Harnessing video for SEO

Videos convert traffic at a rate between 2 and 6x compared with other media. It provides one of the fastest, easiest ways to build an audience and get traffic – and chances are your competitors aren’t using it.

Reel Social Media gave an excellent presentation called 5 Videos You Can Shoot in an Hour as part of the RISE Austin event yesterday. Weston Norton and Talmadge Boyd both had some great points that I’ve summarized here. The SEO world has been alive with chatter about video for a while now, so this is an ideal time to start experimenting.

Why does your site need video?

YouTube search now represents 28% of all Google searches – visitors are actively seeking out videos as well as text. For “how to”-style articles, video is often more understandable than text, faster to create, and provide a higher rate of conversions.

Putting your face – or your CEO’s and co-workers’ faces – on a site also creates a rapport than helps differentiate your organization from competitors. In the social web, your visitors will be more involved if they can see who you are.

What are the best practices for shooting video?

• Transcribe the content: search engines cannot index video content (yet) – providing a text transcript helps SEO and also allows viewers to skim for interesting sections of text to jump around the clip. One service that can do this for you is SpeakerText.
• Keep it short: the optimal length for video is around 90 seconds, in terms of maximizing the number of viewers who will stay until the end. Clearly the length will depend on the subject matter, but the video should be no longer than it needs to be.
• Invest in the audio: audiences will watch sub-standard video with good audio, but not the other way around. Make sure the audio track is as clean as possible by using a lapel microphone (see equipment below).
• Create a useful title: just as the title Titanic communicates the topic to the audience better than the name Ishtar, your title will determine whether visitors view your video or not. And also whether it gets found by Google, so flex those keywords.

What sort of video should you create?

Rather than shooting commercials, which are definitely more complicated and costly, there are various types of video that are useful to visitors and easy to create:

• Interviews: with colleagues and co-workers, providing insights, expertise or breaking news around your business.
• Testimonials: get customers to say how great your product or service is – it’s more genuine in video.
• Screencasts: for demonstrating either proprietary or third-party software, screencasts are popular on the net.
• How-to videos: show your expertise by solving niche problems or providing advice in your field.

What equipment do you need?

• External microphone: Audio Technica ATR-3550
• Video camera: Kodak ZI8.
• Video editing software: Final Cut Express (for Mac) or Premiere Elements (for Mac or PC). There are many free editing suites available too.

Given the proliferation of cameras on devices, it’s no surprise that video is becoming more important in the social context of web marketing. The direction that Google is taking with SEO also means that you ignore these trends at the risk of losing your ranking. We’re going to start experimenting with video on all our sites in the next few weeks – more to come soon.