Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

Inbound Marketing Using Video Content

May 13, 2011, Troy Adamson

Passion-Inspired Video and Other Creative Content (GF502)

The use of video to market powerful content has exploded in recent years! Whether it’s used in blogs or as a viral content strategy, video gets peoples’ attention! When searching popular keywords, Google now gives videos first-page rankings. Sites that would otherwise score unfavorably are now able to make the top of first-page search results by posting video content. So, what does this tell you? Video is an incredible opportunity to drive more traffic and leads to your website!    

Inbound Marketing Using Video Content

Image by: laverrue

The video advantage

Since video is fairly new to online marketing, there’s less video content to compete with. This means, if you’re smart about optimizing your video content, there’s a pretty good chance it can show up at the top of Google search results. Many businesses are still preoccupied with optimizing keywords for only text-based mediums. They haven’t discovered that keywords can be optimized using video as well.

Where to post video

Hosting your videos on third-party sites like YouTube may be a good strategy if you’re only interested in getting your content out in public view, but if you’re serious about directing more visits to your site, focus on hosting content on your own site. YouTube generates lots of traffic, so posting your videos on YouTube will help you generate lots of views quickly, but won’t do much for your site rankings.

Optimize your video content

Use rich keywords and position them as far to the left of the title as possible. Video itself doesn’t contain content Google can decipher, so be sure to upload a transcript of your video. Transcripts should be time-coded and the video script broken down into segments. Here's a useful video that shows you how to upload a transcript to YouTube videos.

Create a video sitemap

Search engines must know how to index the pages on your site that contain video. Building a video sitemap will accomplish this. A video sitemap is able to identify and tag videos on your site. It should include the URL for the video file, a thumbnail URL, play page URL, and title and description information. Take a look at how to create a video sitemap using Google's Webmaster Tools.

Measure your content

Like blog posts, keep your videos short and concise. People watch videos because they’re trying to absorb meaningful information in a short amount of time. Ten minutes should be the maximum length for your video. If it runs longer than that, consider cutting it into a series of shorter videos. Make sure your content is relevant and informative to your audience. Videos have the potential of attracting lots of inbound links IF they contain content people find useful.

Promote your video

Spread the word by posting links to your videos on your LinkedIn and Facebook pages. Send out tweets to your Twitter followers so they can check out your new content postings. Generate more activity around your videos by encouraging others to leave comments about them. Video is a popular medium for viral marketing. If you have something valuable to share, your content could spread like wildfire!

Online video is a dynamic tool to use in your inbound marketing strategy. If your site's having difficulty getting higher search rankings, consider tapping into the SEO potential video can offer. Video can be an effective way to sell your brand, educate your audience, and generate more traffic for you site.

Topics: Lead Generation, Inbound Marketing, SEO