The Ultimate Guide To Boost Your SEO With Video

Video is the richest form of media that Google indexes when optimizing their search engine results, and is still one of the most underutilized tools business owners can use to amplify their online presence through SEO.

Marketers have been optimizing their webpage content to best rank in search engines since the beginning of the dot-com era. As time has gone on, search criteria and the capabilities of search engines have only improved and now more than ever individuals and businesses fight over rankings for the most coveted search terms in their niche.

Video indexing is a big advancement in search engine capabilities that most SEO marketers still do not take full advantage of.

Here are just a few stats to set the tone:

• Video results are 50x more likely to be organically ranked in Google than text-based results. (Forrester)

• 62% of Google universal searches include video. (Searchmetrics)

• 80% of people say they typically switch between online search and video when researching products to buy. (Google)

• 68.2% of videos on the 1st page of Google are in HD. (Backlinko)

• Video search results have a 41% higher click-through rate (CTR) than text-based results. (AimClear)

Why Video Is Essential To Your SEO Success

Video is the ideal format for increasing brand awareness. People are much more likely to remember information if it's presented in visual form.

Video makes it easier for people to engage and interact with your brand. It also improves your rankings because Google recognizes video content on a webpage and will index the thumbnail, alt-text, captions, transcript, title, sitemap, and more. Google will also rank a search result that includes video, over another in the same category that does not include video.

This is because Google recognizes web pages with video content to be naturally of higher value to searchers. It is also easier to maintain your improved rankings because as users watch videos on your site, your avg. session time increases which is also a key factor in outranking others in search engines.

According to SEO giant Moz, there is no substitute for the power of video for organic search, as long as you implement the following key elements:

• Video content should be highly shareable. Just like your text content, your video should be engaging, exciting, and should add something to the message you’re communicating on your page. Content that receives high engagement levels and shares also garner higher search engine rankings.
• Video content should be original. While creating content can be time-consuming, and many business owners have not adjusted to the thought of being on camera frequently, your brand must develop original and unique content. Simply sharing content from other brands(that does not also include your brand) will only hurt you in rankings, as un-original content is often detected by Google’s search engine, and is less likely to be recommended to searchers.
• Video quality should be excellent. Not everyone has access to high-quality equipment or software to make superior video content, but you should always strive to make the highest quality possible with the resources you have. (Find content about your brand.)

What You Need To Get Started

When it comes to video content, you want to focus on creating concise, relevant, high-quality videos that people want to watch. While standard webpage uploads and non-interactive videos are still a great place to start, it's important to consider what you want to offer your audience in a video.

Here's the checklist:

What message are you trying to communicate? If you can’t answer this question yourself, how could a search engine?

How will it capture attention? This is arguably one of the most important parts of the process. If you can’t keep the attention of a visitor in a video, they won’t keep watching. If visitors don’t watch your video, you lose a significant amount of the SEO benefits.

What questions might the viewer have? Consider what questions a visitor might have and preemptively answer them during your video. This provides viewers more value, which keeps them watching on your site longer.

What action should the viewer take after watching? Every video should have a purpose on your site. Driving sales, entertaining, driving form submissions, announcements, etc. are all great examples of CTAs (Call-To-Action) you can place in your video content to drive even more engagement on your site.

If you follow these steps you’ll be producing SEO-friendly video content in no time.

But, that’s not all.

In addition to the video itself, it’s important to consider the SEO impact of the associated elements that come with video:

Title - Should include keywords associated with overall page ranking, as well as attract attention; encourage clicks.

Caption - Also include relevant keywords, but this area should be more descriptive. It’s ok to write a sentence or two of text here to support SEO, just keep it on topic and natural.

Thumbnail - Should be eye-catching, encourage clicks, and be on-brand with the rest of the pages’ color scheme and design style.

Alt-text - The thumbnail brings with it the opportunity to place Alt-text on the image on your page, like the caption this can be a longer description of the image, and keywords should be included to, again, help with rankings.

How To Find Video Content Online

Creating video content can be a lot of work, but don't worry, if you're looking for a shortcut there are a lot of other ways you can find valuable video content.

• 55% of people watched video content daily, and 54% want to see more video content this year. (Social Media Week)
• Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in the text. (Insivia)
• Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users. (Wordstream)

I could go on and on. The stats are undeniable. Video is a must-have marketing tool that needs to be on your online store or site.

So what do you do?

You have a few options:

Collecting User-Generated Content(UGC) From Customers - UGC is one of the most powerful video resources you can use. This could be in the form of product reviews, testimonials, clips of your product in-action, or otherwise any video content about your brand that you didn’t have a part in creating. These types of videos offer direct social proof to your site and help drive belief and trust in your products or services. Here are some tips on making the results of user-generated content last longer.

Partner With A Creative Agency - hire a creative agency like VAXA Digital to create custom video content that will drive results for your store, site, or social media. While hiring a creative agency isn't free, it often leads to some of your highest-performing assets and can be well worth the investment.

Curating Existing Content - While most of this could technically be categorized as UGC it’s still very different and deserves a distinction. Content about your products is being spread across the internet every day, especially for any eager entrepreneurs selling already existing products through platforms like Shopify, there is likely content about your products online that you just haven’t found yet. It can be a mountain of a task to sort through waves of videos on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Vimeo, etc. trying to find the best content about your brand. If you are a Shopify store owner, here's a shortcut to find the best videos about your brand online and publish them directly to your product pages.

Track Your Results

Adding video to your site obviously leads to a lot of upsides, but how do you truly know how big of an impact is being made?

There are lots of useful tools to track SEO analytics, but the best place to start is with Google Analytics (GA).

Manually:

If you opted to add videos to your store manually, start by creating custom on-click events in Google Analytics. These will help you to directly measure the number of visitors who viewed videos and track their progress towards one of your defined goals in GA.

For more detailed analytics and traffic tracking, you will need to integrate with a third-party app that handles video at a large scale and can measure more precisely like VideoWise.

Automatically:

If you opted to add videos to your store automatically with VideoWise, then you don't need to do any extra work to start tracking your analytics.

VideoWise enables Shopify store owners to sell with video on any page of their store. In addition, it features an in-depth analytics dashboard that helps you to track every relevant metric around your videos.

Here are just a few key performance indicators (KPI's) that you can track with VideoWise:

• Engagement Rate  (How many visitors are interacting with videos)
• Conversion Rate (The direct impact video has on your bottom-line)
• Added Time On-Site (Total time spent watching videos)
• Avg. Session Time (The average length of time a visitor spends on your site)
• Influenced Orders (Purchases made after engaging with videos)
• Direct Orders (Purchases made directly from a shoppable video)

Struggling to succeed with video for your Shopify business? Book a demo with our team, for a personalized approach to video marketing growth.

Summary

Video is one of the most valuable forms of media we use today to communicate about everything, and Google understands that searchers want to see video content when they search for topics.

If you search almost anything today, several of the first few results will have video content on them, and sometimes videos are even displayed above the search results.

It's vital that brands of all sizes adapt to including video content across their online site/store, as well as the other platforms that they use to communicate with their customers.