Maximizing SEO Returns with Optimized Social Media Videos

Intro

Video can be a powerful form of content in your SEO arsenal. Social media videos can capture the attention of your audience and may help improve your reach and impressions. A well-made video reflects well on your brand and may improve referral traffic to your website, too.

However, you can’t just shoot a few minutes of content, hit “send”, and expect to find success.

Like other forms of content, social media video content should be part of a wider SEO and digital marketing strategy. This is crucial, as optimizing your videos can improve the ROI of your keyword-tracking tools and indirectly boost the effectiveness of your overall SEO strategy.

Socials and SEO

Social media does not directly affect your ranking on Google or other SERPs. However, that doesn’t mean you can overlook social media in today’s digital age. Most of your customers have some kind of social presence, meaning sites like Facebook and Instagram can help you reach your audience.

Rather than thinking of social and SEO as two separate concepts, imagine that they feed each other traffic. Understanding the synergistic relationship between social media and SEO is important, as consumers do not see a difference between your branded blog content and your social media posts. As such, you need to maintain a clear brand presence across all your marketing channels.

Videos can help increase traffic and boost your brand presence by capturing more impressions than other forms of visual content. This is underscored by data collected by Sprout Social’s 2024 Content Benchmarks Report, which found that 54% of marketers value video over other forms of content and that half of all social users say they prefer video to images.

However, to get the most out of the videos you post to social media, you’ll need to optimize them based on your wider digital marketing strategy. This will indirectly boost your SEO metrics — as more folks will navigate towards your website — and help you engage a different audience than the one you usually find through SERP traffic.

Crafting Optimized Videos

Optimising your videos can be a time-intensive endeavour if you’re new to shooting, editing, and posting on social media. However, you can save time and streamline the process by following the basics of video marketing, including:

• Goals: What metrics do you want to improve and what changes do you want to see at your firm? Do you want to improve brand awareness? Increase your lead conversion rate? Capture the attention of a new market segment?
• Audience Research: Before you start posting, figure out who is watching your videos. This should be fairly straightforward, as most social pages have an analytics tool that shows demographic data.
• Branding: All your video content should be branded. This means that the fonts, colours, and logos you use for videos should be consistent with the branded images you post.
• CTA: Embedding a strong call-to-action in your video content is a great way to boost your most important metrics and drive conversions.

You’ll need to adjust your video marketing content strategy based on your purpose and audience, too. For example, if you’re a B2B firm, you’ll need to optimise your videos for B2B audiences. You can do this by:

• Producing videos for each step of the buyer’s journey;
• Focus on editing your content to be more direct and concise for busy viewers;
• Try to come across as authentic, rather than cold and corporate;
• Use insights from a rank tracker to improve the relevance of your social media videos.

When producing video content for B2B audiences, try to create informative, engaging videos that add value to your viewer's lives. For example, if you’re an industry leader, your viewers would probably appreciate behind-the-scenes content and explainer videos. Or, if you’re new to the market, you’ll probably want to focus on product demos and case studies to build your credibility.

Reaching Your Audience

Effective social media videos help you reach your audience and spark long-term follower growth. However, if you’ve ever posted a short video to your Instagram or Facebook page, you’ll know that the response can often be underwhelming. Rather than turning your back on video content following a disappointing reception, make strategic changes to improve your reach.

Start by tapping into trends. Sites like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are trend-friendly, meaning that more people will see your content if you hop onto the latest online trend. Start your search for trending content on TikTok Trends. This is where many of the latest trends emerge, meaning you can be at the cutting edge of content creation.

Follow up on trending content with relevant hashtags and captions. This will help your audience find your videos and increase the likelihood that your content will be recommended to viewers. If you’re still struggling to gain traction, consider promoting a few paid video adverts. Paid content pushes your video in front of your potential audience and can dramatically improve your reach.

Engaging Your Audience

Reaching your audience is only one part of the social media puzzle. If you want to optimize your SEO returns using video content, you’ll need to _engage _those viewers, too. This can be tricky, as many viewers automatically navigate away from videos when they recognize them to be branded adverts.

Keep folks on your video for longer by producing high-quality content and offering something of value to them. For example, if you make polish for cars, consider posting exciting videos of luxury vehicles that have been treated with your product and follow up with a giveaway. This will capture the attention of your petrolhead audience and will convince folks to like, follow, and share your posts.

It’s worth noting that creating engagement-worthy video content can be an entire job in its own right. You may, therefore, want to consider hiring a specialized video content creator who already understands how to produce videos that will maximize your SEO returns. If you do decide to hire a specialized employee, ensure you clarify your expectations before bringing them on and create a customized training program for them. This will help them overcome common onboarding challenges like information overload and get them up to speed quickly.

Tracking Social Video Success

Regularly posting high-quality video content should boost your brand presence and indirectly improve your web traffic. However, if you want to optimize your offering, you’ll need to track your social media videos across multiple metrics. Get the ball rolling by keeping track of key SEO metrics like:

• Organic traffic;
• Bounce rate;
• On-page engagement;
• Domain authority.

These metrics give you a baseline assessment of the effectiveness of your website. This is crucial if you have an eCommerce site, as your business relies on organic traffic, on-page engagement, and high conversion rates. You can also track social metrics like:

• Amplification rate;
• Virality rate;
• Reach and impressions;
• Video completion rate.

Use these metrics in tandem with your SEO metrics to get a better understanding of how a high-quality video might affect your ranking on SERPs like Google. You can then use these insights to tailor future video productions and better target your wider SEO goals.

For example, if you find that you have a high bounce rate on your site, you may be able to alleviate the issue with embedded social media videos. This is because a high bounce rate usually occurs when your site either a. is inoperable or slow to load, or b. doesn’t provide the kind of content a viewer is looking for. You can use a website audit to identify inoperable or slow-loading pages and can keep folks on your site for longer by embedding informative video content straight from your social pages.

You can also use video content to increase organic traffic to your website. This occurs when you post a non-paid video to your social media page and see a genuine uptick in traffic thanks to that video. Importantly, SERPs won’t rank you higher based on the success of your social page, but generating lots of traffic may have a net positive impact on your overall SEO score.

If you do decide to invest in social media video content, be sure to measure the impact of video content by using a SERP checker. SERP checkers keep you up to date with your ranking and help you identify keywords that you might want to target. You can use this in tandem with your social presence to create cohesion between your social posts and SEO strategy. For example, if you begin posting video content themed on sales, you may want to use a SERP checker to analyse your ranking for a longtail keyword like “Sales for product X”.

Conclusion

Maximizing your SEO returns with optimized social media videos is easier today than ever before. You can use social platforms to discover trends and publish high-quality content, while SERP checkers and keyword trackers can analyse the impact of social media on your digital brand. This is particularly useful if you work in a competitive eCommerce market and need to drive more organic traffic to your site. Remember to make the most of your high-quality videos by posting them to your website and linking to your social pages where relevant.