Video, SEO, and SEM — What Your Association Needs to Know

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Is your association having trouble keeping up with the growing need for video? Are you unable to produce more than one video every few months, and even then, not finding a return?

Well, you’re in the right place. Video marketing is crucial for all associations of various sizes to grow their communities by maximizing site visits, video views, and revenue. Videos are versatile and boost ratings and conversions as “64% of members purchase after watching branded social videos.” When you combine video with your efforts to promote your website with SEO, your association can grow exponentially in search engine results.

Marketing with Video

Video marketing has proven to be crucial for an association as it continues to grow as one of the types of content with the best return on investment (ROI). Video enables associations to make a personal connection with their members, which builds a foundation of trust.

Traditional video production is expensive and takes a lot of time, which leaves a lot of associations unable to produce more than one video a year. However, many leading associations are starting to realize that they can increase their video production throughout the year by using intuitive digital technologies that automate the most time consuming parts of the process.

With members and chapters across the world and video applications becoming more affordable, it’s no wonder associations are finding video production to be a worthwhile investment for their flexible association.

What Exactly is Search Marketing?

Currently, Internet Live Stats states there are 76,274 Google searches completed per second daily. With thousands of searches happening per second, it’s no wonder associations are rushing to understand how search marketing will give their brand a competing chance in digital marketing.

Search marketing is a general term for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEM is known for traffic through paid search listings. For example, when you Google something and the top results says “Google Ads,” this organization has paid for this exposure. SEO is known for traffic earned through free or unpaid search listings meaning search engines crawl (yes, like spiders) your organic content to see its effectiveness in attracting traffic. If any content you publish is not in the appropriate format a.k.a crawlable for search engines, you are hurting your ability to attract organic traffic to your website and meet broader member audiences.

With digital marketing’s constant change, association search marketers are maintaining the momentum by researching trends of their members. Once they review member’s trends, they can personalize their marketing to accommodate this pattern and see almost immediate improvements from Google’s search engine crawlers.

Search engine crawlers will look for three main things. The first is whether your content is high-quality, second is if the website’s user experience is simple to navigate for visitors, and the third is where your inbound links derive from and whether you’re backlinking (which we’ll get into further detail later) to dominate sites.

Don’t miss out on the important opportunity to increase your awareness by ensuring your digital content is optimized for search. Organic search allows you to stretch your paid marketing efforts further. A great place to start is optimizing your homepage for your main keywords. Ask yourself, what keywords have a high click-through-rate but low organic search results? Focus your SEO efforts on this keyword and start building awesome new content around it.  

Video as an Organic Search Tactic

Videos are proliferating as 500 hours of video are uploaded every 60 seconds on YouTube; 500 million individuals watch videos on Facebook daily. Another 10 million videos are viewed on Snapchat daily as well.

The Association of Governmental Risk Pools (AGRiP) leverages YouTube to video to enhance their organic search presence

When you are creating a video, building a keyword list is crucial to driving conversions. Here’s how to make a successful and unique keyword list for your brand to boost your organic traffic.

  • Know your Audience: Examine your association’s data to understand your targeted audience and build specific keywords to meet their needs.
  • Optimize Video: After creating your keyword list, begin brainstorming ideas to develop your video around those keywords. By including some of these keywords not only in your title but video description, and tags will enhance your SEO ranking.
  • Identifying Keywords Search Volume: Once obtaining your keywords, you can utilize online tools to assist you in figuring out how much traffic said keyword provides.
  • Knowing your Competition: While it’s great to get ahead of the game and stay relevant with your competition, it’s essential not to use the same or remarkably similar keywords as them. Having a keyword list comprised of viral keywords will make it difficult for your video to reach its desired traffic or be at the top of the search page.
  • Autocomplete: Have you ever began typing something into a search engine and had the sentence finished for you automatically? You can now use this tool to uncover the populated topics and searches to understand which keywords have the most search volume.

The Benefits of Video, Backlinking, and More

If you’re interested in maximizing popularity, views, and members to your website, there are many types of videos and link building strategies your brand can create. For instance, having backlinks will ensure you rank up quickly on Google; fortunately, you don’t have to pay to get them. Backlinks also connect the end-user with other websites that are relevant to their main search with just one click. You can build backlinks by networking with prominent members in your association, inviting guests to send in video for your blog, link reclamation, and original research with insights.

You can go to a backlink website of your choice or Neil Patel’s free link. Once there, enter your competitor’s URL and notice all the people linked to their webpage. This strategy will allow you to see the most popular articles on the webpage, which can then show you the backlink counts for said URL.

To gain more traffic, conduct an organic traffic audit or simply examine the content on your page and make sure it is relevant to your association’s niche. If a particular post is ancient and has not gained many views, ask yourself whether it’s incredibly relevant to your association’s offering; if it is, update it and make it compelling, if it isn’t, remove it. While it seems that eliminating content may lower traffic, it doesn’t, as it merely makes your website niche-based allowing more views and traffic for your association’s specialized membership or offering.

