We’ve seen enough articles over the last few months to know we’re not the only ones saying 2014 is the year for video content online. It seems that the reports generated in 2012/2013 by Forester and Search Marketers have made an impact to the broader spectrum of content creators and digital marketing teams.
The reports by Forester showed that video content is 55 times more likely to be ranked on the first search engine results page (SERP’s) compared to a standard web-page, containing copy and links. More recently Moz stated that ranking 3rd in results with a video thumbnail or author profile could get more click throughs than ranked positions #1 and #2 combined.
Video content should be presented and used with other rich media to make webpages more engaging, sticky and more likely to generate referred links from external sources. Video content is ideally created and used within a content plan and have associated landing pages also optimised for search results and conversion. The more targeted and unique the content can be, the more likely it’s going to drive traffic that converts.
It is a fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine (also it’s owned by Google) and is a great place to post video content to pick up additional views. However it’s important to be clear in your strategy as content on YouTube could be cannibalising your website traffic & conversion rates. Having defined your strategy for Using YouTube, the content uploaded should be optimised and, depending on your objectives, have the correct outbound links. With engaging links directing traffic to related landing pages to drive conversions from views. I actually ran my own experiment between two videos on YouTube and the content and the one that was optimised gained 16,000 views against 1,000 for the one that wasn’t. It pays to optimise.
If you have webpages with killer ‘call to actions’ it would be best to use the video assets you have to drive traffic to these web pages and not YouTube. It just makes sense. Good content has to be made visible to gain its benefits in search engine marketing and when it is, it drives more traffic to the call to actions and improves conversion rates.
This goes the same for High Street retail outlets or Global Tech Companies who are driving measurable conversions through.
- Purchases
- Subscribes
- Downloads
- Registrations
In these cases where these measures are are critical to the measure of your digital marketing, its best to use video content in web pages for search engine results. To pull in targeted audiences using key phrases and terms in organic search results that will attract the relevant audiences for your content.
One way to implement video content in webpages for search engine results is to use a video player that makes SEO best practice easy, the tools to drive conversion and is customisable.
Wistia is a fantastic video player which is easy to use & implement. It’s vastly superior to vimeo and provides an alternative to the YouTube strategy. It’s optimised for social media channels, manages SEO video Site maps and enables you to create turn stiles for email capture. That said, Vimeo is a great player for content for an audience of designers/visual artists.
The main key difference is Wistia creates video Site maps for you that have rich snippets. Wistia relays these to Google for your site via Google Webmaster tools.
Having spent hard fought over marketing budgets on websites and video, the aim is to utilise these assets as much as possible. Rich snippets give you the edge on doing this. So it’s important to ensure you are using the correct meta data for your content and your content relates to what your audience want. Also the content being produced has to be in some way unique. Otherwise it’s harder to get search rankings and website traffic.
If your competitors have similar content and no video, create the video and see how you compare in search engine results following the above advice.
