With every passing year, the new set of trends initiates a game-changing impact in the world of SEO. To keep pace with the evolving digital landscape, marketers need to re-evaluate on the current digital marketing strategies to improve the website ranking, boost engagement and enrich branding accordingly. Video marketing is already proving to be a promising SEO tool and the scope is getting larger with the increased consumer demand for attractive visual content and hunger for information packed with entertainment. Recent Google’s Algorithm update adds some spark to it. But why to invest in video content as part of the SEO checklist?

Here is why:

• Video will represent 69% of all consumer-based Internet traffic by 2017; this is expected to rise to 80% by 2019.
• A video inclusion on a landing page can increase conversion by 80%
• 75% of executives watch work-related videos on business websites at least once a week.
• 90% of user says that seeing a video about a product is helpful in the decision process.
• The users of YouTube, one of the popular video sharing platforms, watch more than 3 billion hours of video per month and 72 Hours of video are uploaded in this platform every minute, according to YouTube.
• 76% of marketers plan to increase their use of YouTube and video marketing, reported by Social Media Examiner.
• According to Forbes, 59% of executives would rather watch videos than read text.

Source:  http://www.insivia.com/50-must-know-stats-about-video-marketing-2016/

A picture says a thousand words but a video creates a multi-dimensional experience. To get started, the following video marketing strategies can help you create a phenomenal growth in the search results.

Video integration in the website:

A report by Marketing Land found that videos make up 62% of all Google Searches universally.

Ranking on the Google’s first page is SEO’s top priority.  It’s true that visually engaging videos are one of the powerful methods to keep the audience engrossed and entertained. But did you know that the same video can enhance the ranking of your website on the SERPs! The presence of video itself affects the most important SEO ranking factor: Content. Ever since Google started considering blended search as a major ranking factor, including rich media content like video on the website, it escalates the chance of maximizing search result benefits. Research shows that video search acquires 41% higher click-through-rate as compared to plain, static text content.

Optimize loading time of videos:

Time is precious and it hugely impacts our daily activities. You just uploaded an HD video covering the recent product launch in your companies’ YouTube channel and shared it to all relevant platforms. The video contains creative and interactive content, appealing visuals, high-quality audio but still couldn’t fetch many views. Ever wondered why? Let us guess the answer for you. If the video takes longer time to load, the page loading time increases which eventually affects SEO. Google says that 4 out of 5 users will click away if the video stalls while loading and 57% of mobile users abandon the site after three seconds of waiting according to Radware. So, you have to be very careful about optimizing the video length for your website.

Create Relevant Metadata:

The most important piece of information for any search engine for indexing a website is relevant meta title, description, file name etc. The Same rule applies for videos. To increase the chance of getting your video indexed and crawled by various search engines, you must provide proper file name, metadata and tags. Feel free to experiment with different keywords as you create legible content and make sure to include short and brief video title that can hike it’s visibility from both end: users and search engines.

Video Thumbnail and Transcript:

“First impression is the last impression”. Video thumbnails are among the very first things that users will notice. Users generally click on videos that are visually compelling. So, if your video is a perfect mix of everything that is meant to be, still it might not get clicked if it lacks proper snapshots. So when you create a brilliant video on your website don’t forget to cleverly draft an eye-catching thumbnail image to tempt users to click on it.

Since audio is the most crucial part of any media mix, including a transcript of the audio portion of your video multiplies its search factor by adding further relevant support to search requests. By having your video transcribed, you are providing specific information to the search engine about the content of your video.

Social Sharing and Live Streaming:

The traditional marketing technique ‘Word-of-mouth’ works wonder when it comes to Social Media. The web world is the best networking platform connecting millions of users just through a single click. Sharing and promoting your video through various social networking channels like YouTube, vine, Vimeo, Flickr, dailymotion.com is the best way to reach bigger traffic in an organic way. Even paid promotion may be useful if you think that this can contribute to your business goals. Social authority cannot be overlooked and in fact, it may be a great way to boost your video’s SEO efforts.

Video currently accounts for half of all Internet traffic, so promoting through this channel initiates endless possibilities for your business. Video live streaming makes way for faster and better communication by broadcasting in real-time. With the online video streaming movement growing, the concept of live streaming is gaining popularity. Implementation of creative live-stream content into the marketing strategy with platforms like Facebook live streaming, Snapchat, Periscope, Meerkat, and YouTube Connect available on both web and app; magnifies the retention rate of your target audience.

Embedding the Video:

As soon as the video is published, it’s time to promote it widely through different channels to drive traffic using the embed feature. Grab the opportunity of earning more inbound links to help your SEO efforts by making it easy for your audience to embed your video into their websites like on a landing page with a clear call to action button or sharing it to their blogs, social channels and wherever possible. This may lead to more viewers, new links, increased traffic and of course, boosted page ranking on SERPs.

Organizations need to brush up their current marketing plans and learn how to capitalize this organic channel to promote their brand in an effective way. The “in the moment” video marketing trend will continue to grow in popularity and accessibility. To stand out in your niche, make a smarter choice of exploring video marketing strategy as a remarkable SEO practice.