The podcast highlights the importance of incorporating video into small business marketing strategies, emphasizing emotional connections and building trust with customers. It discusses optimizing videos for search engines, leveraging video testimonials, and different types of videos small businesses can use. The importance of understanding the audience, choosing the right hosting platform, and promoting videos through various channels is also emphasized. The speakers stress the power of video in attracting ideal clients, increasing brand awareness, and improving conversion rates, suggesting different approaches for creating engaging video content.
The Power of Video Marketing: Strategies for Small Businesses
Alright. Hello. Thanks for joining us for this episode of marketing guides for small business podcast. I’m Paul, and I’m joined by Ian, Jen, and Ken, and we are your marketing guides. And today, we’re gonna talk about SEO for video. You can’t ignore video anymore, and video is the most consumed content on the Internet now. That I agree that includes any kind of video, but it’s becoming more and more important for businesses as well. And even small businesses, how to videos are one of the most searched for videos on YouTube. But it’s not as easy as just making a video and uploading it to YouTube. There are a lot of things that you need to consider and to make that video findable for people that are looking for something. So, Ken, let’s start by talking about what exactly is SEO for video.
Before I answer that, I wanna just make a a a quick statement that from something that Google announced that they’re planning on doing. They haven’t rolled this out yet, but they’re planning on doing it here in the not too distant future. And that is that they’re gonna start to return images and videos as a part of the search stream, so as a part of the regular search results. And I think they’re doing that because they wanna make the search experience more similar to my maybe the feel of what you get with social media. That means, in my mind, Google absolutely sees the video as a priority and critical. And all you have to do is take a look and see the growth that TikTok has experienced to realize the power of video. So Google is definitely planning on that. They still own and will likely own the lion’s share of search for a very long time. By the way, they own YouTube, so which is the second most searched site on the web. So it just makes sense. But YouTube is fundamentally a different tool, and it’s a different platform than Google even though Google owns it. And video SEO is really the discipline of the the things that you need to do to help your video show up in the search rankings. It’s a different set of things, there are different algorithms that trigger it. And so when you’re thinking about that, one of the key things is you wanna try to get your video to show up in the rich snippets because that’s that’s, like, incredibly valuable placement. That’s gonna be where the very top of the page, when you do a search, you’re gonna get a set of answers from Google if you’re asking a question. And so that’s where your content could show up. And so you definitely need to work on getting and leveraging rich snippets to try to get your video to rank there. There are a whole series of things that you need to do. It’s just a completely different thing. You don’t have a lot of written content to work with. If you’ve listened to this podcast or watched this podcast before, you know that we say, typically, you have to have at least five hundred words for Google to even give you a chance for it to understand what it’s about. In order to rank, depending on whether you’re a local business in a noncompetitive market, you might be able to get away with 07:50 word articles or blog posts. If you’re in a very competitive space, you’re looking at substantially more written content. You don’t have that written content in video. You’ve got a little bit of a description. You’ve got some tags that you can leverage. So the little bit of written content you have, you absolutely need to take advantage of from an SEO perspective as well.
And you bring up a good point that YouTube is its own search engine with its own algorithms. And that’s why SEO for video is different than SEO for blog posts. So, Ian, this question isn’t really about SEO so much, but I think there’s a lot of businesses, especially small business, to think that they won’t benefit from video, but they can. So can you talk a little bit about what are some types of videos that small businesses should be using?
Yeah. For sure. Video is so powerful. It’s another form of communication that a lot of people gravitate or service. Right? What are the benefits? What are the features? How what what solutions does it, solve? Or what what problems does it does it solve? And solutions. What solutions does it solve?
So it could create.
That’s right. It creates problems. Hopefully, your product or service does not create problems. Explainer videos. If you have a highly complex product or service, explainer videos can be very helpful because, again, it’s essentially helping them where what it would feel like to be your client or to own that product or service. Frequently asked question videos. I think this is one of the low hanging fruits of any type of content. But if if you, as a business, get asked the same questions over and over and over by prospects and clients or patients, you should be putting those in video. It creates an immediate connection with the viewer that text simply cannot do. Customer and patient onboarding videos. If there’s a common process that you follow when onboarding new clients or patients into your your practice or your business, this can be super helpful. Right? It it just systematizes it a bit. It helps them feel like they’re involved in a bigger picture than a smaller business. Testimonial videos. If you can get your clients, patients, customers to leave a testimonial video, so powerful. Company culture videos, these are growing in importance. They’ve always been important, but these are really important, especially in our highly competitive markets where it’s really hard to find good people right now in a lot of different, industries. Sharing your company culture through a video can be a very powerful way, especially if you have employee testimonials weaved in there, customer testimonials weaved in there, can be a very powerful way to create a connection and and position you as a better option for somebody coming to your business. Video voice mails or sales videos, I use these all the time.
