Wondering why video SEO is important for your small business?
Well, you’ve come to the right spot to get the answer. SEO is a powerful marketing strategy through which you can get your website to show up at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). This helps you get traffic to your website, which can grow your sales and revenue.
And if you’ve seen video search results of late, they look something like this:
Image via Google
While the first and third search result is from YouTube, the second one is from another website, “DIY Playbook”. When a searcher clicks on the video, they’ll be directed to that website instead of a video hosting site like YouTube, and that’s all thanks to video SEO.
So, what exactly is video SEO, and how can you do it for your small business?
Let’s find out.
What is Video SEO for Small Businesses?
In simple terms, video SEO is a process through which you can get your website to rank higher in video search results. Additionally, it can help you show up in the video snippets that come up in the SERPs like the one below:
Image via Google
This means that videos can help you drive traffic to your website just the way blogs or other pages would.
But why do you need video SEO?
Well, for one, search engine crawlers can’t understand the content of videos and images like they can for text content. As a result, you need to optimize your videos such that search engines can understand what they’re all about.
Let’s take a look at some more reasons why it’s important.
Why is Video SEO Important for Small Businesses
Here’s why you should be using video SEO for your small business.
1. Improves User Experience
Like most other SEO-related best practices, video SEO is also aimed at improving the overall user experience of a searcher when they land on your website.
When you add a video to a page on your website, you automatically make the page better as people who prefer to watch a video rather than read content will find it engaging. At the same time, adding a video description also helps them understand the video better, thus improving the overall experience.
2. Boosts Conversions
When you create an engaging video, it’ll hook the attention of your website visitors and this will increase their chances of converting by purchasing your products or services online or even heading to your brick-and-mortar store.
Additionally, when they spend more time on your website, it’ll boost your SEO and further improve your rankings in the SERPs.
3. Increases Traffic
As mentioned earlier, when you do video SEO well, it helps you rank your video higher in the SERPs. You don’t even need big budgets here to outrank bigger competitors, making it a very small, business-friendly method of growing traffic.
For instance, you can start shooting videos with your phone and create the video by splitting and stitching it using a video editing tool. And you don’t need to spend much on it too; you could easily create whiteboard videos in minutes.
If your video SEO is done well, it’ll rank highly for your targeted keywords, which will bring in greater traffic to your website as most clicks go to the top three search results in the SERPs.
Image via Advanced Web Ranking
And when you get more traffic, you’ll get more footfall at your stores and greater conversions on your website.
How to Do Video SEO for Your Small Business
Now that you know why video SEO is so important for your small business, let’s take a look at how you can do it.
1. Write Compelling Titles and Descriptions
As mentioned earlier, search engine crawlers can’t understand videos but they can understand text. So, it’s crucial that you come up with great titles and descriptions for your videos and optimize them for the right set of keywords.
This can help search engines understand what your video is about. A great way to improve this process is by incorporating keywords into these titles and descriptions.
You can use several SEO tools, such as Ahrefs, to research keywords for free and add them to the content you write. This will improve your chances of ranking for those keywords.
Here’s a great example of a website using video SEO. Note how the title and description are talking about things related to the video.
Image via FlexJobs
2. Add Video Transcripts
The other helpful tactic here is to create a video transcript and add it to the page on which the video has been embedded. As the transcript would be text, search engines would be able to crawl it, and they could potentially help the video rank higher in searches.
Additionally, those who prefer to read than watch the video would find the transcript helpful too. This can help improve the overall user experience and the time spent on the page.
The best part here is that transcripts could potentially replace your video descriptions as well if they’re already well-optimized for SEO.
3. Create Engaging Thumbnails
While thumbnails may not directly affect your video SEO, it’s important to create engaging ones as they could make all the difference. When people search on Google, they’ll see the video’s title and the thumbnail. Being the only visual element among the two, it’s important to make it catchy enough so that people click on it. And when people do so, you get traffic on your website.
Now, here’s the thing — people who land on your website may end up seeing your entire video if it’s as good as the thumbnail itself. This could increase the time they spend on your site, which can improve your video SEO further.
4. Monitor the Performance
Evaluating the performance of your video content is an important element in understanding how well it is performing and identifying any issues. Sometimes, you may create and publish high-quality content, but it still doesn’t appear on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) due to a non-indexing issue.
The right Google index checker tools can provide a full report of your content indexing status. You can choose the right tools, such as IndexChekr, and Semrush.
Final Thoughts
Videos are wildly popular on the internet, and that makes it necessary for even small businesses to invest some time into them.
All you need is a phone to get started, and video SEO can help you take your video to new heights in the search results. The best part here is that video SEO requires minimal investment and can drive footfall to your brick-and-mortar stores too, making it a great marketing tactic for small businesses.
So, get started with video SEO right away by implementing the strategies mentioned above.
