The Ultimate Guide To SEO Video Marketing
For SaaS Businesses

Have you ever tried looking up something on Google and the results first show a handful of videos related to your Google search? Did you click on a video or scroll past it?

I could only guess. But most people would choose the video rather than scroll down for lengthy blog posts.

According to a study by SEMrush, most businesses say that the highest-performing type of content marketing is video marketing.

They also claim that search engine optimization (SEO) is the second most important content marketing tactic, next to producing high-quality content.

So how do you leverage the most effective content type and the second most useful content marketing strategy?

That’s where SEO video marketing comes in.

In this article, we will talk about SEO video marketing, its key factors, and how you can optimize your marketing videos to increase your SEO ranking in the SERPs.

But first, let’s understand what video marketing and SEO are.

What Is Video Marketing?

Video marketing can be defined as creating and sharing videos online for the purpose of promoting or marketing a product, service, or brand.

Some businesses use online video marketing and live streaming as a way to build thought leadership, while others use it as a way to connect with their customer base and improve customer retention rates.

There are three prominent platforms where you could upload your marketing videos: your website, social media, and YouTube.

Website Videos

The good thing about placing videos on your site is that you can use all sorts of videos for various purposes.

You can upload videos for product video demonstrations, customer testimonials, and sharing your company culture.

What’s more, you can add videos to your blog posts to make them more engaging and informative. It’s been proven that videos make your website visitors stay longer on your site than written content, so make sure to include multiple videos on your blog posts to keep your website visitors engaged with your content.

Social Media Videos

Social media platforms are increasingly becoming popular channels for video marketing.

This makes sense because, for a business, a social media platform is all about engagement and building relationships with your potential customer.

Online videos are the perfect medium to do this since they can be more personal and engaging than other types of content like short social media posts, lengthy blog posts, and infographics.

Another advantage of using social media for video marketing is that you can target a specific audience with your videos depending on the platform you use.

For example, LinkedIn is great for business-to-business (B2B) audiences. While Facebook, Instagram, or even TikTok is better for a business-to-consumer (B2C) target audience.

YouTube Videos

When it comes to using videos for content marketing, YouTube is THE platform to be on. With this said, your SaaS company should have a YouTube channel to promote your product, show live streams, present webinars, showcase presentations, tutorials, and more.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise since YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world after Google. YouTube SEO has its own algorithm, which is another topic by itself. But should your YouTube video place first on YouTube’s search engine, you’ll find yourself having a wider audience reach compared to focusing on just your website and social media platform.

Just like Google, people use YouTube to search for all sorts of things like SaaS product reviews, how-to videos, and entertainment.

The good thing about YouTube is that it gives you a lot of SEO benefits that can help your videos rank higher in the search results. You can also gain valuable insights about your video production and marketing efforts through YouTube analytics.

Additionally, YouTube is great for building brand awareness since you can include your branding in the YouTube video itself.

What Is SEO?

SEO is the process of optimizing your website and online content to rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for certain keywords or phrases.

The goal of SEO is to get your site to show up in the top positions of the SERPs for relevant searches.

This is important because people tend to click on the first few links that show up in the SERPs. So, if you can get your site to rank higher, you’ll get more traffic from organic searches without spending anything on ads.

Now, it’s easy to imagine SEO on blog posts and other types of text-based content. You have common SEO practices like including keywords, adding links, and getting backlinks.

But what does SEO look like in video content marketing?

Let’s take a look.

SEO Video Marketing Factors

There are several factors that affect your video content’s visibility and priority on search engines: its video, audio, text, and performance.

Let’s talk about them one by one.

The Video Itself (Visuals)

Obviously, the most important factor in SEO video marketing is the video file itself. It’s mainly what your viewers are after.

And there are a lot of other aspects of your video visuals that you need to be mindful of, such as the following:

• Video quality
• Video duration
• Video format
• Still images
• Thumbnails

Audio

While the video is the most important factor, the audio is a close second. After all, what’s a video without sound?

Here are some things to keep in mind for SEO video marketing when it comes to audio:

• Sound quality
• Separate audio files

Text

The text in your video is important for two reasons:

First, it can be used to provide context for viewers who might be watching your video with the sound off.

Second, it gives search engines something to index when they’re ranking your videos for the SERPs.

That’s why you need the following text content for your videos:

• Video Title
• Video description
• Tags
• Transcripts
• Closed Captions

Video Performance

Last but not least, SEO video marketing also takes into account your video’s past performance. This includes things like:

• View count
• View duration
• Viewer retention
• Subscribers

These metrics and analytics will give you an idea of how well your videos are performing and what SEO changes you need to make to improve them.

Best Practices for SEO Video Marketing

Now that we’ve talked about the different factors that affect SEO video marketing, let’s take a look at some best practices that you can follow to optimize your videos for SEO.

1) Create High-Quality Videos With High-Quality Audio

This one should be obvious. If you want your videos to rank well, you need to make sure that they’re high quality.

This means using good equipment and filming in a well-lit area with minimal background noise.

What’s more, top-notch video editing may also be something that you need to invest in. Wipe transition effects may work for Star Wars, but they may be a little too jarring for SEO video marketing.

Still, it depends on your target audience. If your videos are intended for B2B customers, then they need to look clean and professional.

On the other hand, if you’re targeting consumers, then you can get more creative depending on which demographics you are targeting.