I don’t know if you guys do, but I find these really, really powerful. In fact, prospects and clients comment on this all the time that marketing services are complex. Right? And so oftentimes, if somebody reaches out to me for for some information and we have a conversation, instead of just throwing them a PDF or some information about a service, I’ll often send a very quick video that just walks them through it a little bit, and it’s personalized to them. It doesn’t take a lot of time for me, but it can be very impactful because, again, it sets you apart. But there’s so many types of videos that you can leverage.
Hopefully, that just gives you kind of, the tip of the ice that form of communication. Yeah. I’d like to jump in. You had mentioned video testimonials. Yeah. And I just wanna call attention to that because you work really hard to get online reviews, at least you should be. And you can take those reviews and you can turn them into review videos. You can do voice overs. But, ideally, it’s even better if you can get your customers, clients, or patients to go on video and talk about your business and why they’re doing business with you. I mean, that’s incredibly powerful. And I think most businesses forget to market the reviews and the testimonials they get. They’re so busy gathering them and hoping that people give them, but they don’t take anything and do with anything with them beyond the platforms that they’re posted on. And so here’s a perfect opportunity to take that, turn that into video content, which is gonna help you show up in search rankings if you do it right. That also is exactly what a lot of people are gonna be looking for. They’re they’re looking to buy from people they can know, like, and trust, and what better way to do that than to have somebody else speak on your behalf. Just something you touched on there, Ken. I think one of the underrated elements of video that makes it so powerful, it creates an emotional company, and you have video testimonial of a husband and wife standing in front of their house. And I can’t tell you how great one two three roofing was. They came. They they did the job on time. It was a good value for money. They cleaned up afterwards, and look at our roof. If you’re somebody that can resonate or look similar to those people, right, you have an immediate emotional connection, and they’ve spoken something about your business that you could never speak in the same powerful way. Or you could try, but it’s always more powerful coming from an actual client. Yeah. And you’re you’re seeing those more and more as well. Jim, you know, I mean, if you’re gonna create videos and take time to optimize them for search, seems you wanna have a strategy as to what you want that video to achieve.
Optimizing Video Content for Search Engines: YouTube SEO Tips
So what are some of the things that video can do for a business? Sure. Video strategy, like, if you’re you’re talking about the SEO strategy. So just to be clear on that, that is different than the strategy for the video.
Like, what’s it gonna look like? What’s the script gonna be? This is after the video is done, and now you have to send that piece of content out to be a workhorse for you. So I’ve got five tips here or five things to consider. Number one, getting that video featured in the rich snippets in Google would be amazing. So what that would be is, your video, so your explainer video, video talking about your business, how to use the product or service, gets pulled up on page one, pretty much right at the top in the Google search results. So what’s really good about that is you get a high ranking for that, and, that’s gonna stand out and hopefully lead to the probability of having people click through on your video. So for that, you need to put some pieces of code in your video and make sure it’s able to be seen in that format by Google. The second thing would be conversions. So we want that piece of, video, that piece of content to go out, like I said, be that workhorse for you. So how can you get it to help people come closer to you as a potential customer? With that, for conversions, think about using videos on your landing pages, videos to explain your product, your service, your next step, take the next step to sign up for our newsletter, take the next step to download this checklist, and that can really help with the conversions on the way to the sale. Number three out of five is, of course, brand awareness. Ian said you’re looking to tell more of the story of your company, Who are the people behind the company? Who are the people that pack the product? Who are the people that design the product? If it’s a service, who’s the person that’s going to be your consultant? So really seeing who is part of the company is important, showing people behind the brand. If you have a, a product showing how it’s made, if you have a complex service, could be like marketing services, what are the different steps that go into, say, for example, total online presence audit, which is something that we all do here, a strategy first, sort of what what are the steps involved.
