How to Incorporate Video into Your Content Strategy

Abstract

The search landscape is changing. 12 months ago, if you were to search for an informational query, such as “how to clean a rug”, you’d likely be presented with a featured snippet at the top, followed by links to nine in-depth blogs.

Now if you search for the same query, you’re likely to be presented with an AI overview (AIO), which is a combination of the top-ranking blogs/videos Google’s AI has pulled together to encourage zero clicks, a featured snippet, people also ask (PAA) section, a couple of blogs, and a selection of videos – whether in the form of a video preview/pack, or an individual listing on YouTube or TikTok.

With that in mind, marketers need to ensure they’re pivoting their strategies to reach people in the ways – and formats – they consume content. In this report, we’re going to focus specifically on video content, looking at the ways you can identify the topics people are searching for, tips on how to get your videos ranking, both within Google’s SERPs, and specific social channels, and how to tie your videos back to your overall on-site content strategy.

The current state of organic SERPs

Research from Statista shows that globally, 78% of internet users use social media platforms to research brands and their products; and 48% of global Gen Z users use social media to search for informational queries, rather than using Google.

If we look at this from a UK perspective, 40% of consumers use TikTok as a search engine, with this rising to 49% of millennials and 64% of Gen Z. Cooking recipes, DIY hacks, and product reviews are amongst the most popular types of searches, which highlights the informative nature of queries, and the opportunities to grow your video content, and build brand awareness.

And, if you think that you’re exempt from social media as your audience is older, then think again; as one in 10 of that 40% figure is said to be people aged between 40-49.

Plus, according to The Social Shephard, 92% of TikTok viewers complete an action immediately after watching a video – whether it’s sharing, liking, commenting, or following – and 61% discover both new products and brands on the platform.

So, if you haven’t yet incorporated video into your overall content strategy, now’s the time to start.

How to discover the topics people are searching for

When it comes to searching for initial ideas, treat it as you would a blog roadmap, starting with the keyword research phase. At Connective3, we use two different tools for this.

Ahrefs

Focusing purely on Google’s SERPs, Ahrefs enables you to see the search terms that bring back videos. Simply navigate to ‘Keywords Explorer’ and type in your search query. You can be as general or specific as you want – personally, we prefer starting off more general (i.e. starting off by searching for ‘rug’ and ‘rugs’).

Then, you can navigate to ‘matching terms’ and start narrowing your search query down – here, we’ve filtered it down to keywords that also have the word ‘clean’ or ‘cleaning’ in them.

Finally, under ‘SERP features’, select both ‘videos’ and ‘video previews’ to see the keywords that bring back videos within Google, and you can start to plan out the type of topics that you’ll want to focus on.

Keywordtool.io

For searches within social channels, we use keywordtool.io – here, you can look at searches across a variety of platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, X, and Pinterest; and you can choose between specific countries and languages.

If you know the types of content you want to create, you can be more specific with your searches (i.e. “cleaning a rug”) to discover all of the topics that are associated with cleaning/caring for rugs. However, if you’re still at the inspiration stage, then we’d recommend being more general again.

For example, if we search for “rugs” on YouTube in the UK and quickly scan the keyword list, we can see the following results:

Rug on carpet gripper – 17,000 searches a month.
Rug ideas for living room – 2,300 searches a month.
Tufting rug tutorial for beginners – 50 searches a month.
Rug making ASMR – 10 searches a month.

So, we can already start to see some of the videos we might want to create if we’re wanting to build out our content for rugs. And once we have some potential ideas, we can replicate this across the other social channels we might want to post across, too. For example, on TikTok:

Rug ideas for living room – 1,500 searches a month.
Rug tufting – 2,300 searches a month.
Rug ASMR – 60 searches.

Keywordtool.io also shows you trends for keywords on a monthly basis, so you can see potential trends you can jump on the back of or keywords that are dying out.

Not every idea will have search volume behind it across different channels (in this case, there isn’t any relevant search volume around using carpet grippers on rugs on TikTok). However, this is a great way to start building out your social content plan, and you can easily tie it back to your on-site content by conducting keyword research on Google SERPs and creating blogs that sit on-site.

Determining your formats

Once you’ve gotten your ideas together, but before you start filming, it’s important you know what you want the format of your video to be – and just like when it comes to writing blogs, we look at SERP intent to see what’s already ranking.

For example, if we take the “how to clean a rug” idea, and search for it within Google, we can see that the three top-ranking videos within the video pack are all person to camera, who are talking through what they’re doing as they’re cleaning their rug, with key points highlighted as text within the videos. So, if we want to give ourselves the best chance of ranking, we know that we’ll want to have a person-to-camera video, too.

