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How to Use Video Content as Link Bait for SEO [Tutorial].
Video can provide four distinct values for SEO. Rich Snippets can improve your click-through-rate, a presence on social video platforms can improve your brand awareness, product videos on commercial pages can help to increase conversion rate and lastly, video can be used to increase the number of links and social shares back to your site. In this post, I’m going to focus on the last of these and explain the methodology behind using video specifically as link bait.
There are essentially only two ways in which people commonly link to video content:
1) Link out to the page – when the page offers a credible source of information, entertainment or features resources that will be valuable for the audience of the site linking out.
2) Embed the video – When the video adds value for the audience within the specific context of the page in question.
Because the motivations behind the links in these two examples are distinct, so are the strategies you can implement in order to successfully build them – you can either create a “linkbait page” that will garner links through recommendations in a traditional manner or you can produce a video that you will outreach to people with the aim of getting them to embed it on their site. In this post, I’m going to explain the form of the content and the technical implementation required for each strategy.
Creating a “Link Bait Page”
Video is a media type, a form of content delivery, rather than a “type of content” as such. As the old adage goes, “form follows function” and this is exactly the approach you should be taking when building out content for link bait purposes. While video may be part of the sum, the page itself is the overall creative and so your task should be thought of “building a content driven mixed-media page”, rather than building a “video” per se.
An example of this approach executed successfully is The Simply Business Guide to WordPress, where a series of videos are interspersed with links to articles and presented in a step-by-step interactive flowchart. While the videos themselves are reasonably useful, the real value is in the structure and presentation of the page – which drives links rather than the YouTube videos themselves. This type of content gets links because it is a useful resource for those unfamiliar with WordPress and meets the need of educating a non-technology savvy business owner audience about creating a website.
Creating a Video That Others Will Embed
If someone embeds a video on their site – it has to be because they want their readers to stop looking at their own content and spend time watching yours instead. If you’re a company trying to build your presence and reputation online, rather than individual promoting the latest humorous cat video, this means that your content has to be exceptional. Mediocre isn’t going to cut it.
With video, exceptional does not necessarily mean that the production quality has to be ground-breaking, but rather that the content must meet the needs of a specific user base and do so exceptionally efficiently and creatively.
This could be as simple as providing a tutorial for something that others’ have been unable to work out – or it could be an exceptionally creative way of delivering a message that provokes thought or action. Video infographics are a typical form factor for this kind of content, and generally work best when the video and audio tracks counterpoint each other to deliver a multi-layered narrative.
Hosting and Outreach Strategy
If you’re building a multi-media web page which utilizes video as one of the form factors – then the hosting methodology ultimately doesn’t matter. If the video isn’t valuable outside of the context of the page (as with the Simply Business example – the value is the curated guide and step-by-step process), then few individuals will choose to link to a specific video – rather preferring to link to link to entity as a whole. Your outreach process will broadly consist of contacting site owners for whom the content will be valuable and asking them to link out to it.
Conversely, If you’re trying to get links to a specific video – then the hosting platform you use matters a great deal.
When people embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo or any other social video platforms, they don’t typically link to the domain of the creator in the process, but instead the profile of the user on the YouTube/Vimeo domains. This is fantastic for the platforms themselves, but clearly sub-optimal for any business trying to do SEO and build links back to their site in order to improve rankings. Whilst these social video platforms are a fantastic way to seed your content and get it in front of a wider audience, you don’t want the likes of YouTube taking your link equity.
10 Steps to Maximize the Use of Video as Link Bait
I therefore recommend the following hosting and outreach methodology for this kind of video linkbait.
1. Self-host your videos (or use a secure third party provider) and put it in a big frame (I recommend 720 x 405 for most desktop sites) on a dedicated page on your site.
2. If you’re using Vimeo Pro, Vzaar, Viddler or any other platform which allows you to publish your video outside of your domain – turn this functionality off for now
3. Create a custom embed code for your video, using the following free tool. So the video has an “embed” call to action at the bottom of a page (NB ensure the in-built “embed” button is turned off for any hosting platform you may be using, as this typically won’t include a text link back to your site)
4. Include social share buttons on the page, with a custom message specific to your campaign (depending on your video hosting platform, you may also need to disable the standard social buttons included with the player and include customized versions separately)
5. Outreach to sites who may be interested in linking to your video, ensuring you include the above embed code within the email (to make it easy for the outreach target to link to you)
6. 3-4 months later, or once the return from your outreach work has dried up – put the content on YouTube, Vimeo and any other social video platforms relevant for the content you’ve created.