And having someone talk through that can make it, I guess, less intimidating, but it can also help build that emotional connection that Ian was talking about with your company. The last two here, quite similar. So social shares, asking people actually asking people to like, share your video, share with someone who could use this information. So making sure to say that in your video, and as well, you could put that in the text that describes your video and then link building as well. So getting a link back to your video, which is on your site to build traffic back to your website, back to your product or service. So those are five ways that you need to think about using your piece of video content to actually go out there and work for you. Awesome. Awesome. So, Ian, this podcast is, at its core, is about making your video show up in search results. So is keyword research different for video than it is for blog posts? Yes. Yes. Good answer. Moving on. Next question.
Targeting Your Audience: Creating Effective Video Content
It it is. Let me elaborate. It is super different. Here’s a couple reasons why it is so different. The first is that most videos on YouTube, show up when YouTube suggests your video to users. Meaning, you’ve watched a video on YouTube. Here’s some suggested videos. Right? It’ll show you after you’ve watched a video or even positive video now. You absolutely need to optimize your videos for YouTube and Google searches, of course. But remember, only about fifteen to fifteen percent of your views will come from Google, while forty two percent of your views will come from suggested videos on YouTube. So that’s kind of the first reason. The second reason for needing a different form of keyword research for videos is that people use Google and YouTube radically differently. Right? If you’ve used both platforms, you may not have thought about it. But if you did, you would see how you search very differently on the two platforms. So think about it. Google may get a hundred and fifty thousand searches for dental implants, but may only get three thousand, searches on YouTube for the same topic. But funny dogs gets tons of searches on YouTube or cute cats. So even the types of information we look for is quite different. So here’s a few tips for YouTube keyword research. Use YouTube suggest. So what I mean by that is just like in Google, when you type in a keyword, Google will give you suggestions. Yeah. Did you like my typing? That’s how I type. A lot because just like in Google where a drop down will show up and it’ll say, here’s a whole bunch of keywords related to that. And those keywords are important because Google sees them as high quality relevant results that match what you’re looking for. And the same thing is true. Remember? Goo, just like Jen said, or was it Ken? Jen or Ken? Your names are so similar.
They are. But what are you gonna say?
I was gonna say it was something brilliant. It was probably Google owns YouTube. Who said that?
Okay. Ken gets the gold star today. But just like that so they’ve used similar methods within the two platforms. But just like that, if you go to YouTube, you type something in, it will pull up and drop down relevant search terms that you should probably be trying to create videos for. If you’re a roofer, type in roofer and see your or roofing or new roof and and just look at what, YouTube is suggesting. Those that’s it’s totally free. It’s the lowest hanging fruit for coming up with what keywords you should be creating videos for. Some other top tools, related to YouTube keyword research, I use something called Tubics, t u b I c s, which basically scans your YouTube videos and walks you through the process of SEO optimizing them. So what tags are you using? What hashtags? Have you given a table of contents in there, basically? Are you using the keyword in your description, in your title? Just all of the process of optimizing. So it’s it’s a similar if you’ve done any SEO keyword optimization on a blog post, it’s kinda the same walk through that tools like Yoast or RankMath walk you through. TubeBuddy tags is a Chrome extension you can use to help find competitive tags. Y t cockpit, so y t meaning YouTube for short, cockpit, and YouTube data studio stats. If you have enough views on your videos, YouTube will open up this data studio stats to you that you can start to dig into the data a little bit more. But those are kind of the the best places to start as far as YouTube SEO research.
Yeah. I’ve got three here. First one is make sure the title of your video includes your keyword. That’s very important. It is very important because, you know, what we run into, sometimes is folks I wanna say folks clients, but also to us too. We wanna make the title maybe a little bit either sarcastic or, a little bit more interesting, but you gotta think about it. Your video is going out there to be seen and searched, so you gotta make it easy for the system to help you do that. So try not to be too inventive with your titles and and really make sure that your your target keyword is in there. Number two, and I think Ken or Ian alluded to this where your video description your names are nothing alike, but you’re both brilliant in this area. But your video description, so two hundred plus words describing what it is, that folks are gonna learn from or see in that video. The longer descriptions help you to give a deeper understanding of the video topic, the deeper understanding that the system has, the more often it can pull, your video up in the in the appropriate searches. So two hundred words is it’s not something you that you can really just dash off. So just really make an effort to make sure your description is is full that way. Third one here. This was interesting to me. I didn’t realize this. The third tip is to say your keyword in your video. So if you got the voice over, if you’re having a conversation, an interview, an explainer video, make sure that you say the keyword multiple times that makes sense. Not too often, but do make sure that it does show up in the audio of your video. And, again, it’s so YouTube can understand what is said on the video, and it helps understand what the video is about, Therefore, it can help, get your video pulled up in the search results. So those are my three tips to optimize your video.
