Why Video SEO Strategies for Digital Publishers Make Sense
Plenty of Web publishers hear the phrase “SEO” and think about page titles, keyword research, and incoming links. Is your sitemap accurate? Are you producing what Google considers thin content? Lots to worry about and the worst part of all search engine optimization effort is that there’s so darn much competition. Are there ever less than a million pages shown as the result of a Web search nowadays?
This is why video SEO is becoming such a hot topic among top publishers, bloggers, and website owners. There is a lot of value in having a strong video component to your publishing efforts, and I’ll show you why.
Why Video Strategies Are Smart
Traditional SEO and content publishing can become a hard market after a while for many publishers. Make your content something even vaguely popular and whether you’ve spent hours researching and analyzing the “keyword effectiveness index” (KEI) of your key phrases or not, you’re competing with 2 million, 5 million, 30 million other pages that might be a reasonable match for a given search. Even if you do the exhaustive research outlined here to ensure things are perfect, it’s still a lot of work.
That’s madness, and the challenge of competing with that many other pages is daunting, even if you’re creating brilliant content that’s smart, insightful and dramatically better than everything else online (see a previous blog on how to do this here).
So smart SEO is about search visibility, about understanding, utilizing and exploiting every possible avenue for visibility, not just fiddling with page titles and checking your word count and ratio of outbound links to internal links.
Images are a good example: Are you naming and tagging your images so that they can show up in an image search? Or local: If you have a business with a street address there’s a ton of additional things you can do to ensure you show up in map programs, voice-powered “near me” searches, etc.
Video SEO is actually less competitive
The real winner in the alternative ways to gain visibility in search category, however, is video SEO. People on the Internet spend a mind-boggling amount of time watching video online. Heck, Netflix alone accounts for almost 40% of all Internet traffic worldwide. Add YouTube videos and the up-and-coming video and live streaming from monster site Facebook and you’ve got what’s projected to grow to over 80% of all Internet traffic.
But it’s not popularity that makes video SEO so compelling from a search visibility perspective, but the lack of competition. For a keyword where there are 4 million Web pages, there might be a few thousand videos — or considerably less! The math is easy: do you want to compete with 4 million web pages for the user’s attention, or with a few thousand videos?
“Words” vs. Video
Words, words, we do like our words, us bloggers, and online publishers. But there’s a bigger world out there, and if you can get over the hump of seeing yourself on camera and learn even just the rudiments of lighting, audio recording and enough editing to get your start and stop points right, you’ll be surprised how quickly you can start to produce compelling video and see significant benefit.
Check out my video above to see just how easy it can be to secure the equipment needed to produce a good quality video. A couple of lights, a camera, some decent audio equipment, video software of your choice, and maybe a green screen, and you can be doing great videos.
Getting started with video
I believe video SEO is important for companies in 2017 and beyond that, if you aren’t comfortable being on camera, check to see if someone else in your organization could be the spokesperson, or even hire someone. I’ve done a lot of commercial video for companies big and small and sometimes I’m on camera, other times they specify what kind of person they want and we hire an actor or actress as appropriate.
Most importantly, video SEO is quite fun to produce once you get the hang of it. Whether it’s live streaming webinars like Tyler and Piper do every few weeks for the Ezoic community (tip: they’re always super informative and worth attending can’t find a link to include here?? ) or a regular schedule of video content pushed up to YouTube (as I do with my AskDaveTaylor YouTube channel), video SEO is an important part of remaining a highly visible online company into the future. And you need to be there.
Disagree, have more questions? Keep me talking by leaving comments below.