Producing original content and building a strong web presence is not an easy task.
It’s a blogger’s duty to keep their readers interested in their work. To do so, a killer plan is a necessity.
Streaming video being one of the most important content types in recent years, a great way of strengthening your content strategy is by finding an intelligent way of incorporating it.
The first step in doing so is to define what your goals are with online video, and establishing whether or not they’re attainable.
A stay-at-home blogger might not have the same objectives as a marketing agency, and it’s important to figure out what you’re looking to gain from an expansion of your content strategy.
Are you trying to be the next viral sensation, or are you looking to improve your blog’s traffic and SEO?
Choosing the right video hosting
Within the early stages of the video content strategy development, the impulse of many is to host their videos on YouTube. While YouTube has a lot of great features, if your ultimate goal is improving your site’s SEO performance, it isn’t necessarily your best bet.
One of the main benefits that YouTube offers is that it allows you to upload an unlimited number of videos at no charge.
While saving money in this regard will allow you to invest the whole of your budget (if any) into the actual production of your videos, it does come with some drawbacks.
If your video performs extremely well on YouTube and draws in a large number of views, none of the SEO value associated with the performance will be attributed to your blog, since YouTube is the actual host of the video file.
Also, if anyone embeds your video onto another site, you won’t be gaining anything other than a few more views for your YouTube channel.
Services such as Wistia, Vidyard and Vimeo Pro have some interesting features that can allow you to do things that aren’t possible on YouTube.
For example, being able to customize skins and video players to match the branding of your blog can bring a lot more personality into your videos.
In addition, they come with features that are valuable for your blog’s SEO, such as listing your site as the actual video host, meaning you’ll get a referral every single time it’s shared externally.
The prices of these services range between about $30 to $100 per month. This can seem like a high price to pay for video hosting, especially since YouTube offers it for free, but the benefits attached to the paid services can be extremely beneficial to bloggers who are serious about their site’s SEO.
Key things in video optimization
Seeing as Google cannot analyze the actual content of the video when establishing its rankings, it’s your responsibility to make sure that you’re making all the necessary information available and crawlable.
In order to rank as well as it possibly can, search engines need to be able to access certain information in order to understand what the content is actually about.
Here are the key things you must to do make all relevant information available to the crawlers:
- Write out a full video transcript and include it in the blog post. The transcription can be done manually on most videos. However on longer videos, this can be a time-consuming task. In those cases, services like Wistia offer transcript services that can help save some valuable time on this step.
- Incorporate strong keywords in video title, description, tags and file name. As Some basic keyword research can help you determine the search volume for certain terms and establish which ones should be incorporated into your content. Google Trends can also be a good tool to help figure out keywords to target, as well as coming up with new content ideas.
- Create an XML video sitemap to get your videos indexed. An XML video sitemap is very important if you’re looking to get your video indexed by Google. Instructions can be found here on Google’s support page.
Focus on your content quality
While these methods will certainly help you optimize your video content for SEO, it’s important to remember that the quality will be one of the main factors in whether or not your content strategy will be an effective one.
If you’re not taking the time to produce something that’s well-made and that can be shared organically, you might actually hurt your site’s image and brand.
The perfect formula for taking your strategy to the next level is finding the right mix of high-quality content and intelligent optimization methods.
Are you using video blog posts as your marketing strategy? Will you even take the steps to start with your first video?
Let us know in the comments …
I’ve always known I need to do more videos, and I’ve also always told others that it’s important to do videos, but for some reason I just haven’t done very many videos myself. The videos I do create I have put on youtube, then embedded those videos on my blog. I also put a link to my site in the youtube description. I think it is good to use youtube because most people watch videos on youtube. But I also tell people to put their videos on vimeo and dailymotion as well. I haven’t heard of wistia or vidyard. I’ll have to check those out. Thanks Ryan 🙂
Depending on your niche, it’s definitely true that YouTube could be a great place to reach out and attract a new audience. However, they just announced a few days ago that 100 hours of video is uploaded every minute– in other words, 115 years of new video content is being uploaded every week. That makes it challenging to get noticed. Also if someone embeds the YouTube player on their blog, the link in the video description won’t be visible (unless they’re good people and give you proper credit) and probably won’t drive much traffic to your blog. I’m still a huge fan of YouTube though, it just doesn’t seem to be super valuable in terms of blog SEO right now. Thanks for reading!