It’s not your pricing or sales pitch or product images that make your sales. Sure they help close the deal, but before all that, there’s the simple matter of being found. As an online retailer, if you’re not bringing shoppers to your product pages, you might as well not exist.
Luckily there are lots of things you can do to make sure your products are found by the right people. Most marketers put a lot of energy into optimizing text and images for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, which is certainly one approach.
However, there’s a new type of content that has even more SEO power ― video. In fact, search engines often rank video content above other forms of content. According to Forrester Research, videos are 53 times more likely to get a first page ranking on Google.
Below are some suggestions for how to optimize video and drive more high-converting traffic to your site.
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The SEO Benefit Of Product Videos On Your Site
First off, as all of us in e-Commerce know, product videos work. They are an effective way to create trust, demonstrate any given product, and engage your shoppers — all with the end result of increasing conversion rates.
If you haven’t already done so, you should be working towards covering your entire product inventory with video. There are a number of affordable solutions on the market, even automated systems that can instantly convert your product catalog into videos.
Once you’ve created the videos, you’re sitting on a virtual SEO goldmine. The problem is, while the search engines love videos, they need your help to find them. That’s where a video sitemap comes in to play.
Maximizing Videos For SEO
If you have videos and want to know if they’re being indexed, simply go to Google video search and enter “site: (your) URL” in the search box. The number of results you receive is the number of product videos being indexed.
Unless you’ve proactively submitted a comprehensive video sitemap, that number will be lower than your total number of product videos, which means you’re missing out on potential sales.
To address this issue, you need to submit a video sitemap to Google (and the other search engines), preferably one that is dynamic and keeps the search engines informed as your inventory grows and changes. For the time being, there is simply no other way to ensure that your individual product videos are being indexed by Google.
Submitting a comprehensive video sitemap (including fields such as video title, description, location and more) is a worthwhile endeavor. Most significantly, being indexed by the search engines will help land your product pages at the top of search results, particularly when it comes to the product specific long-tail search terms which are known to convert at a higher rate.
Other Ways To Enhance Video SEO
While submitting a video sitemap is the most effective way to ensure your product videos are being found, you can also enhance your video SEO effort by uploading your existing product videos to the major video sharing portals such as YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, and Dailymotion.
In general this is a great idea for increasing exposure. Plus, on video sharing sites such as YouTube, since you can also include your company’s name in the description field, as well as a direct link to each product page, it’s a great supplement to your video SEO campaign.
While you can upload your videos manually, there are great solutions on the market that can upload your videos in bulk (including the relevant fields of title, description, etc.) automatically.
Video SEO bottom-line
You’ve already made the effort to create the videos, now take your investment one step further and make sure your highest converting search terms (and their associated products) are being found by submitting a video sitemap, uploading your product videos to the video sharing portals, and taking control of your video SEO.
As VP of Sales & Marketing for Treepodia, Dr. Melody King, DM, provides e-Commerce solution expertise to harness the power of rich media in the form of engaging video content. Dr. King has 12 years of experience in Information Technology, focusing the last five in e-Commerce. During her tenure, she consulted with more than 500 organizations to assist with increasing their site usability, merchandising, conversion, and order size.