So I just wanna stress that today, we’re talking about SEO for video content.
Yes. We are. Yes. We are. Shane would like to get the title of the and the keyword of the episode into this video.
Oh, that’s great. What What are we talking about again, Ken? SEO for video content.
Ian, let me ask you this. I mean, if you’re gonna in the process of creating video, how important is it to understand your audience? Look. People watch stupid videos that are randomly uploaded all the time. They manage to get a lot of views. So do you have to understand your audience? How important is that?
Not at all. I think you should totally ignore your audience and see what happens. Works for some people.
You might strike lightning the other way by happenstance but or get struck by lightning. Truthfully, if you’re if you’re putting the time and energy and cost into any kind of content creation, that goes you need to be things that we stay away from because they wouldn’t resonate with small businesses. And in the same way, when you’re creating video content, you absolutely wanna understand who your target audience is because you want to customize the information you’re sharing with them so that it resonates with them. Any kind of SEO is all about relevance. You wanna create information that’s relevant to the person you’re trying to connect with. That’s really what Google’s whole platform is about, and that’s what YouTube is about is is about relevance. The Google and the YouTube platforms only exist and to what your target audience is searching for. So you have to know your target audience. You should know what common questions they ask, what common problems they have that need solving, especially related to your product or service. Do they have common interests? Not that this is totally relevant, but I remember when I was doing corporate marketing in a customs brokerage, one of our competitors top it it threw off all our competitive statistics because one of our competitors had a car racing team, and they would post videos of burnouts of this racing car where they would just spin the tires, create lots of smoke, and then take off. And those videos got thousands and thousands and thousands of views. And so when we are doing competitive analysis, man, that competitor’s just killing us. And then we’d look at what videos it is, and it had nothing to do with actually gaining customers. Right? So it was an irrelevant video. It might get more people to them, but they’re the wrong people. So if you wanna do that, more power to you, but it’s not so totally relevant to the audience you’re trying to attract. What are your audience’s goals? What are they trying to achieve? Again, it’s all about the audience. It’s not about you. It’s about the audience. And that goes to if you’re if you’re thinking about it from a staffing hiring side, they’re another type of audience, so you need to know who it is you’re trying to attract and create videos appropriate to them as well.
Ken, I have a stack question for you. I usually reserve these for Jen because she loves the stack questions.
Yeah.
Incorporating Video Content into Business Strategies for Success
What about a video hosting platform? Is YouTube good enough? Are there times you wouldn’t wanna use YouTube? And something else we’ve seen is why can’t I just upload it to my website hosting?
So I’ve been thinking about, like, an unboxing video because those are very popular. And as Ian was talking about, and I know this ties into some stuff that Jen’s talked about as well, you have to understand your your customer, your client. And so if you if they’re consuming unboxing videos and you don’t have one, you’re missing out. Now what do you do with that? And how does that relate to video hosting? Well, those unboxing videos are probably gonna be showing up and and maybe suggested very strongly on YouTube. You definitely wanna take advantage of YouTube, as a hosting platform for your video. It’s the second most searched site on the web, as I said before. It’s owned by Google. Google loves Google. So, yeah, absolutely. But at the same time my own favorite charity.
