Category: Writing

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Videos always have played an important role in organic visibility. Video-rich snippets were one of the first elements in Google search results pages.

For years, Google would show video thumbnails inside organic search results. Having your video thumbnail in Google search always meant higher brand visibility and more clicks.

So does video help SEO these days?

How Videos Help Organic Visibility

Now that we talk more about organic visibility than rankings, building a consistent video strategy has become even more important.

With on-the-go and video search on the rise, video content has become even more important, as consumers are able to watch videos without interrupting their current activity.

Videos Are All Over the Search Result Pages

Google has been adding interactive video-rich elements all over search engine results pages. As such, you can find video carousels for every other Google search these days.

On a mobile device, video carousels look like this:

Apart from carousels, videos can enhance your organic snippets as Google will grab a video thumbnail to place it right inside your organic listing:

Brand Familiarity Builds Clicks & Conversions Over Time

Furthermore, you can brand your video thumbnails to build brand recognizability. This may help your click-through and conversions in the long run because brand familiarity causes web users to feel more confident and to trust the website:

Google Loves Long-Form Content, for Videos Too

Google is known to love long-form content. It looks like Google loves long-form video content too, especially for certain queries.

Below is an example of a search engine results page allowing you to navigate a video right from organic SERPs: Clicking any title will take you deep into the video. These timestamps are added by the author in the video description, but it is nice to see that they also can make it right into organic SERPs:

Here’s a detailed guide on time-stamping your YouTube videos.

How Videos Help On-Page SEO

Apart from providing enhanced organic visibility, videos have been found to boost on-page engagement, which is a powerful rankings factor. Google wants its users to like each page that is returned in search results and to continue interacting with the site instead of leaving right away.

On-page engagement definitely sends good signals to Google.

That’s exactly how a well-placed useful video on your page can indirectly help your rankings and get Google to like and trust your site.

Over the years, videos have consistently been found to improve on-page engagement and conversions:

• The majority of web users prefer watching a video to reading words (Source: Forbes Insights).
• Using videos on a landing page can increase conversions by 86% (Source: Eye View Digital).
• Finally, the average user spends 88% more time on a website with video (Source: Oberlo stats).

With that in mind, do implement best SEO practices when it comes to embedding videos to your page:

• Lazy-load videos to avoid any negative impact on your page load time. Page speed is a confirmed ranking factor, so make sure you are keeping an eye on that too. Here’s how to easily lazy-load videos in WordPress.
• Use video schema to increase your chances to have a video thumbnail in organic search. Google offers a helpful tutorial here. There are even some enhancements available, including getting a LIVE badge added to your video and allowing users to navigate your video from SERPs.

Ideas for Video Content to Boost Your Organic SEO

Finally, to leave you with some truly actionable advice, here are a few ideas to create meaningful video content for your brand that would help with everything I mentioned above:

• Organic visibility.
• Organic click-through.
• On-page engagement and conversions.

1. Re-Use Your Demos and Webinars

Every SaaS business out there actively use demos and webinars to build and convert leads. Only a few of them make the most of their efforts though.

Demos and webinars make great long-form video content that can boost your branded SERPs and engage your potential customers.

With tools like ClickMeeting, re-using your past webinars and demos is also incredibly easy. The on-demand feature allows you to record, organize, monetize and publicize your webinars.

Additionally, using ClickMeeting’s WordPress plugin, you can embed the entire on-demand video experience on your website, even gating it and integrating it into your lead capture and nurture funnel.

Alternatively, if gating your video content doesn’t make sense in your situation, then you can simply upload your videos straight from your ClickMeeting dashboard to your YouTube account and then embed them wherever you like.

2. Influencer-Driven Videos

These can be interviews, webinars, video q&a and even testimonials. Any time you feature a niche influencer in your video, you tap into its existing community and trust.

The beauty of collaborating with influencers for creating video content is that you can use their authority and existing community to generate views and conversions.

Use Buzzsumo to find influencers with which to work. You can limit Buzzsumo results to videos only to find those who don’t mind co-creating videos:

3. Customer-Driven Videos

Your loyal existing customers may be the best video creators. Set up an easy contest encouraging your customers to submit their own unboxing videos or screencasts and reward best efforts.

Give your customers lots of spotlight and generously recognize their efforts. Campaigns like this also build loyalty and bring in more buyers.

Plus, it generates video content for your brand, which you can use to build organic visibility. Over at Viral Content Bee, we invited our current users to submit video tutorials of how they use the platform to include in our official Udemy course:

This way our official course includes all kinds of perspectives to which different types of users can better relate.

