Our series on Rainy-Day SEO initiatives – essentially, projects you can always work on if you’re stalled elsewhere – turns from link-building and third-party profile optimization to an often-overlooked initiative in the organic world: video optimization.
A Nogentech report from 2023 showed that 91% of brands are using video in marketing campaigns. My experience with clients (and brand audits) tells me that a much lower percentage of those brands are devoting much time to making sure those videos are optimized for organic discovery – and that even brands that are using video could be aligning them more to the customer journey.
In this post, I’ll talk about video types and where they fit in the purchasing funnel, video trends we’re seeing in early 2024, and for making your videos more discoverable across organic channels.
Clients enjoying the most success with video campaigns – no matter where they’re driving engagement – tend to approach all four funnel stages: awareness, consideration, conversion, and the often-neglected step of retention/upsells.
You might have video inventory to cover all of the above steps and think you’re covered – but that’s not necessarily true if those videos were created a while ago, before the following trends developed:
Consumers’ increased emphasis on brand transparency and authenticity has led to a recent uptick in videos like “behind the brand” and customer testimonials featuring real, relatable people.
It’s far less about push marketing these days; what people are responding to are things like how-to videos, DIYs, and explainer videos that address a particular paint point and offer a solution using a particular product.
This isn’t necessarily new, but it works as well as ever. I’ve seen lots of brands doing smart videos with product teasers, which are perfect for building anticipation for product launches or updates.
Video is a different animal, and so is video optimization. Yes, many of the optimization steps are similar to those of other types of content, but great optimization includes all of the following initiatives:
Creating great video might feel like table stakes in 2024, but there are still competitive advantages to be found in video optimization. Don’t catch yourself sitting on your hands waiting for bigger projects to get moving if you have a few video assets that could use some SEO love.
Next up in the Rainy-Day SEO series: Digital PR and Content Promotion.