Yeah. At the same time, though, that doesn’t mean that that’s the only place that you ought to think about hosting your video. If you’re trying to be found by search, Facebook does not return and display in the news feed links to YouTube videos anywhere near what it does if you upload that video natively to Facebook because Facebook wants to keep people on Facebook. They don’t wanna send them to a competitive platform. Have to video platforms make sense for your business. You should also, though, put it on your website. And when you’re putting it on your website,
I’m not a big fan of embedding YouTube video. I would rather you use a professional video hosting platform. Wistia is fantastic. Vimeo is great. There are a whole host of others that are out there. The reason is because, one, you can you can create and control calls to actions, I think, a little bit easier while people are watching the video. You wanna put that video on your website as well because people are gonna watch the video. You can transcribe it. You put that text on your page and that may help you show up in search results as well, image based content is much more memorable, if that’s a word, than written text. And people don’t like to read web pages. They scan them until they have a reason to read them. So absolutely, you should put your video everywhere, and you should use an appropriate platform or platforms to host your video.
Upload it natively to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter. They all give you video capability, video hosting capability, and they all are gonna return the results better if you if you put it natively on their platform. But at the same time, if you’re gonna put it on your website, as you alluded to in your in your notes to me, Paul, you said you were talking about cat videos. You don’t wanna have a cat video pop up at the end of your video on a website because you embedded it from YouTube. Because now people are gonna click through and they’re gonna go and and they’re gonna go chase that video and they’re gonna watch it and they’re gonna leave your website because there’s a distraction that we all know has really strong appeal. It could be the burnout video that Ian was talking about. If that’s your next suggested video, boom, people are off and they may never come back. So you wanna use a hosting platform. Now for most website platforms, I don’t think you should host the video on that website platform. And the reason is because video files are are large, and the file size is gonna be a factor and the load speed of that natively is going to cause issues with how fast your overall page loads. So if it’s a really small, light video, maybe you can get away with it. Maybe it’s easier to just do that. But really, for the overwhelming majority of videos, you really should have a video hosting platform. You can use YouTube, but I really think you should look at it at one that doesn’t have the distractions that can be suggested at the end of that video to take people away. You’re only gonna get that if you pay for a subscription to something. Just to add a little bit to the about uploading videos to the website, most hosting platforms well, hosting platforms, they simply don’t have the bandwidth to deliver video, especially if you have the, you know, the cheap five dollar a month bottom of the barrel web hosting.
They simply don’t have the bandwidth to do it. And so there’s from a technical standpoint, just so people understand, there’s a difference between uploading a video to your web hosting platform where that’s where it lives and having it hosted on Wistia, YouTube, whatever, and you get an embed code that you put on your website, the video isn’t actually taking up bandwidth on your website when you do that. So, Ian, I think Ken touched on this a little bit, I think, but what about promoting the video one once it’s out there, you have it hosted wherever you wanna. What about promoting video? Any thoughts on that? Yeah. Absolutely. It’s almost similar thought as should you know your audience. If you’re gonna spend the time investing in creating videos, you wanna make sure you maximize the return on investment. And so uploading it to YouTube, absolutely. Putting it on your website, absolutely. Ken and Jen both talked about social sharing. Right? You wanna you wanna make sure you’re putting it on where your audience is. So, again, know where your audience is. So if you have appropriate. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. For your business, you should be making appropriate videos.
what I mean by that is if you did a kind of a funnier video Yeah. That, that still was very relevant to your product or service, I don’t know that I would necessarily put that on a platform like LinkedIn, but I might put it on Facebook or YouTube because the audience is different and that the culture of the usage of the platform is different. You know, the stuffiness of LinkedIn has dropped, and people are sharing more personal things on there than they ever have.
Since and I’ve noticed that since COVID hit. I don’t know why, but that seems to be a trend. But I I think the part that you didn’t mean, but I was alluding to, Ken, was be careful about using explicit words or anything like that that can get flagged on any platform. Right. Even if it’s in your regular vernacular, you might wanna stay away from that for video just like you probably wouldn’t put it in a blog post or or say it in a social share.
You can advertise. Right? You can advertise. Use your video. You can do a clip of your video that sends people to the full video. You can create teasers. You can link to it, obviously. You can share it in groups. So if you’re in a CPA firm and you serve the trades and you’re in a trade group of some kind, whether it’s on Facebook or some other channel, you can share it in that group. Right? As long as the administrators allow it. Man, it can be very powerful. You can put it in your blogs. You guys talked about that. I’ve seen it where companies will share stuff in their email signature. So they’ll share their latest video or culture video of their company or promotional video, right, in their email signature. Again, if you’ve gone to the trouble and powerful. Dan, you you mentioned the email signature if you have a an email newsletter that goes out.
