In our experience with small businesses, content marketing with video is a highly effective strategy for search engine optimization (SEO). In fact, we believe that video marketing can be the foundation of your local SEO and content marketing strategy.
To make this happen, you need to create enough videos to make a difference and those videos need to convey your business expertise and experience. These videos, done right, can start to build trust with your customers.
There are great reasons for creating a few very polished (and expensive) videos — perhaps to introduce your business to website visitors. But the main focus of your video creation effort should be to provide the information your customers are looking for online. You should be answering their questions. You should be explaining how your products and services will help them.
If videos are the foundation of your content marketing strategy. If you do this with your videos, and then repurpose your videos into website pages, blog posts, and social media posts, you’ll likely rank very well online and you’ll likely convert more of your website visitors into customers.
This is a video that Paul Sherland recorded explaining how video and video marketing can be the cornerstone of your content marketing, and even Internet marketing strategy!
Here’s a summary of Paul’s video on how we use marketing videos as the foundation of your content marketing program. If you want to try this yourself, go ahead and give it a try. If you want some experienced help, we can provide it.
Howdy folks. My name is Paul Sherland of IX Brand SEO Services Company in Sugar Land, Texas. And we’re going to talk about how to use video as the foundation for your local content marketing strategy. We talked about how to create it in the last video. We’re going to talk about how to use your marketing videos here.
Content Marketing with Video Starts with Vimeo
You’ve got to decide where you’re going to host your videos. To start with, make sure you put your videos on YouTube, but I would not recommend that you rely on YouTube as the host for videos that you’re gonna use on your website. One of my YouTube channels was hit with a false flagging attack last year and the initial notification from Google came in at 5am on a Friday morning. And the second email from Google was at, like, 5:01 and the entire channel was down and I got a warning message saying don’t ever create a channel again and it was just gone in a minute or less.
Now you can imagine what would have happened if those videos had been on your website. What you’d see is a rectangle on your website every place there was a video saying the video had been removed for violating YouTube’s community standards. You don’t want that to happen. So I strongly recommend that for the videos you that you place on your website, host them someplace where you’re paying for it. Like Vimeo or Wistia, and those are two that come to mind. I host my videos on Vimeo. But I still use YouTube, because YouTube is tied in with Google, so you’ve got to host them there. I wouldn’t put those YouTube videos on your website if I were you.
Content Marketing with Video Requires that You Get Videos Transcribed.
You gotta transcribe your videos if you wanna use them as the foundation for blog posts, for web pages, you gotta have text. So you gotta get the videos transcribed. I use Speechpad, Speechpad.com to get my videos transcribed. And I use standard captions, $1.50 a minute. That gives me the time coded transmissions that create closed captioning for YouTube, for Facebook and for Vimeo. And those time coded transcriptions, closed captioning, are indexed by Google. So Google understands what the video is about. Which helps them rank it. So get the transcriptions. I recommend Speechpad, $1.50, one week turn around, standard captions, and you’re good to go. (I now recommend Rev.com — it’s less expensive, faster and they offer more file formats.)
How Should You Use Your Content Marketing Videos?
With your YouTube channel, you want to make sure that you have links to your social media profiles and to your website. And on Vimeo, I create a Vimeo portfolio for my clients, for each of my clients. And that Vimeo portfolio is like a gallery page. And it also links to my clients websites and it comes up in search results quite often. In my experience the Vimeo hosted videos appear in search results just about as well the YouTube hosted videos, so I would use them both.
Next you add videos to your website, and that’s what the transcriptions are for. You have text now that you can use for blog posts or for web pages. You have to do a little editing because there are some mm’s and ahh’s and things like that that have gotten into the videos. You need to pull that out and you may need to improve the grammar and usage a little bit. But basically you’re 90% or 95% of the way there. You’re over the writer’s block, and you’ve got the written content that you can use on your website.
You can also use the video on social media. I upload my videos directly to Facebook. I think Facebook gives, videos that are uploaded directly, gives them a boost in appearing. I think they appear and I think they’re viewed more often than videos that are added to Facebook via link, via YouTube link or Vimeo link. So, if I were you I would upload your videos directly. Again, you can use the SRT files to add closed captioning. And add the location for your videos, again, to increase the local tie-in with your videos for a local SEO.
For Pinterest, Pinterest is a great-, it’s a growing social media channel, and you can add your videos from your website, just like your images, to your Pinterest boards. So make sure you do that. I also upload my videos directly to Google My Business. Just like images, you should be uploading your images to your Google My Business page. recommend that you use that.
You can also use Twitter and all the other social media channels to make use of your text derived from the video, and also the video. You can also use video in many of your local citations. Angie’s List has taken video, I think they’re still doing that. There are other local citations that often times let you upload a business video. So you have video to do that. If you have any questions, please leave some comments and we’ll get back to you. Again, my name is Paul Sherland, IX Brand SEO Services, Sugar Land, Texas. Thank you very much.
Don’t Make Content Marketing Videos Like Advertisements
In my years of working with small businesses, there are a few that have a hard time making informative videos that convey valuable information to the viewer. It’s tempting to make advertising videos that start with an introduction and then explain why the viewer needs to hire the business to solve his or her problem. The premise here is that the customer is not really qualified to understand the problem or participate in the solution. That doesn’t work well.
The more you educate your video viewers, the more they will be watched and shared. The more your visitors learn from you, the more they will view you as someone they can trust. It’s that simple.
For more information about how to use video to boost your online marketing program, please call 281-343-3284.