4 Reasons Why You Should Optimize Your Videos (Including Product Videos)

In last week's article, I wrote about how a video can become a valuable content to improve your website's SEO. Now, I'm going to talk about why you need to implement SEO to the video itself.

Essentially, the reason you should optimize content for search engines is to make both your audience and search engine crawl robots to understand it better. But other than that, why bother doing it?

Well, these are the reason why you should optimize your videos.

Videos are the most consumed content right now

People are watching videos like crazy. Every day, 50 million people go to YouTube and watch in a total of 5 billion videos. With that in mind, saying that your video has a tiny chance to get any view is an understatement. It is very likely that your video will end up without being viewed once.

The problem is, even the smartest crawl bots do not have the ability to watch and understand your video. That means no matter how professionally your video was made, if there are no correct tags, it's likely to drown among the other millions of videos uploaded in the same day.

Optimizing your video for certain keywords will get your video a much-needed boost, especially if you're a newcomer.

Increase audience reach

Optimizing your video has an indirect connection to your brand's reach.

Most video hosting platform, especially YouTube, can offer you direct SEO benefits in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Google is designed to show you different types of content are most relevant to your query. That translates to Google showing video thumbnails mixed in with text links within the SERP.

Throughout the years, search engines have learned that there are many people who will find a video explanation easier to understand and more helpful than a standard article. This means that if you optimized your video correctly, you're likely to get a prominent placement on SERP for the query you are aiming.

In 2017, getting the first spot on SERPs means more traffic to your video (and thus more reach for your brand). On top of that, it helps you to establish yourself as the go-to expert, I'll talk more about this in the last point of this article — keep reading.

Increase in ROI

Do not consider a video content as a 'tool' you must have because everyone else has it. A video content is an investment, and optimizing your video can result in a bigger return on thatInvestment.

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Applying SEO to your video means that you are one step closer to getting the most out of your investment.

An Invodo study says that 52% consumers think that watching product videos increase their confidence in online purchase decisions. Essentially, you provide a handful of information that they can use to judge for themselves whether they should trust your brand.

If you present this information to as many people as possible, you will get the most out of the money you spent creating the video itself.

Be the key player for a niche

Here's the thing about people on the Internet: the more they see something being shared around and talked about, they are more eager to find out more. It's called the fear of missing out (FOMO).

That's why most online marketers subscribe to Google alert. If you don't already know, Google alert alerts (duh) you daily/weekly/monthly about notable new content for certain keyword. I, for one, subscribe to alert for 'explainer video'.

My point is: optimizing your video with the right tags, meta description, and title will get you a premium ticket to Google alert entries.

Now there are two possible outcomes to this:

You'll notify your competitors about what you're making, allowing them to one-up your content.

You'll open a mutualism window.

The first outcome is rather negative, if not neutral for your brand. In this case, think of your competitor as that one friend who keeps saying he's done something a little more awesome than what you just told him. You can ignore them until you actually do something that is far more awesome than this one.

The second outcome is what you're shooting for by optimizing your video. People who subscribe to alert for 'explainer video' are not always from explainer video creators. Some of them come from a shoulder niche like video marketing, online marketing or voice acting.

This is the whole point of appearing in Google alert. When they see your video in their inbox, watch it and think "oh hey this is a good content, I'll share it with my Twitter followers". That will start a chain reaction that will not end, at least until the content is no longer relevant. And that's where SEO-ing your video really pays off.

Have you tried applying search engine optimizations for your video content? Let me know in the comments!

Source: 4 Reasons Why You Should Optimize Your Videos (Including Product Videos)