Now that we understand how videos become valuable content to improve your website’s SEO, it’s crucial that you need to implement SEO on the video itself.
Essentially, the reason you should optimize content for search engines is to help both your audience and the search engine crawl robots understand it better.
But, other than that, why bother doing it?
Well, these are the reason why you should optimize your videos.
The Importance of Video Optimization
Not only do well-optimized videos help you to get a better rank on the SERPs, but they also show your target audience that you provide reliable and well-structured content.
That is what makes the video even more clickable and worth watching.
That being said, let’s break down some other reasons why optimized videos are crucial for your video marketing campaign’s performance.
1. Videos Are The Most Consumed Content Right Now
People are watching videos like crazy. Every day, 50 million people go to YouTube and watch a total of 5 billion videos.
With that in mind, saying that your video has a tiny chance to get any views is an understatement. It is very likely that your video will end up without being viewed once.
The problem is, even the smartest crawl bots do not have the ability to watch and understand your video.
That means no matter how professionally your video was made, if there are no correct tags, it’s likely to drown among the other millions of videos uploaded on the same day.
Optimizing your video for certain keywords will get your video a much-needed boost, especially if you’re a newcomer.
2. Increase Audience Reach
Besides increasing your product value, optimizing your video has an indirect connection to your brand’s reach.
Most video hosting platforms, especially YouTube, can offer you direct SEO benefits in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Google is designed to show you different types of content relevant to your query. This means that within the SERP you’re likely to find video thumbnails mixed in with text links.
Throughout the years, search engines have learned that there are many people who will find a video explanation easier to understand and more helpful than a standard article.
This means that if you have optimized your video correctly, you’re likely to get prominent placement on the SERP for the query you are aiming for.
In 2018, getting the first spot on a SERP means more traffic to your video (and thus more reach for your brand).
On top of that, it helps you to establish yourself as the go-to expert, I’ll talk more about this in the last point of this article — keep reading.
3. Increase In ROI
Do not consider video content as a ‘tool’ you must have because everyone else has it. Video content is an investment, and optimizing your video can result in a bigger return on that investment.
Applying SEO to your video means that you are one step closer to getting the most out of your investment.
An Invodo study says that 52% of consumers think that watching product videos increases their confidence in online purchase decisions.
Essentially, you provide a handful of information that they can use to judge for themselves whether or not they should trust your brand.
If you present this information to as many people as possible, you will get the most out of the money you spent creating the video itself.
4. Be The Key Player For A Niche
Here’s the thing about people on the Internet: the more they see something being shared around and talked about, the more eager they are to find out more.
It’s called fear of missing out (FOMO).
That’s why most online marketers subscribe to Google Alerts. If you don’t already know, Google alert alerts (duh) you daily/weekly/monthly about notable new content for certain keywords.
I, for one, subscribe to alerts for the term ‘explainer video’.
My point is: optimizing your video with the right tags, meta description, and title will get you a premium ticket to Google alert entries.
Now there are two possible outcomes to this:
- You’ll notify your competitors about what you’re making, allowing them to one-up your content.
- You’ll open a mutualism window.
The first outcome is rather negative, if not neutral for your brand. In this case, think of your competitor as that one friend who keeps saying he’s done something a little more awesome than what you just told him.
You can ignore them until you actually do something that is far more awesome than this one.
The second outcome is what you’re shooting for by optimizing your video. People who subscribe to an alert for an ‘explainer video’ are not always explainer video creators.
Some of them come from a shoulder niche like video marketing, online marketing, or voice acting.
This is the whole point of appearing in a Google alert.
When they see your video in their inbox, watch it and think “Oh hey this is good content, I’ll share it with my Twitter followers.” it will start a chain reaction that will not end, at least until the content is no longer relevant. And that’s where SEO-ing your video really pays off.
Storytelling in Video Optimization: Why Do You Need It?