Takeaways

• Videos enjoy a great deal of visibility in Google’s organic search results.
• By creating well-branded and consistent video content, you can boost brand familiarity and click-through.
• Videos also can improve your on-page engagement (and, hence, indirectly help with organic rankings).
• A few examples of video content to add to your marketing strategies are webinars and customer- and influencer-driven videos.

Good luck!

The post How Does Video Help SEO? appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

http://youtu.be/d8_m8-Gmuf8

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8_m8-Gmuf8&w=640&h=360]

https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/613701932/0/convinceandconvertconsulting/

Videos always have played an important role in organic visibility. Video-rich snippets were one of the first elements in Google search results pages.

For years, Google would show video thumbnails inside organic search results. Having your video thumbnail in Google search always meant higher brand visibility and more clicks.

So does video help SEO these days?

How Videos Help Organic Visibility

Now that we talk more about organic visibility than rankings, building a consistent video strategy has become even more important.

With on-the-go and video search on the rise, video content has become even more important, as consumers are able to watch videos without interrupting their current activity.

Videos Are All Over the Search Result Pages

Google has been adding interactive video-rich elements all over search engine results pages. As such, you can find video carousels for every other Google search these days.

On a mobile device, video carousels look like this:

Apart from carousels, videos can enhance your organic snippets as Google will grab a video thumbnail to place it right inside your organic listing:

Brand Familiarity Builds Clicks & Conversions Over Time

Furthermore, you can brand your video thumbnails to build brand recognizability. This may help your click-through and conversions in the long run because brand familiarity causes web users to feel more confident and to trust the website:

Google Loves Long-Form Content, for Videos Too

Google is known to love long-form content. It looks like Google loves long-form video content too, especially for certain queries.

Below is an example of a search engine results page allowing you to navigate a video right from organic SERPs: Clicking any title will take you deep into the video. These timestamps are added by the author in the video description, but it is nice to see that they also can make it right into organic SERPs:

Here’s a detailed guide on time-stamping your YouTube videos.

How Videos Help On-Page SEO

Apart from providing enhanced organic visibility, videos have been found to boost on-page engagement, which is a powerful rankings factor. Google wants its users to like each page that is returned in search results and to continue interacting with the site instead of leaving right away.

On-page engagement definitely sends good signals to Google.

That’s exactly how a well-placed useful video on your page can indirectly help your rankings and get Google to like and trust your site.

Over the years, videos have consistently been found to improve on-page engagement and conversions:

• The majority of web users prefer watching a video to reading words (Source: Forbes Insights).
• Using videos on a landing page can increase conversions by 86% (Source: Eye View Digital).
• Finally, the average user spends 88% more time on a website with video (Source: Oberlo stats).

With that in mind, do implement best SEO practices when it comes to embedding videos to your page:

• Lazy-load videos to avoid any negative impact on your page load time. Page speed is a confirmed ranking factor, so make sure you are keeping an eye on that too. Here’s how to easily lazy-load videos in WordPress.
• Use video schema to increase your chances to have a video thumbnail in organic search. Google offers a helpful tutorial here. There are even some enhancements available, including getting a LIVE badge added to your video and allowing users to navigate your video from SERPs.

Ideas for Video Content to Boost Your Organic SEO

Finally, to leave you with some truly actionable advice, here are a few ideas to create meaningful video content for your brand that would help with everything I mentioned above:

• Organic visibility.
• Organic click-through.
• On-page engagement and conversions.

1. Re-Use Your Demos and Webinars

Every SaaS business out there actively use demos and webinars to build and convert leads. Only a few of them make the most of their efforts though.

Demos and webinars make great long-form video content that can boost your branded SERPs and engage your potential customers.

With tools like ClickMeeting, re-using your past webinars and demos is also incredibly easy. The on-demand feature allows you to record, organize, monetize and publicize your webinars.

Additionally, using ClickMeeting’s WordPress plugin, you can embed the entire on-demand video experience on your website, even gating it and integrating it into your lead capture and nurture funnel.

Alternatively, if gating your video content doesn’t make sense in your situation, then you can simply upload your videos straight from your ClickMeeting dashboard to your YouTube account and then embed them wherever you like.

2. Influencer-Driven Videos

These can be interviews, webinars, video q&a and even testimonials. Any time you feature a niche influencer in your video, you tap into its existing community and trust.

The beauty of collaborating with influencers for creating video content is that you can use their authority and existing community to generate views and conversions.

