We all know that video is a great way to tell a story, but the usefulness of video doesn’t end there. In addition to improving your overall user experience, video can also be a valuable tool to build into your overall content and SEO strategy to get more traffic to your website.
On it’s own, just embedding a video into a page on your website isn’t going to do much to build more traffic.
To do it effectively, you need to take it a step further than that and actually build it into your overall content strategy and create more value for your audience. And the key to building video successfully into your content starts with knowing how to do it correctly and strategically.
Step 1: Plan Your Video Content Around Search-Ability and Existing Content
As with any good, valuable piece of content, planning what your video is actually going to be about is probably the most difficult part of creating it in the first place; but a good place to start is by creating video content around what you’re already trying to show up for in search results already as part of the content you already have optimized.
You can figure this out by looking at the pages or posts one your website that get the most traffic and rank the best in search results, and create a video about that topic that you can add to it to make that page or post even more valuable and comprehensive for the audience.
Remember, a lot of people will watch video before they’ll read content, so having a video that addresses the same topic isn’t duplication; it’s creating another avenue for your audience to interact with and consume your content: it’s making it more valuable.
If you wanted to invest in video in a bigger way, it would ideally be useful for you to create a video for every single blog post that you write.
Obviously, that would be a lot of work to do, but it would be worth the time investment if it meant getting more traffic to your website and providing more value to your visitors.
All of this can also help with the page or posts search-ability and your overall SEO strategy by improving your website metrics. If Google knows that your audience is staying on your page for a longer period of time and getting their initial questions answered, they know that the page is valuable to the visitor, which is one of many factors of how it gets ranked in search results.
★ Want to learn a bit more about building a content strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Writing Content for SEO as a Real Estate Agent
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
- Writing Successful Real Estate Content that Converts
- Building and Managing a Real Estate Content Lifecycle Plan
Step 2: Create a Good Quality Video
Most of the videos that get uploaded to YouTube are pretty low-quality, and unless someone really needs the information or it’s highly entertaining, most people won’t watch them, so to keep people engaged, you need to make sure your videos are good. But what makes a good video?
Do you need a full-production team and complex editing software to make a good quality video? No. But if you’re able to do that, it will certainly help.
While you don’t need to go all out on your video production, at the same time, you also should make an effort to make your videos as watchable as possible.
No one wants to have their questions answered by watching a video of you driving around in your car distracted by traffic in low-lighting with a shakey camera. You don’t need to go all out, but you should care about the basics, like video and sound quality, lighting, backdrop/background, etc.
If you’re going to invest the time required to create videos and build it into your overall content and SEO strategy, maybe you should even consider setting some time aside to take a course that gives you the basics on video editing. As I said, it’s not required to go all out on production, but the more effort you put in, the better product you’ll get in the end, and the more people will watch, engage, and click.
Step 3: Optimize Your Videos For Search
Just uploading your video to YouTube and hoping for the best is definitely not the optimal approach to take.
Much like you would do when you take the time to put together an informative, well-written blog post, there are a lot of best practices you should take on your videos to improve their search-ability in both YouTube search results itself as well as on search engines.
The topic (or keyword) of your video is important, and ideally, it should about what you want to show up in a search result for. That keyword should be throughout your video: it should be in the video title, the description, you should even say it a few times in the video itself and ensure it’s included in the transcript.
In the end, every video that you upload to your YouTube account should be optimized, including your listing video tours. In the same way that you shouldn’t be using single property page websites for your listings, you also shouldn’t be just embedding the video on your website from the video production company’s or photographers website as that won’t do anything to help you with your own strategy. You should always ask for the video, and optimize it and upload it to your own YouTube account and embed it in your website from there.
Once your video is optimized and uploaded to YouTube, you should share it with as many people as possible over your social networks, not only to get more views, but also to get more mileage out of a video that takes time to create. After that, you can use it in your own content.
★ Want to learn a bit more about building an SEO strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
- Writing Content for SEO as a Real Estate Agent
- Building a Well-Rounded SEO Search Strategy for Your Real Estate Website
- How to Start Building a Solid Real Estate Local SEO Strategy
Step 4: Put it All Together in a Single, Strong Piece of Content
As mentioned in step 1, your video should be embedded into your website on a post or page. To do it strategically, it should never be used as a stand-alone video, but rather, to add more depth and information to content you already have.
Basically, by building all of your content out to be informative, well-researched, and well-structured for search, and including multiple medias that answer your audience’s questions in multiple ways, your content is more likely to rank in search results than content that isn’t structured that way.
In the End…
On it’s own, just embedding a video into your website isn’t going to do much for your content or SEO strategy, and for that reason, a lot of people tend to dismiss it, but there’s still a lot of value in recording high-content-quality videos and building them into a strong content piece. Doing it successfully can definitely contribute to you getting your website in front of more people.
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