The Latest Secret to Getting Page 1 Google Rankings
What if we told you that there was an almost guaranteed way to make your website standout and POP, would that be of interest to you? And what if we further told you that this method is affordable, easily accomplished, and that studies show that it has at least a 50 times greater chance of landing you on a Page 1 search result?
Thought that might grab your attention!
What is the secret, that magic potion, you ask? The answer is – video, search engine optimized video.
Using Video to Make Your Business Unique Online
If you want to have your website standout, if you want to engage viewers, if you want more people to visit your site, if you want more conversions . . .
and if you want Page 1 Google rankings . . .
then the thing you must do is, first and foremost, is add video to your site. As we said, Forrester Research did some research a while back and found that when search results are blended (that is, they include text, video, images, news, etc.) videos that are search engine optimized (more on that in a moment) give you a 50 times greater chance of ending up on the all-important first page of a search result.
Now that is what we call standing out from the crowd.
But here’s the catch: You can’t just add a video to your site and expect a great search engine result for that page. The video must be search engine optimized, that is, it must contain key words in the file names, URLs, captions, tags, meta descriptions, and so on. That same Forrester blog indicated that less than 20% of all online marketers search engine optimize their video.
Of all the things you can do on your website to engage viewers, adding video may be the best.
Do you see what an incredible opportunity this is for the self-employed? It levels the online playing field. With just a little work, you too can get your site noticed.
Taking Advantage of the Opportunities: Optimizing Video for Search
To better understand this phenomenon, TSE spoke with Benjamin Wayne, the CEO of the video website Fliqz. Fliqz offers affordable, branded video solutions – everything from video hosting, and SEO tools to search engine submission. He explained that offering video content on your site actually serves three functions:
- It attract new customers because they will/should find you when the do a search (the SEO part)
- It is engaging – studies also show that site visitors click videos than almost any other thing, and how often do you actually get someone’s uninterrupted attention online for 3 or 4 minutes? Not often
- It convert visitors into paying customers
But again, just adding video to your site is not enough. As indicated, that video must be SEO’d. There are two ways to do this:
First, you can use a service like Fliqz, which submits your video to the various search engines.
Second, depending upon the platform of your website, you can SEO the videos yourself. For example, if you use WordPress, there are many SEO plugins that you can add to SEO your videos and other content. Here at TheSelfEmployed, we like Yoast.
Now, maybe you are thinking that it is enough to simply put your video on YouTube and embed the YouTube player and URL into your site. While we do some of that here too (for content and not SEO purposes), it does not really help with one’s SEO since the rankings will be applied to YouTube and not your site. So the best practice for Google rankings purposes is to add your video to your site, SEO them, and submit your URL and keywords to the search engines.
The Other Benefits of Video for the Self-Employed
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you have to create an expensive video for this to work. In this online era, people are used to watching videos that are less than perfect. Of course yours must look good and add to your brand, but that does not mean they must cost a fortune or take forever to create.
The second advantage of video is that it engages your audience. When you have video on your homepage, as indicated, 50% to 80% of your visitors will click that first. So video becomes a very effective tool for reducing your “bounce rate” – the amount of people who come to your site, take a quick look, decide it’s not what they are looking for, and surf on.
And the final thing video can do for you is to help increase your conversion rate – that is, the number of people who visit and then end up buying something. By using video instead of just text as part of your call to action, your conversion rate can greatly be increased.
Example: Think about a rental property website that offers guided tours of each of their properties. At the end, there could be a link that says “Rent me now!” In that case, both the site’s traffic and conversion rates would likely increase dramatically.
Video: Your secret weapon.
