The Core Truth: Use Video to Strengthen Your SEO Balance

By Stacey Piper

While many in-person fitness franchises shuttered during the pandemic, boutique gyms are taking off, providing smaller group sessions focused on one or two types of exercises. Look around and you’ll see yoga studios, cycle bars, and many other specialized workout regimens, including Pure Barre. Pure Barre combines elements of ballet, yoga, and Pilates for a low-impact, high-intensity workout that leverages small movements performed with precision.

If you know me, you know digital marketing is always on my brain, even if it’s on the backburner. Then, right in the middle of the Pure Barre introductory Foundations course, it jumps to the forefront like a jeté, interrupting my zen moment. Search engine optimization is core to the foundation of any strong digital marketing strategy, and to do it well, you should combine elements of website content, social media, and video content.

I know video content might be stretching your marketing muscle, and I can feel your pain as I try to hold a plank for 90 seconds. But just like a precision workout can supercharge your metabolism, video content can supercharge your SEO, making it well worth the investment. Evaluating your company’s video assets is a key component of the digital audit that Piper Strategies conducts for new client engagements. Just like with exercise, a little effort in a targeted area can have a dramatic impact.

YouTube: Your SEO Sweet Spot

Let’s start with some basics. Think search engines, and Google is still the dominant app. Think video, and YouTube is your go-to resource. Put the two together, like Google did when they bought YouTube 16 years ago—back when you were still using a Blackberry—and you can’t really go wrong by focusing your video strategy here.

According to data from Statista, YouTube streams more than 100 million videos per day, with more than two billion monthly active users. In fact, it’s a search engine in its own right, second only to its parent, Google. And eight out of 10 video search results are YouTube videos. With 93 percent of all online experiences starting from a search engine, you can’t afford to overlook this. How are you not on this platform, when one quarter of the world’s population uses YouTube every month? Trust me, you’re using it, you know you are, so why isn’t your company?

Getting Started With YouTube

Don’t worry about optimizing your videos for search engines—that’s a subject for a future blog. After you’ve created your company’s video channel, keep it simple and focus on three things in YouTube:

1. Just get started! Post your videos so you can embed the YouTube code on your website.
2. Provide context. Include complete meta data—title description, categories, and meaningful file name—so YouTube can understand your videos’ relevance in searches.
3. Add indexable content. Upload video transcripts.

Your videos don’t have to be long. You’re trying to drive moments of engagement with your brand, not make a movie. On average, visitors spend almost 1.5x more time on a page with a video, no matter the length of the video.

The Value of Video

Getting found is your goal, and it will get a lot easier when you add video to your content portfolio. You’ll notice that video results display as thumbnail results or “rich snippets” in Google results. They’re called “rich” for a reason—they are purported to have higher clickthrough rates than a link with a description.

Piper Strategies can help you conduct an A/B test to measure the value of video with your own data, but here are some undeniable reasons why video just works:

1. Google’s secret algorithm seems to prioritize video in search results, meaning your content is more likely to make the first search engine results page (SERP).
2. Another key metric in Google’s magic equation is “time spent on page,” which Google uses to gauge the quality of your page, and videos increase the dwell time on your site.
3. Multimedia content is more likely to generate backlinks—links from other websites—which help give your page more authority as a resource.

Finding Your Balance

I topple over a few times in my first Pure Barre class, but the experience is invigorating, and I can feel the impact, particularly in my core. Video is another way to flex your marketing muscle, and as investments go, a remarkably fast and effective way to make a noticeable difference in driving traffic to your website and gaining brand recognition. If you haven’t leveraged video, think of it as a way to enrich your core offerings and improve your company’s content balance. It’s time to go for Warrior pose. Before long, it will become part and parcel of your digital posture.