Product Videos & SEO: 6 Tips To Optimize Your Ranking
For e-commerce brands, visual content such as video is a critical part of online marketing. Video SEO aligns your internal content strategy with the search engines algorithm, making it a powerful tool for SEO.
A survey report reveals that 94% of audiences rely on video to make a decision. Another report by HubSpot states that explainer videos can increase conversion by up to 80%. The reason is not far-fetched. Videos can make information extremely easy to digest and give a good impression of a brand.
So, here are the top six ways to optimize your product videos to increase your ranking.
Product Videos & SEO: 6 Tips To Optimize Your Ranking
1. Get a Transcript for Your Video
Google and other search engines can’t watch your videos. They rely on the information obtained from your captions to understand the context of your video. As a result, the indexed text in your closed captioning increases your keyword depth. Inserting relevant keywords on your video description, tags, and title can boost its ranking on multiple platforms.
Transcripts and captions provide search engines video data to help them crawl through the content to check its relevance and rank it highly. This strategy can help improve views, search rank, and engagement for your product videos. A case study on the effectiveness of transcripts reveals a 4.18% increase in traffic and 3.89% newly acquired links. Hence, it is imperative to keep your transcript in mind from the beginning and identify searchable keywords to add and highlight throughout the video.
2. Create High-Quality Videos That Serves Your Audience
Creating numerous videos is not enough in SEO. The key is to make videos that serve a purpose to your viewers while aiming at a particular goal. While it is great to attract viewers with your content, creating high-quality videos encourages people to reshare your video link with others. Videos give you a boost in rankings, which allows more people to see your site and click on your link.
However, a low-quality video with little or no context can adversely affect your ranking. Visitors will quickly exit your page if it doesn’t satisfy their purpose. This increase in bounce rate tells search engines that your page isn’t valuable and lacks website authority.
The following steps can improve your video strategy:
- Be sure your video educates: Answer questions about your brand, products, or services that will empower potential customers to make a purchasing decision. Consider a demonstration for your product in action from your product pages.
- Be consistent: Work consistently to rank for multiple keywords that match your customers’ search intent.
- Make your video visually appealing: Creating top-quality videos that look professional will help you stand out.
3. Choose the Right Video Hosting Platform
Traditional SEO focuses on keyword research and link building to optimize text-based content on a webpage. However, video SEO requires that marketers adapt their SEO strategy and keyword research to complement the guidelines of the video hosting platform they choose.
There are many video hosting platforms to host your videos, both free and paid. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. For instance, some have limited customizable embedding options, while others place no ads in the video player. It’s best to research each platform before choosing which one to use for regular video hosting. You can also upload your content on multiple video hosting platforms to increase exposure and discoverability.
4. Prioritize the Technical Details
Besides uploading your video to a site like Vimeo or YouTube, there are technical details to take care of. Entering the correct information on the backend is essential for search engine crawlers to categorize your video.
If you’re using YouTube, the platform uses the following information to rank your videos:
- Keywords in description tag
- Audience engagement and retention
- Comments
- Title tag information
- Likes and dislikes
- Video length
- Tags
Even though you can’t entirely control some of these requirements, such as subscribers and comments, work on those you can control to improve your video rank. This includes creating compelling videos that people want to watch. It would be best to leverage playlists that people search by having similar videos of your brand in your playlist. Other proven tips include embedding the video on your site, promoting the video via multiple channels, and considering paid campaigns to drive more view time.
5. Build Quality Links for Your Videos
A video can generate many high-quality links for your website if properly implemented. However, it’s essential to decide who you want to share the video with and who you want to link to. Besides offering value to the viewer, your video has to evoke a strong emotional reaction. This will compel users to share it, either by clicking the share button on your site or by creating a post about it on their website or blog—with a link back to your site.
You can also use PR or outreach strategies to gain brand awareness through your videos. Figure out if you already have enough high-quality traffic to attract links automatically. If your brand already has a large, loyal community of followers, they’ll likely share your content naturally. However, ensure you create high-quality content targeted at your fan base.
6. Increase Video Conversions
Besides increasing ranking, video SEO can be a great sales strategy. This process entails attracting more visitors to your website and optimizing your site to convert into paying clients and customers. Videos are great for landing pages and other eCommerce website pages, engaging prospects and turning them into paying customers.
Two ways to increase conversions with video are by embedding it on a landing page and using rich snippets. A report showed a 6% to 30% increase in sales on products by Zappos when they added a product video on the page to one of their category pages.
Some businesses are service-oriented and may not have a product for viewing. In such cases, explainer videos can introduce your business effectively in an engaging way. Dropbox increased their conversion by up to 10% by adding an explainer to their homepage. The high conversion rate and increased sign-ups no doubt generated a huge ROI.
Conclusion
Video marketing is no more an emerging trend. It is here to stay, and more businesses are discovering its benefits. These tips will help you boost your ranking in search engines through videos while increasing conversions and engagement with your target audience.
