From small-business owners to well-established public relations professionals, when deciding on how to grow our brands or appeal to a wider audience we are always having to ask our selves tough marketing questions like “Should we invest more in our SEO Vs Video?”, “where should we spend our marketing dollars and time?” or “What is going to give us the best return on our investment?” The real question we should be asking ourselves is what our audience needs, how our product/service may best benefit time, or how can I best engage and convert a site visitor. No matter the platform, the quality of the content that you put out will have a direct impact on the reach and engagement that you will get among your audience.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, according to a quick google search, is “the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.”
With the increase of video content and the amount of SEO content that has saturated the digital marketplace, it is sometimes hard to decide between the two. So, what should you do? Short answer: Both, if possible. Long answer: it really depends on your goals and purpose of creating the content.
SEO and video serve two separate purposes which often crossover into one another. One’s primary purpose is to get your site to show up at the top of search results and the other is to engage the visitor once they are on already on your site. Now, that does not mean that good SEO or video content on its own can’t be used in creative ways to both attract and keep the attention of visitors. Video content can actually impact your SEO rankings Here are three main things to consider when you are trying to decide on investing one or the other and why you should, whenever possible, consider both. The most important thing to consider when investing energy into organically producing site traffic is now and will always be CONTENT.
Why SEO is Important (vs Video)
At the end of the day, people are still using google or other search engine sites to find what they are looking for. Google uses a series of complex algorithms in order to determine how your site ranks as compared to other sites using similar search terms.
Good quality SEO will combine the right keywords, great writing, properly titled/embedded media and many other components. If you’re telling yourself “well, I’m only good at one of those things”, the great thing is that you can outsource the rest to freelancers at a reasonable cost to ensure your are capitalizing on your strengths while outsourcing anything that wont be the best use of your time. For example, these two articles, 5 Pieces of Yogi Wisdom for New Yoga Students and Building You Yoga Wardrobe: The Essential Sportwear, where written by a professional writer but the SEO, images, uploading and releasing where all done by someone specializing in SEO, content creation, and web design. It is all about collaboration and capitalizing on the strengths of others.
Three easy things that will immediately improve your SEO results, if you are not doing them already, are linking other relevant sites, placing keywords into your photo text/alternative text (make sure to title the picture with Keyword before uploading), and having continuously fresh content that your audience or clients can look forward to on a regular schedule.
You have to look at SEO as a marathon and not a sprint.
Why Video is Important (vs SEO)
You can sum up the importance of using video in one word. “ENGAGEMENT”.
For proof or a more in depth read on why video is crucial to engage with your audience check out this article from Medium.com.
Video is such an exciting platform for small-business owners today because recent technology has made it much easier to create it at minimal costs as explained in this article 3 Ways to Make a Halfway-Decent YouTube Video without Spending a Dime. There are countless ways to use video to help your business grow, like what we did for this brand, Giovanna Barrios, who just opened their doors on Park Ave in Winter Park, FL this past. Her video, which will hopefully better engage her audience to the brand she represents, is already on the first page of google when doing a simple search of the name of her business with an already perfect store front.
Paying for sponsored, targeted ad campaigns is one of the more effective ways and is now becoming much easier through user-friendliness of social media platforms. Another way is to continue to push out relevant video content that will be useful to your audience and use keywords in the videos you upload to YouTube, Vimeo, other Video Platforms, or hosting on your own site. Nowadays, when people do a search they are often clicking Google’s “video search tab” or on the first link they see that contains a video thumbnail in search results because they know the information will be easier to absorb.
How to Combine Both SEO & Video
In truth, video and SEO are not direct competitors of one another. In fact, they can and should be used to compliment each other.
You want to combine both SEO and Video because the combination will yield more results. One of the ways that google will rank your SEO content is by how long users visit and stay on your site. If google sees that people are leaving your site in less than 10 – 15 seconds, it will assume that your site is not what the end-user was looking for, thereby lowering your ranking in their complex algorithm. Since videos are more engaging, it is smart to have a plan or campaign to continuously push out videos or other content.
Having video in combination with solid SEO will allow increase the likely-hood of your client to be more engaged with and stay on your site longer, which in turn improves your google rankings, and gets more people to your site.
The way that you can easily combine the two yourself is, when you have thought of your idea, blogpost, or message that you want to share with your audience, either write it up with a few focus key words you would like to use or record your thoughts that you want to share. Depending on which method you decided on, recap the same message in a blogpost or video and upload them all to the same place, site, or platform.
When you upload your videos, image, or other content use the same keywords in the titles and/or ALT text before uploading to the hosing site and clicking the publish button.
Also, never forget to be authentic.
Don’t forget to donate to a good cause. 🙂
Check out our work and if you have any ideas, want to collaborate on a project, or leave feedback, feel free to leave us a comment below, call, send us a message, or shoot us an email.