Watching a video is better than reading text for recall of information, it’s more persuasive, it’s more personable, it’s more engaging and builds trust faster, and search engines love it!
A high quality video promoting your business offers some fantastic benefits to your company, including more traffic and more clients. But video alone may have limited value all by itself. Because, what do you do with a business profile video once you have it? To really leverage the full scope of benefits of a business profile video, people have to watch it.
So, how do you get people to watch your video? First, you must get your video in front of people so they can watch it. This is where Video SEO comes into play.
What is Video SEO? Video SEO (vSEO) is search engine optimization for video. Optimization literally means a “process or methodology implemented to make something (e.g., a design, system, decision, etc) as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible.” vSEO is simply optimizing the video and the page where the video resides in particular ways that search engines (e.g., Google and YouTube) like and need so the videos can be ranked higher in search results for keywords that are important to your business.
What does that mean? Video SEO has one purpose: Getting the video in front of people searching for what your business offers. The point of Video SEO is to drive traffic specifically to your video and content, and ultimately to your website.
One critically important advantage for businesses having a highly optimized video (using good solid video SEO techniques) is increased conversion rates (meaning, people become your customers and clients more often by watching a video than without watching a video).
Why Video SEO Is Super-Important for Your Business
Video SEO is highly valuable when done right, and can drive lots of additional traffic to your videos and to your company. Here are a few reasons why video SEO is so important for your company’s videos:
1. Videos show up more easily in all search engine (like Google, YouTube, Bing, etc) results.
Search engines love video content. Why? Because people love watching videos and search engines know it. So search engines rank optimized videos higher than text web pages.
The presence of video on a web page makes it 53x more likely to appear on the first page of Google. Bottom line: video increases the searchability of your content, if the video is optimized properly. In other words people looking for your products or services find you.
2. People can’t get enough of video.
People will click on a video before they click on a text page. For example, a video listed in position 4 or 5 may be clicked on more often than a text page (non-video) in position 2 or 3!
Cisco estimates that by 2017, 69% of all consumer internet traffic will be strictly related to videos, video watching, and video searches. If you have online videos, don’t miss out on a huge amount of potential traffic by neglecting to optimize your videos with vSEO.
3. Good video quality along with solid video SEO means more and sustained traffic, and increased conversions.
Video SEO is incredibly valuable for attracting traffic to your video. But it’s also important because people who watch a video on your site tend to stick around longer, which means you’re more likely to turn them into a customer.
4. Referring Traffic
Visitors don’t just come to your website out of nowhere, so posting optimized videos on YouTube is an easy way to drive visitors to your site. For many companies, their videos on YouTube are a large driver of traffic to their website.
To take full advantage of this referral traffic benefit, you must get traffic to your video! And getting traffic and viewers to your video is the heart of video SEO.
5. Video Vastly Improves Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing remains one of the most effective marketing tactics available, with one of the highest ROI’s of any other marketing strategy.
But what if you could double or triple the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts? That’s what video does: it increases email click-through rates by 200-300%, ensuring that your email campaigns get the highest ROI possible.
6. Blogging v. Vlogging – or Both?
Videos add tremendous value to blog posts. Remember, people love watching video, way more than they love reading text. If you’re writing text blogs posts with pictures, you can expect your readership/viewership to spike when you add video. The most powerful blogs have video as the centerpiece for each post, then text surrounding the video that satisfies the need to read (and the search engine spiders).
Combine your blogging with video and with email marketing and you have a marketing powerhouse trifecta!
If you currently have one or more videos, or are just delving into video for your business, make sure you get those videos optimized with Video SEO so you can see more traffic, more conversions, and more success in your business!