Produce (or Steal) Web Video and Juice Inbound Marketing

It’s 2013 and you need to live in a world where users expect video when they are searching for information. The bad news — you need video to help rank your page or site. The good news — you can “steal” it.

With the explosion of YouTube, social media, and smart mobile devices, users often don’t have patience to read through a lot of text sometimes. They want simple answers and a real person to deliver it to them. I’m not discounting text and images, but what’s the attention span of people now that thousands of tweets are blasting out in a second? Exactly.

Increase Your Odds for Ranking on the SERPs

Your chances of ranking for a video on YouTube versus text content are significantly higher. Domain age, authority, inbound links, and other common SEO practices don’t necessarily have to apply to video for Google to rank a video highly. There are 319,000,000 results in Google for “Video SEO.” How many video only results? 31,300. Your chances of ranking are 10,191x better. I like those odds much better. Plus, if your text content includes a video you’re likely to get boost in ranking. I did with my blog posts Google Knocked Me Down – How I Fattened Content and Won and Mobile Web Apps or Native Mobile Apps? Plus, users tend to stay on your site longer because online videos are usually around 5 minutes. That’s 5 minutes they could be looking at ads, your Twitter handle, related posts, or anything you want them to see.

You can embed video from YouTube, Vimeo, and other video sharing sites. Smart video producers brand their videos with the producers name, Web address, and Twitter handle. Since YouTube embedded videos are served from Google servers, your site bandwidth isn’t affected and videos typically load in a snappy fashion.

Producing Web Video is a Lot of Work – “Steal” for Inbound Marketing

Producing good Web video is time consuming. That’s why your odds of ranking are 10,191x better. It’s not easy. People are picky when it comes to online video. They have no patience for cheap-sounding audio. Not everyone can afford expensive non-linear editing software. Not everyone has the editorial skills to make a fun and informative video. If you can produce a snazzy Web video, brand it with lower third information, and blast it out to the world using third-party video hosting services, you’ll make your site and content much more appealing to a broader audience.

Since many people don’t have the tools or skills to produce their own quality Web video, I recommend “stealing” quality, relevant, videos to sex up your site. Here’s a video by Scott Willoughby from SEOmoz on Optimizing for Video Content. It’s worth a view. Note: I didn’t produce this video!

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Optimizing for Video Content from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.