SEO your Website through “short videos”

 SEO your Website through “short videos”

Since the pandemic started, we've seen a huge increase in the number of people watching Reels and TikTok videos. Are you the type of person who is also interested in those new trends? If so, you'll be pleased to know that Google is already working on ways to show short videos in search results more often.

Short videos are becoming more popular than ever, mainly because this format can provide much more information in a short period of time. In fact, data has shown that online video is expected to account for more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2022.

The reason behind this surge in the percentage is that in a video we can see emotions, movement and tone of voice, elements that the format of only text or image could not provide with such clarity.

We all know that with the rise of TikTok, many other companies began to explore this new format, such as Instagram, which added the resource “Reels”, and YouTube, which has included “YouTube Shorts”.

Each one of them has its particularity and, until now, we do not have a standard concept of short video. "Short" videos are those that are less than five minutes long and shot in a vertical aspect ratio.

From Google's perspective

We all know that Google has an amazing and very clever mechanism to crawl and organize all the results pages. It's amazing to see how accurate our queries are nowadays: no matter what topic we're looking for, we can always find pages that answer our questions.

However, most of Google's suggestions are just written content and that's because it's so good at reading and understanding text. The Google search engine answered 74.3% of 5,000 questions, and of those answers, it had a 97.4% accuracy rate.

But have you tried searching for videos on Google? If you do, I think you'll realize the same thing I did: Google wasn't built to crawl those kinds of video assets, and there are a lot of weird search results. This happens because videos are much more complex than text, and this is actually one of the reasons why videos can be richer than images and text.

In a video, there is a lot of information to understand, such as audio, visual signs, images, movements, expressions and other elements.

Google has a couple of teams that are looking into how crawlers can extract the text/audio from a video to combine that information with some other elements, like character recognition and visual cues. By doing so, it would be easier for search engines to categorize them and display them as a result. They're still at the beginning of those improvements, but I'm already excited for what it's going to look like in the end. Would you like to see it?

Why short videos?

We can agree that there has never been as much content available on the Internet as we have today. It is possible to find all the information that we want in any possible format, which is very good since it allows each person to choose the way in which they prefer to consume that information.

When talking specifically about brands and their customers, HubSpot, one of Rock Content's partners, conducted research on consumer preferences towards brand marketing efforts. Take a look at what they discovered:

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/visual-content-marketing-strategy

Here we can see that videos are number one on the list and it doesn't really surprise me as 60% of internet traffic revolves around videos. According to the same source, the duration of the videos is getting shorter. Here's another chart from Tech Smiths showing the preferred length of videos:

https://www.techsmith.com/blog/video-length/

Seeing this data makes a lot of sense as to why Google is thinking of using search engine mechanisms to display short videos (up to 5 minutes) on the results page. Honestly, I prefer those types of assets as there is so much, we can explore and learn without wasting too much time doing it.

Short videos can also be entertaining and revealing. Think of those DIY or how-to videos. They are much more fun than static text. People can also include music and movement, which makes it a way to create a deeper connection with the audience in a more engaging way, as they are truly immersive.

And from what I see here, I'm not alone, as "mobile consumers are much more likely to see a 30-second snippet than they are to scroll through a blog post or marketing copy."

From a marketing perspective

For those who still think that short videos are only for teens who like to create online dance trends, you might be surprised by these facts:

·         84% of people were convinced to buy a product or service based on the brand's video (Wyzowl)

·         72% of people prefer video over text to learn about a new product or service (Colormatics)

·         68% of people will happily watch a business video if it's less than a minute (Vidyard)

·         93% of marketers have landed a customer through a video on social media (Animoto)

·         More than half of marketers (51%) who use short-form video plan to increase their investment in 2022 (Hubspot)

·         63% of marketers say video content gets the best ROI on social media (Animoto).

It's time to take a broader look at the way we create content. But of course, always remember to understand who your audience is and what channels they are on. As we have already mentioned in other posts, the best marketing strategies are those that are focused on the customer.

Should you decide to go ahead with that strategy, it's important to remember that people don't care about scripts and elaborate productions. They want to feel connected and get to know you, your brand and your product in a matter of seconds, so get creative!

Here are some short video ideas to explore:

·         product videos

·         FAQ Video

·         Q&A sessions with customer-submitted questions

·         A day with the team

·         Social trends

·         Practical tutorials

·         Easy tips

This is an opportunity to go viral. According to Wyzowl, people share videos twice as fast as any other form of content. Also, viewers want to see more of those styles of educational videos as they are very useful in their daily lives.

So, if brands start putting education and engagement as one of their priorities, they may get more lead generation opportunities and increased brand awareness. I'm curious to see where those new Google updates will take us and how marketing teams will make use of those easy-to-consume, strategic videos.

After all, if someone is unsure about buying a product, which option do you think they will choose? The brand that only has PDFs and blog posts, or the brand that has a fun explainer video in addition to the written content?

Leave your thoughts and share your videos with us, let's be the first in this new journey.