Yeah. Link to it from there. It’s a good one. You’re gonna throw this out to everyone. Is there anything anyone wants to add? Well, there’s a lot more to this topic than what we covered here, but anything anyone wants to add? Yeah. There is something I wanna add. We get some of the pushback, and and I think Ian or Ken mentioned this about your company marketing is not for you. It’s to attract your ideal client. And so we’ve talked a bit about this this before, your emotional connection or disdain for certain channels that can’t go into the conversation about this. You have to be where your potential clients are. So the pushback we frequently get on video is I I’m not really a show off. I I would not really ham on video.
Maybe I’m not the best person for it, if it’s the company owner. So there’s some things I some recommendations I would have on that. There’s gotta be someone in your company that does feel comfortable on video, and it’s fine if it’s not the owner doing the product demo or walking folks through the services or whatever. So think about that. Think about also too perhaps an animation or a a video where you’re doing the voice over as the owner of the company so you don’t have to be on videos. That could be a small step forward ahead of time. And as well, also too, you can hire a professional spokesperson to walk through and be the host in your video. So there’s there’s really no excuse to get going on this, and it’s such a powerful medium. So make it something, that you guys are gonna do in your next round of marketing planning. It really is worth it.
Yeah. Jen, that’s a great point. I know a lot of people hate being on video themselves. Look. Almost every business that I can think of should have a home page video. You really should. And that video should also live on YouTube so that it’s findable and searchable. That doesn’t mean that you have to do all of video. Like you said, you could do animation. You can do a professional spokesperson. But I do think it’s important, at least at beginning or the end, for somebody in the company that is gonna be, some somebody that the customer is probably gonna be working with to just at least say, I’m Ken Tucker, and I’d love to have the opportunity to meet with you to see how we could solve your problems. If that’s all you have to say, that’s pretty easy to do. Get over it. Get over it. You just gotta do it. Do it professionally and but, dominating the Internet right now, and so you have to pay attention to that. Paul, as you talked about from an SEO perspective, the how to videos, the unboxing videos, things like that perform really well. They get tons of views. But at the same time, don’t forget about short term video. As a matter of fact, YouTube now has YouTube Shorts to compete with some of the other social media platforms. So video content’s critical. It really should be a part of every business’s strategy in twenty twenty three.
It can also help a biz we’ve talked about this in the past, goodwill and brand awareness. Like, if you’re an HVAC company, you cannot make money going out and programming someone’s thermostat, but you can make videos on some of the most common models and generic videos. So here here’s how you do it, and you put that out there. And if someone does need something in the future, they’re more likely to remember you.
I would just echo what Ken and Jen said about finding people in your business who feel comfortable in front of the camera, but also anybody who’s doing any kind of business development or sales, which is the business owner to start with, you’re already in front of people. It’s just practice a little bit, go through it a few times, record yourself each time, improve on it. It’s not hard. You will be fine. And your eighty percent good is probably a hundred percent perfect in other people’s eyes. So so just And hundred percent better than your competitor who’s not doing it.
Yeah. That’s right. Or a hundred percent better than you not doing it. The one the one other thing I left off when we were talking about usage of videos, I know we’re focused on SEO, but landing pages, it’s extremely powerful in landing pages. They say that conversion rates increase eighty six percent when you use videos on your landing pages, and those are very conversion focused pages. So don’t ignore video in your business. Yeah. I hope that’s the case because I just spent last weekend recording a lot of video for landing pages. Oh, wow. So we’ll all be doing a critique on straight live streaming of Ken’s videos now. Next episode. Tricky.
Alright, Paul. You can wrap it up now. What is the topic we’re talking about? Yes. We’re getting this point, Tim.
Everyone, thanks for joining us. Hope you found this topic informative and share it with other businesses, anyone who could benefit from it. What’s that outro that you always do, Ian? Keep calm and mark it on. We want to thank you all for taking the time to listen to today’s podcast. Please be sure and subscribe to the marketing guides for small business podcast in your podcast software. We’d love for you to rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. And please don’t forget to visit marketing guides for small businesses dot com for more episodes, free resources, and links to set up free consultation calls with any of the hosts of this podcast. Thanks again, and stay tuned.