Looking at the length of each video is equally as important – those three top-ranking videos are all five minutes or longer, so we have a good indication of what the length of ours should be.

However, it’s really important to note that just because you’ll be creating the same topic of video across multiple platforms, it doesn’t mean you can publish that one video across all channels. TikTok videos need to be much shorter – search for “cleaning a rug” there, and you’ll see that videos are, at max, 30 seconds long, and they tend to be from the view of the person who’s doing the cleaning.

However, for other ideas, you might find that animated videos with voiceovers work best, or even a series of image stills.

All of this is information you’ll want to include within your preproduction strategy, as it’s going to give you the best chance of ranking.

Preproduction, filming, and editing

Depending on the makeup of your team, the pre- and post-production strategies and actual filming of the videos may sit with you; or like with Connective3, you might have a dedicated content creation team you share ideas with who can then take your vision and turn it into a reality.

During your pre-production stage, you’ll want to think of the logistics, and how to film as much content as possible in the most time (and cost!) effective way possible. You’ll want to set up your backdrop – whether you’re doing it in a showroom or home, or renting out a studio. You’ll also need to consider all of your props – i.e. getting the rugs, sourcing the products used to clean them, and making sure that, most importantly, there’s someone in the team who’s happy to be the face in front of the camera!

If you’re having a voiceover, you’ll also want to make sure that you write a script, including those key keywords you identified at the beginning of your ideation.

How to optimise your videos for SEO

Once your videos have gone live across your social channels, there are a few other tactics you can try to give them the best chance of ranking organically; and these can vary from channel to channel. In this report, we’ll show you specifically how to rank on both YouTube and TikTok.

YouTube (in-channel, and on Google SERPs)

Some of the things you can do here include:

Optimising your title tags: Include one or two main keywords, making full use of the 60 characters available to you.
Writing engaging descriptions: Weave those keywords in as you explain what the video is about. Add in CTAs through to key landing pages/blogs and encourage subscriptions to your social channels. You have 5,000 characters to work with here, so you might as well make the most of it!
Including relevant hashtags: Look for 8-10 that are the most relevant and have the most searches behind them.
Adding closed captions: Google can’t understand what’s being said within the video, but it can read the captions – and if your video is relevant to what it’s talking about, then keywords will naturally be included. It’s also good for accessibility purposes – for instance, if someone’s hard of hearing or someone wants to watch the video without the sound on.
Uploading a transcript: Likewise with the above. Upload this as a file within the description rather than pasting it in directly.
Choosing a high-quality thumbnail image.
For longer videos (four minutes or more: add in timestamps so viewers can click through to the exact part of the video they want to watch.

Here’s an example of a YouTube description we wrote for one of our clients on ‘Saxony vs twist carpets’, where the keywords we were targeting were the following:

TikTok

While there are many similarities to optimising your TikTok videos, there are some differences too:

Saying your keywords in the video: TikTok can understand what’s being said, so make sure you physically say your main keyword.
Adding keywords to your on-screen text.
Including keywords in the video description: But be aware that these are going to be much smaller than YouTube’s – a couple of sentences at most.
Including relevant, trending hashtags.

It’s important to note that this isn’t the only way to get your content ranking, as all of this is underpinned by engagement – think likes, comments, and shares. So, you’ll need to work closely with your social team, who can create engaging content alongside these SEO videos, and provide insights into what followers do and don’t like to give your content the best possible chance of ranking.

How to tie it back to overall on-site content

A cohesive content strategy needs to be coordinated across all channels, so it’s important you’re tying back your videos to what’s on-site too. This largely starts at the beginning of the process – for instance, when you’re doing your keyword research, you’re including on-site content as well, so each week, you’re going out with an idea that’s going to be published on your blog, as well as social channels, e.g.:

Week one: How to clean a rug
Week two: Rug trends and design inspiration for your living room
Week three: A beginner’s guide to rug tufting
Week four: How are rugs made?

It might also be that you have existing guides on your website that you want to optimise, and alongside weaving in keywords and internal links and adding in additional sections; you’ve identified search volumes for videos, and know that embedding a video into the blog will help to drive engagement metrics. So again, that’s a way to create a cohesive content strategy.

Relevant videos can increase engagement metrics on-site, with research showing that people spend up to two minutes longer on a site that has a video; and landing pages with videos embedded on them seeing an increase in conversions anywhere from 80-300%!

So, once videos have been published, it’s important to do a sense-check of what’s on-site and see if videos can be embedded. However, only do this if the topic is exactly the same; otherwise, it can seem irrelevant, and users can bounce off.

If you’re embedding a video onto a page, and aren’t going to host it on your site, then we’d recommend embedding it via Vimeo rather than YouTube. This is because Vimeo doesn’t have ads, so there’s less chance of users clicking off the page.

