What Video Marketing Can Do to Improve Your Rankings

Featured article by Jennifer Livingston, Independent Technology Author

Video marketing is one of the most effective ways to improve your search engine rankings. This has been true for quite some time, but many businesses still overlook this strategy. Videos are good both for engaging your audience and for SEO. Not only can you rank your videos on YouTube and other video sharing sites, but videos can improve your website’s position in the search engines. Let’s look at some ways that you can leverage video marketing to get more traffic and higher rankings.

Google Still Favors Video

Ever since YouTube, which is owned by Google, became hugely popular, videos have been one of the easiest types of content to rank for. This remains the case today. To cite just one statistic, you have a 53 percent better chance of having your landing page reach the first page of Google if it contains a video. The fact that videos also make your site more compelling to visitors makes it even more or a no-brainer to use video.

Videos Help You Rank for Niche Markets

When considering your video marketing strategy, you should always keep keywords and SEO in mind. Keyword research in your niche or industry provides clues about what your audience cares about. When you identify a problem or issue that many people care about, you have a good topic for a video. Don’t only focus on broad problems, though. Just as you might research long tail keywords for article topics, do the same for videos. For example, if your website is on the topic of fitness and weight loss, you might research diet and exercise trends. You might make a video about the Cucumber Diet, whether you want to recommend it or ridicule it. You can use a similar strategy for any niche. Videos on trendy and niche-specific topics are a good way to rank for long tail keywords.

Video Improves Your Email Marketing

When you think about improving your rankings, you may not immediately think of how email marketing can help you do this. However, as you develop an email list, you have an easy way to engage with subscribers and send them to your website. These are people who probably visited your website in order to subscribe to your list. However, without prompting, they may never return.

Sending engaging emails is a great way to remind people to visit your website again and again. It turns out that including videos in your emails improves click through rates by 200 to 300 percent. In an age when email marketing is more competitive than ever, its important to gain any advantage you can find. The vast majority of emails, even from otherwise sophisticated marketers, don’t use video, making this a powerful way to differentiate yourself and get better results.

Ways to Optimize Your Videos

When Google or YouTube rank videos, they’re actually ranking the titles and descriptions under the videos. That’s why the exact same video could have very different results depending on what techniques you use to optimize it. Choosing a keyword rich title for your video is the most important factor for both SEO and attracting videos. It’s also important to include a full description for your videos. This is a chance to include many long tail keywords in addition to your main keyword.

One method to make your videos more SEO-friendly is to use closed captioning. First of all, this makes your videos accessible to hearing impaired viewers. Additionally, it also provides more text for the search engine bots to read. You might even consider using captions in other languages. For example, you could make two versions of your video, one with English and the other with Spanish captioning option. If you want to attract viewers that speak other languages, you could do this for as many languages as you want. This is a powerful but under-utilized trick for optimizing videos.

These are some of the ways that video marketing helps you rank better in the search engines. There’s really no downside to using videos in your marketing, as you’re also providing your audience with appealing content. Evidence indicates that videos are more likely to be shared than text-based content. There are many ways to incorporate video into your marketing campaigns. If you’re not taking advantage of this opportunity, you’re missing out on a chance to achieve higher rankings for your content.