Website ranking relies heavily on SEO, the better optimized your site is for it, the more traffic it will receive. But it’s not just about having a large library of links. The quality of your content affects your site’s long-term ranking. High-quality content is able to attract links naturally over time and is unbelievably important to marketing. Just as important is taking into account SEO for video production.
An underutilized form of SEO is VSEO or video search engine optimization. Brands tend to incorporate images, infographics, and written content but tend to ignore videos. When used correctly, VSEO can be a powerful form of content that will skyrocket your SEO. This blog will be the financial advisor’s go-to guide for all things video SEO.
1. Have a Plan/Goals
When producing financial advisor video content, the first and most important step is to have a plan in mind. The content you’re producing should show off your knowledge of the field. Ask yourself, what type of video are you creating? What do you want it to tell your audience? Remember, you’re not just making a video for the thrill of it but to complement your SEO strategy. Your SEO strategy will determine how effective your videos are, so establishing a plan is vital to your video marketing.
Have a goal in mind so you’re not just aimlessly creating content. Fortunately, SEO makes that easy for you as there are only really two goals that you could have; to build links and generate social shares.
As a financial advisor, you want to produce content that is relevant to your field and interesting enough for people to watch and share. Along with the two goals of building links and generating social shares, create a personal goal. Maybe you want your video to be funny, maybe you want it to stimulate some sort of emotional reaction. Add in your own finish line to help motivate your video creation and produce high-quality work. Creating motivation is crucial to being able to complete any job.
If you’re stuck on what type of video you want to create, read this blog on 4 Video Marketing Ideas for Financial Advisors.
2. Prepare With Research
Any project requires research to ensure that the end product is not only high-quality but also accurate. That goes double when it comes to financial advisors. Having done research will allow an advisor to craft a video based on current stats and knowledge with precision and accuracy. For VSEO, it’s a little different than just looking up facts. It’s about studying keywords and seeing what’s popular and what type of video content is currently being searched for. Keywords for videos are not the same as text-based blog posts, the reason being that many of your views will come from YouTube’s own suggestions.
An important thing to remember is people use YouTube and other streaming platforms differently than they use Google. For example, a keyword like financial advisor might receive 150k monthly searches on Google, while on YouTube, it may receive 300. On the other hand, searching for something like pranks might net 300k searches on YouTube and only 5k on Google. Here are some tools to help you figure out what keywords will work for you.
- YouTube Suggest: Type a keyword into the field and get a list of suggestions. Great for seeing what people are searching for.
- VidIQ: Input a keyword to see statistics on keyword ideas. Helpful for uncovering low-competition, high-volume terms.
Now produce an optimized video with the help of the keywords you researched. Your video will be laser-focused and from there, your firm can add its own flair to help it stand out even more.
3. Creating Your Video with Metrics in Mind
It’s finally time for the fun part, where you can exercise your creativity and subject knowledge. After the planning phase, you should have a pretty good idea of what direction you want your video to go in and what it’ll be on. Be sure to include your selected keywords in your video for SEO. Use them naturally when talking, as YouTube and other video platforms are able to track them through voice recognition.
Now it’s time to focus on the metrics that will impact how your video performs on any streaming platform using VSEO. They are as follows:
- Watch Time
- Audience Retention
- Engagement
- CTR
Watch Time
This is the total amount of time your video has accrued. So if your video is 10 minutes long and has been fully watched by 10 people, that’s 100 minutes of total watch time. YouTube loves when that number is high, so creators produce long videos to incur more watch time. Be sure to make your video as long as you can without hurting the quality of your work.
Audience Retention
This is the amount of your video (viewed as a percentage) that people have watched. For example, if your video is 10 minutes long and the average viewer watches 4 minutes of it, that’s a 40% retention rate. Maximize your retention rate by:
- Focusing on the first 15 seconds, use this time to hook the audience in
- Look for peaks and valleys: where does audience retention peak or drop
- Use pattern interrupts; moments in the video where you change things up
Engagement
User engagement is another vital ranking signal as it shows the interests that users have in your content. This includes how many people will like, comment, follow, share, and add your video to their playlists. These stats indicate engagement and thus influence your video ranking. To boost your engagement, try:
- Asking questions in your videos that will make users comment
- Include a CTA to follow or subscribe to your channel
- Reply to as many comments as you can
4. Optimizing the Video
Much like a blog post, videos can also be optimized during and after creation to boost SEO and attract traffic.
The video title is like the subject line of an email, it’s crucial to catch the viewer’s attention, but it’s also where you want to include the keyword you choose during the research step. You only need to include it once.
Video descriptions allow YouTube to understand your topic. Try to write 200+ word descriptions for a deeper understanding of your video topic. A deeper understanding leads to YouTube suggesting your video more often.
Lastly, take advantage of YouTube’s video tags to give your video an SEO boost. They’re not as important as they used to be but can still lend a hand. 5 is the magic number, any less isn’t enough, and any more is overkill.
Video SEO is about combining creativity and research to produce high-quality content that both attracts viewers and converts them. Optimizing videos with SEO is the most difficult part of video SEO, not the video creation itself.
You might know how to create a video, but it’s the after that can be the issue. Ensuring your content is successful on the platforms you created them for and making sure your work is not wasted. That is the purpose of this blog, and we welcome you to come back whenever you need to refresh and be inspired. Now go out there and produce high-quality video content that is sure to impress!
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