Video optimization doesn’t always have to be too technical and make the content slightly boring.
Creating story-driven videos can help you attract more eyeballs and boost engagement as well as view rates — which lead can signal search engine crawlers to index the video better.
Stories are the most engaging content type for audiences. Using strategies like emotional appeal, a timeline, and a clever choice of words, stories are an incredibly effective tool for shaping your brand’s character and engaging your customers.
After all, a video is an amazing way to connect with people because it’s visual, easy to digest, and, most importantly, it’s highly accessible and shareable.
All of these elements of a good story combined with the eye-catching nature of an online video will help pave your way to marketing success.
Here are four rules for storytelling that will help your video optimization with a few examples to illustrate them.
1. Be Friendly, Don’t Be Braggy
Engaging video content is not about you. Your customers don’t really care that much about your company. Continuously bragging about how your product is superior to a competitor’s will only be a turn-off for your audience.
An effectively engaging video talks about your audience base’s goals, problems, and shared interests.
Building a strong relationship with your audience base starts by stepping into their circle of trust.
You can do this with valuable content, such as providing solutions to common problems, answering questions, and sharing information about the industry’s ups and downs.
2. Always Include Context
Explaining context is the first thing you should include in a storytelling video. Borrow the basic principles of journalism (what, where, who, when, why, and how) to help your audience better understand your story’s content and context.
Every element in your storytelling video should serve a specific purpose that will gradually make the video better as a whole.
By now, you should have seen DropBox’s very first explainer video:
The video above combines a story and a call to action beautifully by making the story a double agent: as context and as an introduction to the concept of their product.
DropBox’s video uses people’s tendency to forget where they put small things, like keys and wallets, as the context for introducing their service. You should know that when they first launched, cloud storage hadn’t been introduced widely to the public yet.
This context helped convey DropBox’s new concept to the public since it used a familiar situation as an analogy.
3. Create Your Own Signature
In order for your video storytelling to work as a brand-building tool, you need to make sure that everyone knows it is your brand, not any other brand.
You can achieve this by including a signature in a video that lets people know that it is your brand that made that video.
Creating an identity is essential for brands, which is why there’s something called brand-building. Yes, brand-building is known as a way to increase consumer awareness of a brand.
However, it’s also a way to give a brand identity and worth.
I recommend that businesses, especially small ones, have a mascot.
Mascots are the easiest way to represent your brand other than using logos, which are far more likely to be forgotten.
Good mascots personify a brand, enabling a business’s target audience to better identify, remember and understand a company and its services.
As ageless brand representatives, mascots serve as brand amplifiers that help a target audience develop a closer relationship with a business.
But mascots aren’t the only way to make your own signature.
Visual aspects such as character designs, color palettes, and strokes are also common practices in claiming a signature style. However, if you aren’t an artist yourself, this is likely to be the least of your concerns.
4. Bend the Formal Look
When it comes to video marketing, most corporations tend to avoid casual looks. They love formalities so much that they forget not everyone is an office worker with a suit and a briefcase.
Granted, stepping outside the corporate parameter is not as simple as it sounds. There are some organizational rules that can’t be broken.
However, if you are that kind of brand, you can easily leverage your social media channels or blog comment sections to build a more personalized and colorful communication media.
If The Guardian, notably among the biggest and most well-known corporations in the world, can post this colorful, casual image to their Facebook timeline, who says your company can’t?
Takeaway
The guidelines for optimizing videos are fairly simple: you need to make it friendly for search engine crawlers to index and engaging for the viewer to watch.
By following these guidelines, your video marketing effort should be one step closer to achieving the goal. What good will your amazing video content do if no one watches it?
These are the frames that your content needs to be seen and the principles that will make your audience like you. Not because you offer sales or because you are afraid to lose them, but because you are actually being personal with them.
At Breadnbeyond, we offer a wide range of animated explainer video packages that are tailored to leverage your next campaign. Click on the banner below!
