Online videos have emerged as one of the most powerful marketing mediums we have today. From increasing user understanding of products and services to driving increased organic traffic to websites, videos have been proven to bring marketers solid returns of their investments.
However, it is safe to say that the popularity of videos also poses a challenge for businesses that are new to enter this space. With hundreds of thousands of videos already out there in the virtual world and hundreds more being added with every passing second, beginners can find it difficult to make sure that their video stands out from all the competition.
Provide exceptional value
People love to share great videos with their friends or on social media, but they are not going to like, share or link to any video they find on the web. They need content that provides exceptional value, inspires them, or touches an emotional chord.
So basically, the first things you need for video marketing success are unique content that your audience can’t find elsewhere and attracts and holds their attention and, of course, a carefully planned and executed marketing strategy. When your video is endorsed by more people or gets more shares, likes, and tweets, it pushes search engines to boost your site’s ranking in their results, leading to more views.
Don’t forget video SEO
However, don’t forget that you also need to optimize your video for search engines like you would do a normal web page if you want your videos to rank higher in search engine results.
To start with, video SEO is different from normal SEO because the search engines are not going to be able to “watch”, search, or index the actual video. They can only index the text content on your page, which is why you need to use descriptive text and keywords while coming up with titles, tags, file names, and so on for your videos. With proper utilization of these video SEO components, you will be able to give your videos the advantage it requires to edge out the competition in the virtual world.
For example, closed captions, which are indexed by search engines like Google, have been proven to increase YouTube views by 13.48% in just a couple of weeks. In addition, captions make your video understandable to millions of viewers who have hearing disabilities. A lot of people who don’t have any trouble hearing also used closed captions when they want to enjoy videos in unfavorable surroundings like a quiet doctor’s office or when they are at home with a sleeping baby.
Search engines also use transcripts for indexing multimedia content, which means that you can increase search traffic to your website by adding transcripts to your videos. In addition, transcripts provide a useful reference for people who want to use the video for reference or as a guide, not to mention the millions of people out there with hearing disabilities.
Considering that more than half of YouTube views come from non-English speaking countries, you may also want to consider adding subtitles to your videos. In addition to improving SEO, subtitles in multiple languages also increase your video’s reach and accessibility and give people the freedom to watch your videos from any part of the world at any time. Subtitles have also been shown to increase engagement time by more than 40%and increase the number of people who watch a video till the end by 80%.
For more in-depth information about how you can make your videos popular and search engine friendly and some useful marketing stats and data, check this new infographic from Taking 1 Transcription!
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This blog contributed by Jessica Morgan.