Use Buzzsumo to find influencers with which to work. You can limit Buzzsumo results to videos only to find those who don’t mind co-creating videos:

3. Customer-Driven Videos

Your loyal existing customers may be the best video creators. Set up an easy contest encouraging your customers to submit their own unboxing videos or screencasts and reward best efforts.

Give your customers lots of spotlight and generously recognize their efforts. Campaigns like this also build loyalty and bring in more buyers.

Plus, it generates video content for your brand, which you can use to build organic visibility. Over at Viral Content Bee, we invited our current users to submit video tutorials of how they use the platform to include in our official Udemy course:

This way our official course includes all kinds of perspectives to which different types of users can better relate.

Takeaways

• Videos enjoy a great deal of visibility in Google’s organic search results.
• By creating well-branded and consistent video content, you can boost brand familiarity and click-through.
• Videos also can improve your on-page engagement (and, hence, indirectly help with organic rankings).
• A few examples of video content to add to your marketing strategies are webinars and customer- and influencer-driven videos.

Good luck!

The post How Does Video Help SEO? appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

https://econsultancy.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-pierre-loic-assayag-ceo-co-founder-traackr/

Pierre-Loic Assayag is CEO & Co-founder at Traackr, an influencer marketing platform.

We caught up with him to find out why he calls himself a “recovering marketer” and what advice he would give to those starting out.

Please describe your job: What do you do?

As a self-professed “recovering marketer”, I consider it my passion and job to help marketing evolve from an automated, programmatic model to one that acknowledges the voice of the consumer based on cultivating valuable relationships and that willingly trades control of the creative process for business impact.

My job today is to continue building Traackr to be the strategic partners to brands who are investing strategically in influencer marketing and need technology and expertise to realize their ambitions.

Whereabouts do you sit within the organisation? Who do you report to?

As CEO, my remit is to ensure our employees, customers and investors thrive.

What kind of skills do you need to be effective in your role?

As the CEO of a growing technology company in an emerging category, I need to be half philosopher, half navy seal: find the presence of mind to anticipate and affect the evolution of the market to make sure our business is prepared to lead the way, meanwhile, be decisive on key levers for Traackr to push or pull.

Tell us about a typical working day…

There is a typical day on-the-road and a typical day at our San Francisco office where I am based. When I am in California, my days start at 5AM and I spend the first five hours maximizing my time with our customers and team based in Europe. Late mornings are for NYC. I’m an advocate for walking meetings, so a great day includes getting in 10,000 steps while brainstorming with my team.

What do you love about your job? What sucks?

One of our hiring principles is to “hire up”, to always find people that raise the bar and make us smarter. The best part of my job is when I see people on my team bringing an idea to life or enhancing something we do and thinking that they did a better job than I ever could at it.

I have an unusual ability to simplify complex situations and problems to focus on their essence. The worst part of my job (and life in general) is when I have to spend time and energy dealing with issues that shouldn’t exist to begin with.

What kind of goals do you have? What are the most useful metrics and KPIs for measuring success?

This is an interesting question given that we are all in the midst of 2020 planning… My goal is to make Traackr the indispensable platform to companies embracing the notion of people-powered marketing whether they were born in it or have migrated to it. The way I measure success is our market share within the segment described above.

What are your favourite tools to help you to get the job done?

I’ve learned a lot from the software engineering industry, including how to run effective meetings and manage complex projects. For example, we’ve adopted the concept of “retrospectives” for managing our Leadership Team initiatives.

I’m also a huge fan of Trello, which I discovered from our product team. Today, we use it across the organization and I personally organize my priorities with it. It’s the one “to-do management” system that I’ve stuck with over the years.

How did you end up founding Traackr, and where might you go from here?

I started my career in marketing for Procter & Gamble and Peugeot in Europe, before immigrating to the United States from France, by way of the UK and Spain. Today, I refer to myself as a “recovering marketer” because when I started out in marketing it was during the time of traditional marketing, referred to as the “art of persuasion,” which never made sense to me. It always felt that the one-way marketing success was due to a lack of alternatives.

When my cofounder, David Chancogne and I set out to build Traackr 10 years ago, we saw an opportunity to organize the web, not by pages, but by people. That premise is what created the foundation for Traackr, which today powers influencer marketing for top brands around the world who are passionate about staying relevant to their consumers.

After Traackr, I want to solve the problem of fake news.

Which campaigns have impressed you lately?

I’m very impressed by companies who are living their brand values and striving to be as authentic as possible. Notable examples of this include Nike’s work with Colin Kaepernick and Calvin Klein’s support of the LGBTQ community. These are two cases where the brands have connected a sense of purpose to their business in a way that meaningfully impacts their community.

