Video content is taking over.
Forbes magazine has even called 2017 “The Year of Video Marketing.”
It’s an understatement. Here a rundown of key statistics that show the growth of video in marketing campaigns:
- Video content will represent 74% of all Internet traffic by 2017.
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Projections estimate 80% of all Internet traffic by 2019 will be videos.
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Research shows that four times as many consumers would prefer to watch a video about a product rather than read about it.
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Moe than 60% of marketers and small business owners plan to increase their investment in video marketing in 2017.
It’s time to integrate video content into your site’s content strategy. Just mentioning the word is enticing to clients.
The same study states “Using the word ‘video’ in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19% and clickthrough rates by 65%.”
There’s no question, video content can boost your site traffic.
We will show you how. Here goes:
1. More Visibility to Search Engines With Video Content
All of us know that boosting site traffic means ranking higher in the searches of search engines. But we all need to be very conscious of the search engines we are trying to position ourselves with.
Did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world? They process vover 3 billion searches a month.
This amount is second only to Google. It represents more searches than Bing, AOL, Ask.com, and Yahoo combined.
In fact, Google and YouTube have been in an extended battle for years to claim their spot as the most visited page in the world.
Focusing on video can mean boosting your searches with a growing search engine.
2. Increase Time On Your Site
Video content encourages viewers to spend more time on your site. In the ever changing equation that is a search engine algorithm, time per visit matters.
Using video will increase your search engine ranking by increasing each visitor’s time on your site.
3. Increase Conversions Too
There are a number of ratios researchers use that tally site traffic to conversions. But the truth is, your conversions will be dictated by the effectiveness of your onsite strategy.
You don’t want to do all that work to get visitors if they aren’t interacting with your core goods and services and investing.
The return on investment with video is great because you are demonstrating products and marketing in a way that is more pertinent to visitors.
You are more likely to make conversions from that traffic. And the effect is cyclical.
More conversions lead to more traffic which leads to more conversions.
Investing in video means investing in the content your visitors desire.
4. Content Is (Still) King
If you give your visitors what they want, they can’t help but reward you.
As long as you are following SEO techniques, much of the core principles are the same for video.
The major difference is that users prefer video. The more quality content you provide that way, the more inbound hits you will receive.
There are a number of ways to increase inbound hits with video. These include:
- Product Demonstrations
- Product Reviews
- Walk Through Videos
- How To Videos
But, just as search engines will penalize you for filler content or keyword stuffing unless your content is quality, it can hurt you.
What your site visitors don’t want, the search engines won’t reward you for. The form of your video should follow the function of your site.
But since visitors prefer this content, they are more likely to come once they know you have what they are looking for.
They are also more likely to share the wealth.
5. Make It Shareable
Your content needs to stand out, maybe especially when it comes to video.
Although there are studies that show some content is shared before web users even read it, with the explosion of content marketing, visitors to your site are becoming more discerning.
And video is such an expanding market on the internet, it’s important to have content that is pertinent, likable, optimized, and shareable.
To give you an idea of the competition out there, let this sink in:
Cisco reports “It would take an individual more than 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month in 2020.”
“Every second, nearly a million minutes of video content will cross the network by 2020.”
As with other types of content, you need to make your video content shareable to boost inbound hits and increase your traffic. Let your viewers do your marketing work for you!
Including video in your email marketing strategy increases open rate. Your audience loves video and you should too.
6. Know Your Audience
The power of video to increase traffic is captured in the number of visitors you can reach through the medium.
The global reach of YouTube alone is over a billion users. YouTube on mobile alone reaches more 18-49 year-olds than any single cable network in the United States.
Capture that audience and you are capturing more traffic every day.
7. Optimize Video
Like all content, there are ways to optimize the video portions of your site.
These include:
- Titles
- Keywords
- Including Transcripts of Audio
- Shorter Content is Preferable
But must of all, embed your video approach in your overall SEO strategy. You will be building your brand and measuring ROI as you go.
Including Video Content in Your SEO Strategy
Still trying to put it all together? Video is a great tool, but to be used effectively it needs to be integrated with your overall SEO strategy.
Two things are for certain:
- In 2017, video content is about to change the internet.
- In 2017, people are still struggling to get their SEO strategy right.
We can help.
We’ve put together a list of the best and worst practices for designing a high traffic website.
Our custom checklist will take less than 15 minutes to consider. You’ll have all the factors that affect your rankings with Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other search engines.
Don’t wait to integrate video into a winning SEO strategy in 2017.
Visit our best and worst practices checklist now and watch your site’s traffic soar.