7. Seed the content socially and try to get as many shares and links as you can to the YouTube/Vimeo versions of your video.
8. After the buzz dies down from this – mark the content up “private” on YouTube and set up domain restrictions on Vimeo (so it stops working for anyone who has embedded it).
9. Outreach to all the people who embedded/linked to the YouTube/Vimeo versions of your video, explaining that this link now doesn’t work and ask them to link to the version of the video on your site instead. You won’t get a 100% return from this, but most of the leads will be fairly strong – as after all, they’ve already linked to your content.
10. If your video is still relevant and valuable six months down the line, then you can always rinse and repeat steps 6-9
Ultimately, the core principles behind using video as linkbait successfully are simple:
1. Allow form to follow function: only use video as your medium when it’s the best way to tell the story in question
2. Carefully target your audience: create something that’s going to be valuable to a specific group of users around the web
3. Avoid leaking link equity – Ensure you minimize the amount of links pointing to domains outside of your own.
Make no mistake, getting these three things right consistently is not easy and it can take many attempts to see a reasonable return on investment. If one element is missing, the campaign will inevitably fail to deliver, but the rewards are there for those with the creative nous and technical understanding to give it a go.
Author: Phil Nottingham
Courtesy of www.reelseo.com
Facebook’s Graph Search: what does it mean for marketers?
For everyone in the digital marketing industry, the big news of the day is the launch of Facebook’s new Graph Search.
In a nutshell, the new tool allows you to search for people, pages, businesses and other services based on the information shared by other Facebook users.
Dodgy name aside, it’s an exciting announcement that might cause a few worried conversations at Google.
But what are the opportunities for marketers, and is it going to kick off a new race to drive up the number of ‘likes’ for brand pages?
To shed a bit of light on some of the key issues, I asked several search and social media experts for their views…
1. What do you see as being the main opportunities for brands?
Matt Owen, Social Media Manager at Econsultancy
Active outreach will be at the forefront of everyone’s minds, but this will largely come down to privacy settings.
If brands can reach out directly to individuals then there’s potentially a huge payoff, but also a massive opportunity to spam, which could lead to more users upping their privacy settings.
I can’t see Facebook being particularly tolerant of this behaviour though, so I imagine the main opportunity will be to more accurately target ads and updates based on very specific bio information, rather than just area, gender, etc.
If Facebook can provide a genuinely accurate ad targeting system then the payoff will be far better.
I can certainly see the opportunity for local search increasing massively. If Facebook can also integrate this properly across mobile then it could be a huge threat to Yelp! And Google’s business listings. I’m sure that restaurant reviews by people you know would carry far more weight than anonymous ones.
Kelvin Newman, Strategy Director at SiteVisibility
I think the biggest advantage for brands is this is going to surface people who have liked you in the past to their friends more frequently.
This is good news because often someone will have liked you, but then not really interacted with so your brand will never appear in the newsfeed.
Now that connection lives on and potentially helps you appear in searches more frequently, so it certainly increases the value of dormant ‘likers’.
Interestingly though, content created by brands, such as photos, won’t appear which does seem an oversight.
Robin Grant, MD at We Are Social
If Facebook evolves Graph Search beyond the current limits of ‘People, Photos, Places, and Interests’ and in turn users warm to it, it could succeed and therefore become relevant to brands.
This would mean that Facebook’s sponsored result ads would become more relevant for advertisers, and ultimately it would mean that raw fan numbers would be much more important to brands (or more accurately, the number of fans they have that match the profile of their customer base), as to appear in Graph Search results a brand will need to have a friend of the searcher as a fan.
It would also make it essential for retailers, or any business with physical locations, to maintain Facebook place pages for each of their branches.
Will Francis, Director at Harkable
The product looks to be of immediate benefit to location-based brands such as shops, restaurants, etc. – ‘where do my friends go for pizza?’ – and content providers such as publishers and film studios – ‘what films do my friends like most?’.
It will be interesting to see how the product comes to be used and how brands exploit those common uses to appear in users’ search results.
2. Is Facebook’s data accurate enough for searches to actually be valid? i.e. does the average user actually keep their profile information up-to-date?
Matt Owen:
I think for brands this is a good thing, as they’ll be encouraged to provide more relevant business information, which in turn should improve the user experience.
Currently I’m often forced to scroll through 50 results to find the right one, even if I’m looking for a specific brand by name.