2) Optimize Your Video Title, Description, & Tags

When you’re writing your video titles, video description, and tags, be sure to include your target keywords. This means that you’ll need to do your keyword research when producing marketing videos for your SaaS product as well.

This will help search engines index your videos and make them more likely to show up in the SERPs.

But be careful not to turn them into a meaningless stream of keywords. Stuffing keywords is not an optimal SEO strategy for both written content and videos.

Your first priority is still to make sure that these pieces of text provide context for your video. Make it so that they just happen to have your target keywords.

Here’s how you can optimize each type of text:

Video Title: Just like headlines are to blog posts, your video titles should tell viewers what your video is all about. It should also contain your main keyword.

As much as possible, your keyword or keyword phrase should be among the first words in your video title.

Since it’s the word or phrase that your viewer is looking for, frontloading it in your title can help catch their attention more quickly.

Video Description: This is where you can give searchers a more detailed look at your video. Write a short paragraph that gives an overview of your video and its main points.

Again, don’t forget to include your target keyword.

You may also want to include a few more relevant keywords in your description. But make sure that it still serves your viewers and that it doesn’t sound weird.

Save the keyword stuffing for the tags.

Tags: These are the words and phrases that you want your video to be associated with. They can be keywords, topics, or even people’s names.

The important thing is to include as many relevant tags as possible. This will help search engines understand what your video is about and index it accordingly.

Generally, video platforms like YouTube allow a total of up to 400 characters for tags. You may also want to maximize that and add as many tags as you can.

3) Use Custom Thumbnails

One of the first things that your target audience would see about your video is the thumbnail. Naturally, it should be attention-catching and engaging enough that searchers would click on it.

Yes, it should be customized.

Why is that?

Firstly, customizing your thumbnails can help you make them more attention-catching.

They can also make your videos stand out from competing video marketers.

If you’ve noticed, viral videos on YouTube are unique thumbnails with engaging (and sometimes over-the-top) texts.

Customizing thumbnails can also give you that opportunity.

However, be careful not to use those too hype-y or clickbait thumbnails.

A lot of YouTubers and content creators quickly get a lot of hate when their thumbnails over promise but their videos underdeliver. You wouldn’t want to become like them.

That’s why our number one best practice for video SEO is to make sure that your videos are of high quality.

Secondly, customized thumbnails enable you to make your videos consistent with your branding.

As a competitive SaaS business, you want to make sure that every digital marketing asset helps build your brand and leave a recognizable digital footprint.

That way, your target market would know what to expect when they encounter your other videos in the future. If you successfully make a good first impression, just seeing your branding on the video can help them trust its content right away.

Eventually, that trust in your content would translate to trust in your SaaS product.

Thirdly, your thumbnail can complement your video title.

Your title and thumbnail are the two things that would make searchers decide whether or not they want to watch your video.

So it would be best if they work together to give searchers an idea of what your video is about.

4) Add Transcripts To Your Videos

Have you ever wondered how some YouTube videos have accurate closed captions? It’s because they’ve been transcribed.

Adding transcripts of your videos can help them rank better in the search results because it gives search engines more text to index.

What’s more, it also helps viewers who might be hard of hearing or are watching your video with the sound off.

This way, they can still understand your video and get its full value.

5) Maximize Other Video Marketing Channels

If you want your videos to reach as many people as possible, then you need to take advantage of as many video marketing channels as you can.

After all, the more viewers and engagements your videos get, the higher their chances of ranking as well.

Throughout this blog post, we’ve been talking about video SEO in the context of YouTube videos.

But let’s not forget that there are also other channels out there for distributing marketing video content.

There are also social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you’re trying to reach a younger audience and/or are trying out short-form content, you may also want to explore using TikTok.

You may also want to use a video hosting platform like Vimeo or Wistia.

And don’t forget that you can always embed relevant videos to your blog posts.

The key is to meet your target audience where they are. If you want to reach them, then you need to be where they are spending most of their time online.

6) Act On Your Video Analytics Accordingly

Once you’ve started implementing SEO video marketing strategies, it’s important to track your progress.

This way, you would know which video SEO tactics are working and which ones aren’t. Then, you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

For example, let’s say you’ve been getting a lot of views but you noticed that your viewers don’t stay long or see the video through the end.

This could be an indication that your video isn’t engaging enough. In that case, you may want to work on making your videos more interesting or informative

On the other hand, if people are staying until the end of your videos but aren’t taking any action afterward, then that’s a sign that you need to add a call-to-action (CTA), whether it’s a verbal CTA on your video or a written one on your description.

You also need to understand which channels your viewers are coming from.

Are they finding your videos organically through the search results? Or are they coming from your social media pages?

The answer to that question can help you understand which SEO video marketing strategies are working and which ones you need to focus on more.

Whatever metrics you are looking at, the key is analyzing the implications of your data and how to address your most pressing problems.

Final Thoughts About SEO Video Marketing

With video content on the rise in the SaaS market today, you may find that more and more of your competitors are also producing videos for their content marketing efforts. People love content that they can connect to and engage with, and that’s what videos do. They connect you and your SaaS product to your customers, and vice versa.

Because of that, SEO video marketing has become an essential part of any content marketing strategy.

But remember that SEO is a long-term game. It’s not something you can do overnight and expect to see results right away. It’s important to do things as correctly as you can, and watch as your SEO efforts bear fruit as you consistently pay attention to it.

Looking for more guides and strategies to help you grow your SaaS business? Visit our blog here.