What advice would you give a marketer starting out today?

The brands that are winning and will continue to win are the ones who put people at the heart of their marketing. The age of persuasion is over. To succeed as a marketer today you need to cultivate your sense of empathy and learn how to translate brand purpose into meaningful programs.

The post A day in the life of… Pierre-Loic Assayag, CEO & Co-founder, Traackr appeared first on Econsultancy.

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In 2016, you likely heard the lurid tale of Target revealing a man’s high-school-aged daughter was pregnant. Target’s algorithm had noted her Guest ID number making common first trimester purchases and began sending automated maternity ads to the family’s mailbox … All before she’d had a chance to break the news to her parents.

Something like this micro-targeting example reveals the arrogant disregard for our privacy, but it seems like nothing has yet shocked America into revolt … in fact, the situation just keeps getting worse. Instead of respecting customers, marketers have just become better at concealing the deception. Andrew Cole, a Target company statistician, told The New York Times:

If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable… We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), an attempt to replicate Europe’s GDPR privacy standards, comes into effect on January 1, 2020.  However, even when these new, more stringent, standards start, the average consumer will remain unaware of how little privacy she retains.

Your smartphone, your life

The New York Times recently obtained access to an enormous file of cellphone location data.

A whistleblower delivered this data — 50 million data points — without associated names, ages, genders, or other information that would overtly identify cell phone owners, even though anyone who had purchased the dataset would likely have some or all of this information.

Even without knowing identities, the reporters were able to track individuals by their movement during average commutes or by attending events from late 2016 to early 2017. The reporters were easily able to identify celebrities who had entered the Playboy Mansion or the home of Johnny Depp. Of more concern, they could also follow White House staff members, intelligence officers employed at the Pentagon, and DC riot police.

Even worse, they could track executives and celebrities visiting drug treatment facilities, abortion clinics, and massage parlors.

This data is available to anyone with a devious knack for digital breaking and entering.

Many companies are clueless

By now it should be obvious that it takes very little data to make a positive ID on a person … and this is data that is becoming more freely available and commonly breached. One study showed that information easily gathered by the US Census — birthdate, zip code, and gender — would be enough to identify 87 percent of Americans.

I recently received a phone call today that I’m almost positive was actually from my healthcare provider, but because I didn’t recognize the phone number, I refused to provide my zip code and date of birth to confirm my identity.

I could nearly hear the caller rolling her eyes, but my concerns are legitimate. My healthcare provider should not solicit information along these lines, and I’m disappointed with them for their ignorance.

Put down the tinfoil hat and protect your privacy

While going off the grid is not an option for social media marketers, it doesn’t mean that we can’t protect ourselves.

First, there’s the small stuff.

• Don’t give information over the phone
• Bookmark your bank, your medical portals, and any sites you use to pay bills
• Only visit those sites through your saved bookmarks
• Never click on links delivered via email or text message
• Create incredibly strong but easy to remember passwords by mashing four unrelated words, using spaces between whenever possible
• This would work: Twitter Ethics Red Paris
• This would not: NeverS4yNeverB0nd

Start using technology to protect your privacy

• Password keepers can be problematic, but you must switch now if you do any of the following:
  • Use the same password more than once
  • Have a password on a Post-it note
  • Keep a password document in Dropbox
• Keep abreast of data breaches by checking HaveIBeenPwned periodically or sign up for alerts
• Browse through EFF.org and try out their free tools, especially Panopticlick
• If you use sites that provide some anonymity, such as reddit, use throw away accounts for anything sensitive
• Consider buying a physical key to act as a password. My favorite is Yubikey
• Try to distance yourself from known privacy offenders such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon
• Try to utilize encrypted services when possible, such as Apple Messages or Protonmail, and consider using a VPN
• Whenever possible, use companies that tend to value privacy, such as Apple, Firefox, GitHub, and (though counter-intuitive) YouTube over Vimeo

If you enjoyed this article, I’d like to leave you with a puzzle: given the current capabilities for technology to identify an author through word choice, how many tweets from an anonymous account do you think would be necessary to identify someone? I have my estimate, and I’d love to compare notes! (Assume all tweets are at the modern 280-character length)

Kiki Schirr is a freelance marketer who enjoys absorbing new trends within the tech scene. She switched to an iPhone early this year, even though she suspected her privacy concerns were paranoia. Now she’s less certain. Kiki is most easily reached via Twitter.

 

The post The ultimate privacy betrayal: Your smartphone is cheating on you appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.