This Digital Marketing Strategy Can Boost SEO & Increase Audience Engagement

Here's today's digital marketing riddle: What form of digital marketing boosts SEO, increases audience engagement, and is projected to account for 80 percent of all web traffic by the year 2019? If you answered "video", give yourself a gold star. You are right on track.

Video marketing packs a punch in an increasingly digital landscape.

The Power of Video (by the Numbers)

Regarding the value of video marketing, consider the following statistics:

• Globally, consumer internet video traffic will be 80 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2019, up from 64 percent in 2014. (Cisco)
• It would take an individual over 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month in 2019. Every second, nearly a million minutes of video content will cross the network by 2019. (Cisco)
• One minute of online video equates to approximately 1.8 million written words. (Huffington Post)
• 4 times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. (Animoto)
• 84 percent of all consumers say they have "liked" a company video in their newsfeed. (Animoto)
• Nearly two - thirds of consumers say companies that use video know how to reach their customers. (Animoto)

Overcoming Video Marketing Concerns

These numbers, impressive though they are, mean little if you are not using video as part of your digital marketing strategy. For many small businesses, the idea of incorporating video into their digital strategy is a daunting one for a couple of reasons.

1. You may feel that your marketing budget is simply not up to handling the additional expense of video.
2. Perhaps you feel that you lack the technical know-how to make effective videos.
3. Maybe you feel your particular business would not benefit from a video, that is not how business is done in your world and therefore you would not generate the ROI.
4. Lastly, you simply do not have the time to invest in it?

Search Engine Land's "The Rise of Video: 8 Tips to Boost Your Site's SEO with Video" notes about these issues: "Technology is making video ever more accessible, and there are ways to simplify video production to overcome those obstacles."

Getting Started with Video Marketing

Hubspot's "How to Use Video in Your Marketing: 20 Ideas to Try Today" provides a number of good suggestions for how to ease into video marketing. Here are a few:

• Create short "Thank You" videos from your team to new customers.
• Film short customer testimonials to boost your brand.
• Produce a short how-to video to demonstrate a product or service.
• Include short videos in drip-feed campaigns to give your emails an extra boost.
• Use user-generated video content to showcase the loyalty of your customers.

Using Video Marketing for SEO

How does video content improve SEO? Consider this. Video is considered as high quality content. Integrating video into your web content sends a signal to search engines that your site contains rich relevant media. This, in turn, boosts your page rank.

Hosting your video on YouTube may provide an additional SEO boost. The Search Engine Land article observes: "YouTube is, on its own, the second-largest search engine in number of search queries. Secondly, YouTube is owned by Google. You can make your own conclusion about what that means ... For small local businesses, exposure on YouTube that triggers secondary actions is likely your better bet."

Hosting your video on YouTube provides additional SEO benefits.

As Google's algorithm appears to give increasing weight to social media signals, getting people to like or share your video gives search engines another indication that your site provides value, improving your SEO in the process.

Finding Success with Video Marketing

The evidence is clear. Video marketing is a powerful tool in the hand of a savvy digital marketer. To take advantage of all video marketing offers in terms of increased audience engagement and better SEO, contact us today. As experienced digital marketers, we integrate video into a rich marketing mix that garners real results for our clients every day.