Content marketing is the biggest trend in the digital marketing world right now because it serves dual purposes. On the one hand, it’s a good long-term search engine optimization strategy and can ultimately bring more visitors to your website; on the other, it’s a strong conversion tool, meaning that it can help to turn those visitors into customers. But in the rush to create content, some marketers opt only for blogs and infographics, forgetting one extremely powerful tool: video.
Using Video for SEO
The idea behind using video for SEO purposes is that when you create good content, people will want to share it. As people share your video on social media and post links to it all over the Internet, all those links will point back to your website. These external links are an important ranking signal for the algorithms that decide rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs, as they’re usually called in the industry). When your content is popular, that’s a sign to the search engines that you’re a quality site with a lot of influence. This is the new face of link building, which used to be accomplished through much shadier tactics (like buying of directory links). Making a high-quality video is a way to earn high-quality inbound links.
Optimizing for Conversion
On your site, video marketing content can also encourage visitors to become a customer or buy your products. The exact numbers vary from study to study, of course, but there are numerous indications that advertising videos are highly effective in driving sales. Recent studies have shown that 34% of people shopping for clothes are positively influenced (meaning more likely to buy a particular item) after seeing it in an online video. And according to a survey by Retail Touchpoints, shoppers are 174% more likely to purchase if they watch advertising videos before shopping.
Factors in Common
Depending on your business, the same video may or may not serve both purposes. For SEO, you might want more general, informational content (or perhaps even something amusing or cute) so that people will want to share it; for conversion, you might want a more straightforward product demo. But it’s not impossible for a video to do both. Regardless, the key to video marketing effectiveness is quality. You want people to take your company seriously, and that means that even lighthearted content needs to be well done. That means working with an experienced digital video production agency who can help you identify your goals for the video and create it.
Are you more interested in using video for SEO, or for direct marketing to clients? Do you think a single video could do both for your business? Share your thoughts in the comments.
