Everything you need to know about video marketing SEO

Video is the most effective tool for digital marketing. Experience says so and so does the data. Just consider these significant statistics:

• 78% of people watch online videos every week. 55% watch them daily.

• The average user spends about 7 hours per week watching online videos.

• The user who watches a video understands and retains 95% of the message contained. On pure text communications this drops to 10%.

• Today, 86% of companies use video as a key tool in their marketing mix. In 2020, the percentage was 85%. In 2016 it was only 61%.

• 87% of marketers said they were satisfied with the ROI related to their video campaigns.

• 94% of video marketers claim that videos have helped increase their audience’s understanding of their products and services.

We don’t need to add much more. Certainly, then, it’s not surprising that video also plays a central role in SEO-driven strategies.

Therefore, this is the topic to which we’ll dedicate this post: video marketing SEO.

In the next section, we’ll start with a general overview of why SEO is so important in the marketing mix, for companies of all kinds. Then, we will narrow the focus on the role of video in these processes. Finally, we will list some of the best practices for the best video marketing SEO. 

Let’s start with the basics, without belaboring the point: SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and indicates the strategies for optimizing how online content ranks on search engines.

The higher the ranking of a website or an individual page, the greater the visibility. With the associated return in the number of clicks (and all that goes with it, starting with conversions).

In that regard, consider these two statistics:

• The top five organic results on Google’s first page collect 67.60% of all clicks.

• In contrast, only 0.78% of Google users click on results that appear on the second page.

It is even more important to reflect on this data, which refers to actions that occur upstream of the previous points:

• As many as 93% of online browsing experiences start through search engines.

• Search engines bring 300% more traffic to websites than social media.

To put it another way: if your site, therefore your brand, is not visible on Google, it practically doesn’t exist. And marketers know this very well.

In conclusion, here are these two additional statistics:

• For 70% of marketers, SEO is more effective than PPC (Pay Per Click) in generating sales.

• For 61% of marketers, improving ranking through SEO and increasing organic presence is the top priority for their inbound marketing strategies.

Here, we need to be very clear and transparent: SEO is not an exact science. It’s estimated that Google’s algorithm changes about 500 times a year, and as a result, it’s not surprising that strategies and best practices also change very quickly. But there are some fixed points. And among them is the very important role that video marketing SEO plays.

To show you how important videos are for SEO ranking, we want to appeal, again, to numbers and statistics.

Here is a selection of them:

• On average, videos rank 50 times better in organic search engine rankings than links that contain only text. 

• Search results that contain a video have a 41% higher average Click Through Rate (CTR) than results from text pages.

• Blog posts that contain video see a 157% increase in traffic compared to those that contain only text.

• A key metric for improving search engine rankings is the average time spent by a user on a page. Videos add, on average, 2 minutes to this time.

• Blog posts that include videos attract an average of three times as many inbound links as text posts; and this is another factor that is highly rewarded by search engine algorithms.

We could continue, but we are sure the message is already clear. Now, however, we are interested in being even more concrete and operational.

So, in the next two paragraphs, we will focus on:

• The preliminary aspects to keep in mind when setting up your SEO video marketing strategy;

• The best practices to adopt, providing you with a list.

When setting up your strategy, where do you start? From the right questions. And from data analysis. Let us elaborate. An effective SEO strategy is always born at the intersection of two forces: 

• Your campaign objectives

• The sentiment of your potential target audience

On the first front, we need to ask: what kind of message do you want to communicate? And accordingly, what are the keywords that sum it up?

Also: who do you want to target? What kind of buyer? To which audience segments? And, even more in depth, to which individual people? (We’ll focus on this last point, which concerns personalization, later in this post.)

And finally: what kind of actions do you want people to take after viewing your videos? These are all questions that the search engine cannot answer. But the answers can be supported by data analysis. And data analysis is crucial for everything related to the sentiment of your potential target audience.

Here, it’s a matter of knowing how to investigate it thoroughly. Identifying trends. Above all, identifying how they change and trying to predict their movements. How? Through the most advanced data analysis and interpretation systems.

In short: don’t just look at the most searched words on search engines. Conduct your analysis in greater depth, including geographic metrics (if your business requires it), demographic, psycho-social metrics, and more.

Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all recipe that applies universally. It depends on your goals. It’s all about making them intersect in the best way possible with your expectations of the customer audience: an audience that is less and less “imagined” and more and more “measured.” 

We published a blog post dedicated to best practices for video marketing SEO. There, we created a complete checklist that you can refer to for more insights to complement the best practices that we’ll feature here.

When it comes to SEO video marketing, it is crucial to put medium- to long-term strategies on track. Search engines always reward consistency in content production and continuous updating of content.

In a blog post that contains a video, you must also take care of the accompanying text (which should also be optimized for SEO), but also for other types of visual content. The key word here is consistency.

• On a more technical level, it is essential to include your keyword in the title of the video. 

• The same keyword should also appear in the video description.

• Choose your video tags carefully (and, again, consistently) as well.

• Thumbnails are increasingly important. For some time now, Google has started showing thumbnails on the results page and users’ attention is very much attracted to this kind of result. A good thumbnail, therefore, contributes greatly to diverting traffic to one’s video.

• Uploading subtitles is another way to improve indexing. Search engines will be able to track and categorize the inserted text.

• It’s not just a matter of text and subtitles. In fact, Google’s and YouTube’s algorithms are becoming more and more refined, and they are now able to intercept even the words spoken in videos with increasing accuracy.

• It’s always a good idea to expand the visibility and reach of your video by publishing it on multiple platforms.

• Finally, orient yourself with the compass of data. In fact, the best way to achieve excellent search engine rankings is to learn about the tastes, preferences, and behavior of your audience.

How to do this? By leveraging data analytics and embracing a data-driven perspective. You can go as far as personalization, that is, producing videos designed based on the characteristics of your target audience.  This is precisely what specialized companies like Babelee do.

To learn more about all the opportunities of Babelee’s Video Platform, see here.