How important is online video in relation to web search?

24 February 2012

Video SEO, or video marketing, is quickly becoming an important part of online search marketing that companies will ignore at their peril. As more and more people get access to broadband, watching videos online is becoming more common, and so that provides an ever-growing pool of prospective customers you can’t access by any more direct means than by posting videos.

This isn’t exactly a new thing. People have been using videos to promote their website or brand for a long time, and the format hasn’t exactly changed: give people something useful or entertaining for free, and tell them to come to your site for more. If you want to know how to grow a bonsai tree, there are videos that explain it, with links to a site where you can buy supplies.

Marketing Videos and Viral Videos: Know the Difference

Anyone can create a simple marketing or instructional video, and I encourage you to try it and practice it. Viral videos, on the other hand, are a special breed. They are highly hit-and-miss, and you could spend ages making a clever, funny video that nobody bothers to share. Viral videos can skyrocket a brand to superstardom overnight, but they can also be a time-consuming waste of money.

If you want to be a hit like the Old Spice commercials, hire a viral marketing agency to do the work for you. They’re not even that expensive.

First-Tier Video Marketing: Using Videos as a Hook

It doesn’t take much to make an instructional video and upload it to YouTube. If you get the title of your video right, and not a lot of people are trying to explain the same thing, and your video is half decent, it will get shared in the special interest forums that talk about your subject, and you should get a few hundred or a few thousand views quite easily. Some of these people will click through to your site.

I call this “first-tier” because it’s pretty straightforward: you make a video, the video gets traffic based on the SEO of its title, number of likes, links to it, etc., and a portion of that traffic goes to your site.

Second-Tier Video Marketing: Link Building

An often-overlooked aspect of video marketing is its potential for linkbuilding. Setting up a bunch of WordPress, Blogger and TypePad sites that link to yours has limited benefit, even if you set up a linkwheel (which is a whole other topic). However, if you upload 5 useful videos, each of which gets 5-10 links posted to it in forums and the like, and each video links back to your “money site”, that’s a lot of link juice you’re directing your way.

Simple Process for Using Videos for SEO

This could be expanded greatly, but in a nutshell a good exercise to (relatively) quickly build link popularity is:

1. Create 4 or 5 useful videos (not a 5-part series, 5 distinct topics) that are relevant to your audience, and give viewers something of value (knowledge, a technique, a trick, etc.). Do your keyword research for titles, meta keywords and descriptions.
2. Identify around 15-20 relevant forums or websites where similar topics are discussed. This can be tricky, so if there aren’t many, start your own WordPress or TypePad 1-page blog with an article about it. Don’t use the same free blogging platform twice.
3. Go through the forums, leaving comments where a question has been asked that is answered by your video. Don’t just comment spam - try to participate in a few discussions.
4. Link all comments to one of your videos, and link all comments to another one of your comments or blog posts if possible. Use different anchor text.
5. Link all videos to your main site, using different anchor text.

Presto! Doing the above should dramatically boost your rankings for the keywords used, once all of the links are indexed.