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Video Marketing with SEO expert Andy Crestodina

“Video testimonials are without a doubt one of the most powerful pieces of content you can put on any website.”

My name is Andy Crestodina and I’m the Co-Founder and the Strategic Director of Orbit Media Studios, which is the web design company here in Chicago.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it’s the art and science of ranking high in search and attracting visitors to your website.

How does video help SEO?

Google likes pages that when visitors click to visit them, the visitor doesn’t leave right away because that’s a sign of the page is good quality. So, one of our goals in search optimization is to make pages that have high dwell time. They call it the “short click” versus the “long click.”

Every time that I’ve published a page with video, the time on page is longer than the rest of the website’s content on average.

How does video help users?

Separate from search, it just has such a powerful force for building trust. It’s just a giant credibility builder because video shows tone of voice and body language and when you’re watching a video, you really feel like you’re talking to that person. The ultimate, of course, would be to be in the room with the person, but we can’t be in everybody’s room with everybody, so videos are way to be there when you’re not there much much more than text it’s the ultimate format for content. Text is the weakest format for content and video is the best.

What pages need video?

There’s two kinds of videos you can add to sites generally. There’s the conversion
focused videos which are specifically designed to build trust and make the case and to provide evidence and put you in the best light. Those go on sales and product pages, service pages, the brochure-ware parts of your website.

Those really should be high production value and I think that when people go to price it out, that they’re surprised at the cost and they weren’t ready at that time to make the investment. People need to consider going big on this and actually fixing that and budgeting for it because it’s valuable. it will make a difference. It’s worth the money.

The content marketing parts of your website, the blog posts, the educational content, the purely informative stuff, those are videos (like this video) where you’re just teaching, you’re just helping and in those cases it becomes the part of a content strategy.

Any video advice?

People have an emotional barrier. They think that it has to be “a plus there too.” If you turn on your webcam and just start teaching something and then share your screen and capture that as a video and post it, that’s not expensive. That doesn’t have to be a “plus like-you-know-super-polished video.”

I think there’s the financial side for conversion videos and there’s the emotional just perfectionist and people that stops them from producing content in general, but video specifically. Again get over it, it’s worth it. Just take the plunge.

Additional Resources

More SEO tips from Orbit Media
SEO Best Practices: On Page SEO Checklist

Video SEO tech tip from Demo Duck
Curious about the tech side of video SEO? Here is a quick and easy way to optimize your videos (for a full step-by-step guide, check out our 5 Steps to Video SEO Optimization blog post).

Find a keyword and be consistent with it. We recommend always having a focus keyword for a video and pairing it with a relevant content page. After you have that selected, upload it to YouTube and make sure the title, description, and tags all include that keyword. This is important because this is the data that Google’s search spiders crawl. They determine what information to catalog into Google’s index, which populates the Search Engine Results Page (a.k.a., what web pages are great matches for certain keywords).

Video sitemaps, what the heck are they?
Let’s just say that Google isn’t the one watching your video, they just help people find the videos that are the most relevant to their search. So, a video sitemap is a text file that Google reads to learn more about the video’s subject matter, which again influences how it will be indexed and displayed in search results. Connect with your webmaster to start adding your video content to your sitemap, or if you’re your own webmaster, check out Google’s help page to learn more.

Even MORE resources:

Interested in learning more about video SEO?
Check out part two of our Beginner’s Guide to Online Video: Video SEO.

Other great interviews with really awesome people:
Client Communication and Producing Teamwork with Rollo Wenlock of Wipster

Telling Stories and Making Connections with Video with Patrick Moreau of Stillmotionand Muse Storytelling.

Starting an Agency and the Problem with Feedback with Uri Ratner of Nelson Cash

Founder Stories: Chris Savage of Wistia

The Business of Video at Basecamp with Shaun Hildner of Basecamp

Written by Sarah Ramler-Olson
Sarah Ramler-Olson is the Marketing Manager for Demo Duck, a Chicago-based video production company. When she’s not writing about marketing tips, she mostly tweeting about ice cream. Follow Demo Duck on Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.