Benefits of Video for SEO
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is a million words. Text and pictures are great, but video is just one level below actually being there and touching the product. Video can get up close and personal. The only thing missing is the sense of touch and smell. Showing your product or service with a video helps it sell better. That is why Video for SEO is a great idea.
Video vs Text statistics
Users spend 88% more time on a website that contains video.
Short videos (up to 2 minutes) get the most significant engagement.
Video content generates 1200% more shares than images and text combined.
Text Articles vs Video for SEO
While humans engage much better with a video than tons of text, having text on a web page is equally if not more important for SEO. Reason is because it is used to describe or tell search engines what your website is all about.
Search engine bots cannot watch videos, they can only gather text and categorize your website based on it. This would then be used to display your website when a user searches for your products and services.
The Search Engine Ranking Problem
The internet is now truly saturated. Getting listed and ranked well in Search Engines now require a lot of SEO work. Results may take months to show. A shortcut to all this is by bidding on keywords in programs like AdWords. While it may look easy, if you were to bid on the wrong keywords, it is as good as flushing money down the toilet.
The key here is to bid on the right keywords, which lead to a highly converting page that ends in a sale. It is a steep and expensive learning curve. Bidding on the wrong keywords only results in very low ROI.
Learning to bid on the correct keywords which results in sales in a long and costly process. This is why some companies choose to hire ad managers or outsource these jobs to an experienced ad agency.
New SEO Strategy – Videos on YouTube
YouTube is the second most popular Search Engine after Google. The search volume is higher than other Search Engines and even FaceBook or Amazon.
As mentioned earlier under “Benefits of Video”, promoting your products with a video brings you up close and personal with the customer. It has the ability to close the sale, so to speak.
The Power of Video Reviews
I do this all the time. When trying to decide between a brand or model to buy, I look for reviews or product comparisons on YouTube, before making up my mind. Once I have decided, I usually end up clicking on the reviewer’s links.
Optimizing For Search Engines
In order for your website to appear when someone searches for it requires a lot of On and Off Page SEO Work
Optimizing for YouTube
In order for your videos to appear when someone searches on YouTube is a different ball game.
Here you optimize your channel, playlists and videos themselves by using keywords once again.
Your channel is like your own TV show. You have to build up an audience by getting likes and followers to your channel. This is done by creating engaging videos and staying on topic within your channel.
Here are some tips on optimizing videos on YouTube
How to Create Videos?
Finally we have come to the million dollar question. Making a video is actually a two part process.
1. Shooting Video
First is shooting the video. This can be done easily with modern day hand phones which come with impressive cameras built in.
Shooting good videos however has a learning curve to it. You need to have a story line, create a script, plan the shots and all this is just the first part (Shooting).
But if you have no experience in this area besides just using your phone to shoot videos, I would recommend going for a Video Production Course which covers the basics in a systematic way.
We recommend this Online Course which you can complete at your own pace.
It is created with beginners in mind, but even experts could pick up a thing or two
2. Editing Video
Editing is the part where you combine all the videos you shot, trim out the unwanted parts, add voice-over, music, animations and other juicy bits and render everything into one video file.
Video editing is done with editing software. The industry standard is Adobe Premiere for video editing and After Effects for adding special effects to your videos. These are subscription based softwares.
I personally prefer HitFilm which has all the bells and whistles of Premiere Pro at a fraction of the cost.
There are 2 types of licensing for HitFilm.
- HitFilm Express (Free)
- HitFilm Pro (Paid)
HitFilm Express is the Basic Version but is more than enough to do some serious editing work. This is the free version.
HitFilm Pro is the paid version and costs around USD300. But it is on par if not better than the industry standard Adobe Premiere Pro. See a comparison between HitFilm Pro vs Premiere Pro
If you are new to editing it might be bit of a struggle, but HitFilm has some good tutorial videos to get you started.
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