Video is a powerful marketing tool used by brands in order to present the experiences they offer as well taking their audiences to the destinations (virtually). As purchases are often highly emotional decisions, video marketing can be a useful tool for brands as they convey stories, which will build brand trust thus resulting in conversion.
Use Video to Solve Existing Problems and Provide New Information
In order for your videos to rank well in Google for your search terms, you need to provide value to the viewer that either provides further information or supports existing content.
When planning out your videos, ask yourself: what questions do my customers ask regularly? How can I convey the experience of the service that we offer?
Not all video has to be difficult or expensive to produce, if you offer holidays to a tropical, beach destination – include plenty of shots of this in the video. If you offer Ski Chalet rentals, you can do a guided tour of one of the chalets, it’s also important to include footage of people skiing and snowboarding in this video too as this is the purpose of them renting the chalet.
Make Videos Easy to Browse
A great way to make your video easy to find is to not only include it on the relevant site pages, but to create a ‘media’ page which is home to all of your onsite videos. When you set up your video gallery it’s important to include categories and tags, making it easy for users to search and navigate between videos with ease.
Make Your Videos Interactive
Every time that a user watches a video, there is an opportunity to further engage the user using a call to action. Include in-video links as well as verbal calls to action to encourage the viewer to view further pages on site or complete an enquiry form.
For example, if you talk about visiting Etosha National Park in your video, include a link at that point that opens your Etosha page in a new tab. This way the user can quickly jump to that page once the video has finished.
Transcribe Your Videos
Including a full text transcript of your video (on the same page) is important from an SEO point of view. If the page only contains an embedded video, Google will not have much visible content to judge what the page is about and may not rank it as highly as it should do.
Transcripts are also useful in creating additional content for your website. You could use the transcript as a base for a blog post that links back to the page containing the video. You can do this in house and have someone transcribe the video, or you can employ the services of a transcription service, such as TranscribeMe, or hire a freelancer.
Make Sure You Have a Video Sitemap
A video sitemap is essential in giving Google more information about the video content that can be found on your site.
Entries on a video sitemap include a link to the page that hosts your video, as well as some other required information. Once you have created your Sitemap, you can submit it to Google using Webmaster Tools and give it the best chance of gaining good visibility in the search results.
Allow Others To Use Your Video
As you create great videos, let others incorporate your content into their work. By making it easy for others to embed your videos on their site, you’re increasing the potential for more links to your website as well as increasing your online reach.
