videos for mobile. You must make sure that your website offers the best mobile experience to your audience.

The specifics of mobile devices are quite different from desktops. Keep those differences in mind before creating a video that is truly optimized for mobile.

If you’re targeting younger demographics who prefer mobiles for browsing the internet, you can also consider vertical videos across networks. The vertical video format helps optimize use of the small viewing area without the viewers having to rotate their screens.

Conclusion

If you are not leveraging the power of videos yet, you’re missing out on a big opportunity.

When used efficiently, video marketing can make a crucial contribution to your overall SEO strategy in many ways. A productive video strategy can help you expand your audience base with improved traffic and better engagement.

In fact, you can now easily create engaging videos on your own with the best video making tools available.

Consider the above points in your video marketing to reap the benefits of increased backlinks and watch your Google rankings soar.

Are you using video marketing to promote your brand? What video marketing tactics do you think are most effective? Let us know in the comments section below.

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