If there is an article your competitor has that is similar to yours, yet they’re earning more views, consider going back to your article and spicing it up for a better effect on your audience. Go in-depth and share more valuable information along with keywords and your video, sure to charm potential new members. Email your subscribers with personalized emails to explain to them why your article is ideal for them based on their specified search.

Uploading your videos directly to social media networks rather than merely sharing a link to the YouTube video will increase views and thus increase your membership rate. Tom Ferry, real estate business coach and motivational speaker, said recently that “if you’re limiting your modality, you’re limiting your opportunity to connect with people” when speaking on video marketing and content distribution (more on this later).

YouTube Strategies for Associations

While we’ve had much talk surrounding Google as it is the largest search engine worldwide, its subsidiary, YouTube, comes next in second place. Ensuring your video contains the most accurate words in the title, description, and tags will guarantee your video doesn’t get lost amongst the hundreds of videos uploaded per minute on YouTube. Search crawlers rely solely on text as they cannot crawl video or image content entirely as accurate as us humans can (yet).

The League of American Orchestras uses YouTube to tell member stories

Here’s how to make sure those crawlers rank your video appropriately.

  • Placing Transcript in Video Description: Crawlers mainly check the description first, meaning you can add up to 4,850 characters of your video’s transcript there as it is keyword-focused on your topic. Adding your target keyword in your description, title, tags, and video will help rank your video accurately. The right keyword isn’t mainstream; meaning, it should have low competition.
  • Add Your Own Closed Captions: While YouTube may provide automated captions, “only 70% [is] accurate, which can make for incomprehensible and often embarrassing captions.” The error in auto-captions can turn your video into spam and in turn, lose your ranking.
  • Translate to Multiple Languages: Translating your video’s transcript can broaden your audience, giving your video more engagements. Crawlers will index your text and add your video in the SERPs in the languages you provided.
  • Intriguing Thumbnail: Ensure that your thumbnail matches your keyword and is compelling enough to attract more viewers to your video rather than a competitor’s.
  • SEO Embed: Use the SEO Embed plugin to add all your metadata to the top of your page so crawlers can index your video accordingly, “you can get 2-5x more views than just optimizing it for YouTube.”

Trends in Video Production

Today, highly polished video production is no longer a requirement. Catherine Tims of NoStop Content says that “consumers are moving away from the prim and perfect productions and thoughtfully staged photos that have been the standard. Viewers prefer an authentic, real feel over a high-quality, and ultimately high-cost production. That does not mean the video has to be low quality. You can take 4K videos on a smartphone. It just means you should focus on the content of the video over the production of it.”

Speed and volume have become more important in video production and with flexible video application tools and technologies, marketers and creators can finally produce more videos than ever before and use their time-savings to focus on creating better content. Gather Voices has been at the forefront of this shift by understanding the value of associations telling their stories through more video. Their technology continues to help associations and brands collect, manage, and publish videos with fewer clicks than ordering on Seamless and save thousands in video editing, production, and distribution costs. Request a personalized demo of Gather Voices today to see how you can take advantage of this growing trend in video.  

Using Video to Tell Member Stories

Now you have more time back in your day to focus on content and storytelling aspect of your brand. Storytelling marketing is pivotal in creating a connection with members to earn their trust and loyalty. Social media marketers and community managers are spending significant hours a week building up this rapport within their community because they understand the value of connecting their association on an emotional level with valuable content.

The Ounce uses video to tell authentic stories — member share personal testimonials about why they advocate for early childhood education

Visual content can elicit an emotional response better than plain text or images by staggering numbers. A video can make us happy, sad, nostalgic or anything in-between. These feelings and visual stimulation can contribute a great deal to whether we take action or not after viewing, even if this action is not immediate. In fact, studies have shown that people recall nearly 65 percent of the visual content that they see almost three days later versus the 10 percent of written content in the same amount of time.

Storytelling through video also allows your association to showcase itself in unique and engaging ways for new members. Social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and more, have become one of the most used marketing tools for telling such stories through video along with newsletters, emails, landing pages, and the like. It’s essential to make sure your message does not include any lying or contradictions nor offensive humor. Below is a list of strategies your storytelling should consist of to maximize members and revenue.

  • A hook: Your story should captivate your members and hold their attention throughout
  • Emotion: Include emotion to attract empathy and ignite feelings amongst your members
  • Brand philosophy: Express what values your association cherishes and are ready to offer new and existing members
  • Highlight membership: Declare the positive effects of your association and its strengths.

New & Innovative Ways to Produce Video

While we cannot foresee the future, history has proven to us how valuable video has been for search marketing year after year. Whether your association has recently started up or has been thriving for years, video production has proven to benefit and enhance an association’s new membership rate and membership engagement considerable.

Are you looking for a more efficient way to produce more video content for your association? Leading associations are using Gather Voices to dramatically increase the amount of video they produce. To learn more about how they’re doing it, request a demo using the form below!

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