On a personal level, if professionals are encouraged to use it as a data mine, then we could see a resurgence in Facebook as the social network.
Twitter’s search has never been the most reliable when looking for contacts, so the ability to search by bio keywords would be incredibly useful. It might be something that LinkedIn should also be concerned about.
That said, my own ‘about’ info contains far more references to Martinis than it does Econsultancy…
Kelvin Newman
I’d expect the data to be sparse for most people, but that might not be such a bad thing for Facebook, as it might give people the little nudge to tend their information up-to-date.
And also don’t underestimate how much data is created frictionlessly, i.e. if you’ve got Spotify connected to Facebook (check out https://www.facebook.com/music) most of that data is being created frictionlessly and could potentially be informing Search Graph.
Robin Grant
Users in their early 20s may have a circle of friends that will be providing enough data for Graph Search to be useful.
However, it seems likely that for most users at the moment that won’t be the case, and there just won’t be enough data in your social graph.
Will Francis
Some data is more accurate than others, with ‘likes’ for brands and products fairly patchy while photos, tagging and basic profile info is more reliable.
So we’ll find users initially gravitate to the searches that are most reliable and we may even see people become more diligent about updating their profiles and reflecting their lives even more faithfully online.
3. Will it kick off another race for ‘likes’ among brands so they show up more in search?
Matt Owen
It’s certainly possible. I’ve never been convinced about Facebook promoting the value of a ‘like’, simply because many businesses (Econsultancy included) don’t scale that way.
Of our own 10,000–odd fans, it’s unlikely that many of their friends are also digital marketers. Brands will need to think more deeply about who they approach and why, which should ultimately help improve the current state of measurement and ROI.
I think Facebook will need to be careful not to create a closed-loop search. Of my friends, very few share my taste in music, so searches that are based on their preferences won’t be relevant.
On Facebook people do tend to search with intent (“Virgin Atlantic” rather than “Cheap Flights”), so being well ‘liked’ will certainly be a factor for many companies to counteract this.
Kelvin Newman
Initially as the system lacks data you’ll be able to reap the rewards on merely having lots of likes just to appear on searches, but it won’t take long for there to be competition, and once that competition is in place the order in which results are returned will become important.
This order will presumably be more sophisticated than simply who has the most likes.
My gut feel is that it will probably work in a similar way to the Newsfeed Edgerank algorithm which is based on Affinity and the Weight; so priority will be given to businesses with strong interaction from people you are connected to or businesses you’ve interacted with in the past.
Robin Grant
If Graph Search takes off, then it’s certainly possible. Although, brands should remember though that even in this instance, it’s not about raw numbers of fans, but the number of relevant fans.
Will Francis
Once brands work out the metrics and overall uses of the system there will certainly be a new set of targets that become prioritised, and agencies will need to be ready to realise these new opportunities to gain visibility and engagement with consumers.
4. Will it result in an increase in spam requests if people are easier to find?
Matt Owen
I’m sure it will, but only at the level of spam tweets. There will always be a few unscrupulous (or uneducated) marketers out there blasting spam, although in the main they’re too useless at it to target properly anyway.
I’d expect to see a rise in friend requests from people I’ve never heard of, but as mentioned it really will depend on whether or not pages can contact directly, something I can’t see happening.
It’s more likely you’ll see a rise in irrelevant ads as Facebook tweaks its settings after launch. I’m sure I can rely on my existing friends to share enough spam as it is…
Kelvin Newman
If LinkedIn is anything to go by, yes! But that’s most likely to affect the tech recruitment sector and eligible singletons.
However in the announcement they talked a lot about Facebook being about meeting new people as well as staying connected to existing friends, so Facebook probably see that as a good thing.
Robin Grant
Possibly, but I think in this instance Facebook is only replicating what LinkedIn’s search already provides, so perhaps we’ll just see those spam requests spread across networks.
Will Francis
Facebook was keen to stress that privacy functions would be at the heart of the new product, with users able to define what does and doesn’t turn up in search results.
We know from past experience though that most users don’t bother tweaking these settings and it’s likely there will be (yet another) minor backlash when people start receiving spam friend requests.
On the flipside, we may see Facebook do what MySpace did and what Google+ Communities is doing well – connecting strangers around common interests.
Along with becoming the world’s social knowledge engine through Graph Search, this seems a natural progression in Facebook’s unstoppable march towards its domination of the web.
Author: David Moth
Courtesy of www.econsultancy.com
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