How to report back on video success

Finally, you’ll want to see how your videos are actually performing in the first place, and there are a few metrics you can measure.

YouTube

If you want to see how well your YouTube SEO videos are ranking within Google, then you’ll want to use Ahrefs. Simply copy and paste your video’s URL at the top, click on ‘keywords’, and you’ll be able to see all keywords the video is ranking for.

For example, for our ‘Twist vs saxony carpet’ video, we can see that we have multiple inclusions not just in Google’s video preview, but as individual listings too.

YouTube also has its own Analytics section, where you can see lots of different metrics, including where traffic has come from. Navigate to ‘channel analytics’ and ‘content’, and you’ll be able to see where users have found your videos. This includes:

External: Anywhere off YouTube, but typically via your website or a Google search – so this is where we can see traffic from appearance in video packs.
YouTube search: This is within YouTube itself, and is influenced by your keyword rankings – so the higher you rank organically within YouTube for relevant keywords, the more likely you’re going to drive traffic this way.
Direct: This is where someone clicks straight through to your video – for example, they might have bookmarked it.
Channel pages: This is where someone has navigated through to your video from your channel page.

If you want to look at traffic performance for individual videos, then when you’re on analytics, click ‘overview’ and ‘see more’, and it’ll open up into a separate tab. Then, once you’ve navigated to ‘content’, you can enter the time period you want to track, and you’ll see a list of videos below. Simply click through to one, select ‘traffic source’, and you’ll be able to see where the traffic is coming from.

While traffic is the most useful in terms of identifying whether your keyword rankings are successfully driving people to your videos, engagement is really important too, as you want people watching your video and taking an action. Other metrics you can track within YouTube analytics include:

Geography: The countries viewers live in.
Cities: The cities viewers live in.
Viewer age.
Viewer gender.
Subscription status (i.e. have they subscribed to your channel or not).
Content viewed (i.e. videos or shorts).
Playlists they’ve watched.
Device type.

Finding out your keyword rankings within YouTube is a little trickier, but it can be done. We use our traffic share model to scrape YouTube, which means we can see videos that rank in positions 1-3 for identified keywords. Chat to us if you’d like to find out more about how we can help you to measure your YouTube success.

TikTok

On TikTok analytics, you can look at several metrics, including:

Video views
Profile views
Likes, comments and shares

And you can filter this to the specific time period you want to look at. You can also find out more about your followers, including gender, age, and city demographics; and you can get more specific information for videos you’ve published over the last seven days.

Unfortunately, as it stands, you can’t see where you rank for keywords in TikTok, but if you’re seeing an increase in engagement in specific videos, you can get a good indication of what’s working. Similarly, you can’t see how many people have discovered your TikTok video directly through a Google search – however, it may be something that happens in the future, as more businesses and influencers spend more time dedicated to TikTok.

Video engagement on-site

You can also measure the engagement of videos that sit on your site to see how useful users find them. GA4 has its own ‘enhanced measurements’, where you can track the following for embedded YouTube videos:

Video_start: How many visitors start watching a video on your site.
Video_progress: How many visitors reach a specific threshold of your video (e.g. 10%, 25%).
Video_complete: How many users watch the entire video.

To look at these metrics on specific pages, simply go to ‘acquisition’ and ‘traffic acquisition’, then set your session default channel group to organic, opt for ‘landing page + query string’, and use your chosen date range.

However, if you want to embed Vimeo videos to the site, you’ll want to go through Tag Manager to set tracking up. Analytics Mania have a really comprehensive guide on how to track Vimeo performance through Google Tag Manager and GA4 that’s worth checking out.

Click through to site

Finally, you can measure how many people click through from your video to your site through GA4 – although it should be noted that this is very much a secondary aspect of videos. Whilst you might include CTAs within your descriptions (particularly for YouTube), video content is more about engaging with your content within social channels.

To do this, within your traffic acquisition report, set your session default channel group to ‘exactly matches’ and ‘organic video’ to show clicks to your site via non-ad links from video sites, including TikTok and YouTube.

Final thoughts

Ultimately, if you want to build brand awareness and keyword rankings, and bring more organic sessions and conversions to site, then you need to start incorporating video into your content strategies.

We know the SERPs will only continue to evolve, and users will likely still change the way they search, so it’s important we keep on top of the latest developments, to ensure your content strategies are up-to-date, and reflect the search landscape.

Hopefully after reading this, you have more of an understanding of why you need to incorporate video into your strategy, how to find initial ideas and get them ranking, and how to tie them back to your on-site content offering. If you’d like to chat more and see how our video SEO team can help you, get in touch with us today!

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