Are you a filmmaker or a video company seeking to improve your rank on the search results? There are many strategies you can use to rank better on the SERP. However, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the only one that offers long-term results. You can use PPC advertising when launching a film. But to ensure users continue flooding onto your site, you must use a proper SEO strategy.
Over 60% of online experiences begin from a search engine. Considering there are 4.88 billion users, you cannot ignore optimising your content for search engines. So, what can you do to optimise your website for search? What steps can your video company rank better on the search results? Below is an ultimate and complete guide of SEO for video companies and filmmakers.
The first step in any search engine optimisation initiative for filmmakers and video companies is getting their technical SEO right. Though this may sound technical, you can use readily available tools like WP rocket or SMUSH to optimise a bunch of technical stuff on your website.
Website architecture and Navigation
Ensure you have an excellent sitemap file. The file shows the search engine how to navigate your website and find all your content easily. If the search engine crawlers can find your content fast, indexing is easy. Your website should have an appropriate architecture. Since it will involve various types of content, ensure at any time, the crawl dept of each webpage is lower than 4. Interlinking your web pages can help with this. Ensure that a user can reach any page with less than 3 clicks from your homepage.
Images
Ensure your website renders images using modern formats like JPEG XR and WebP. These new formats can be compressed better than PNG and JPG image formats. It will reduce your website’s loading time, a factor that the search engines use to rank your website. Ensure your website doesn’t include duplicate content. Google can penalise you for duplicate pages and images.
Website loading time
Loading speed is a vital factor of SEO. Search engines prefer websites that load faster. For both PC and Mobile, the website should load in less than 3 seconds. Online visitors are likely to abandon your website if it takes over 5 seconds to lead. You can use PageSpeed to evaluate the performance speed of the website. Do not use JavaScript or CSS to resize the images or videos. Properly size the graphic contents before uploading them to the server.
Activate lazy loading if your pages have a lot of images. It allows the images below the screen to get loaded whenever a user scrolls down. Enable Gzip compression to allow network file transfers to be quicker, reducing the load time and bandwidth consumption. The other factor that increases the loading time of a website is the number of external files; stylesheets, HTML, images, videos, and JavaScript Files. Ensure you aggregate, inline, and magnify these files before loading them onto the server.
Mobile Friendliness
The other critical SEO strategy is ensuring that your website is mobile responsive. Google uses a mobile-first approach when ranking web pages. Therefore, you might miss out if your web pages are not optimised to be responsive to various screens like smartphones, tablets, and iPads. It is estimated that about 75% of people will access the internet using mobile devices by 2025. That is a lot of the audiences to leave out, meaning you will miss 75% conversions, CTRs, web traffic, and revenues if you do not make your website mobile responsive.
User Interactions
The other key SEO strategy that video companies and filmmakers should implement is user interactions. The users should interact with your content, be it video, text, or images. Ensure that users can comment, criticise, or even vote on the content.
User interactions can contribute greatly to the Key Performance Indicators of your website like direct traffic, bounce rate, repeat visitors, dwell time metrics, and organic click-through rates for the target keywords. All these KPIs contribute to the Quality score that the search engine assigns to your content. They will impact your performance on the SERP.
Having dynamic, comprehensive, relevant, and informative content
Properly research the keywords before putting up the content. They will help you evaluate the usefulness of your upcoming content. Keyword research helps you prioritise content, track your publishing process, and obtain your web pages’ top-down view.
Does the website have quality content? Though this might sound a cliché, one of the essential components of a successful SaaS SEO strategy is the quality of the content, even for filmmakers and video companies. Ensure that your video company blog uses evergreen content of high quality. Otherwise, your ROI from your content will always be low.
After performing keyword research and creating content based on priority, cost per click, and monthly search volume, post the content on your website. Ensure you regularly update and optimise it for search engines. Content is called evergreen if it can be sustained.
Ensure you post comprehensive and informative content. The content must also be relevant. Content on the latest developments is likely to rank better than old news. Below every video or image, add a meta tag that shows what the content is all about.
Create SEO Backlinks and Landing Pages
In the keyword research, there are landing page keywords and content keywords. Landing page keywords are useful in creating a captivating landing page. Ensure that your video company website has an appealing landing page. The landing page should have graphics related to the video, and some text based on the keyword. The home page landing page should cover the company and what it does.
Every video should have a landing page since the videos are unique. However, the landing page should be responsive. A person using a smartphone should have the near same experience as the one using a laptop.
The content should also have backlinks to authoritative sites. Search engines rank content with quality backlinks higher on the SERP than otherwise dry content. However, ensure that the backlinks are alive and relevant to the content. Google might punish you if the backlinks and the content are not related.
Conclusion
Search Engine Optimisation is the best way to rank higher in the SERP. Ensure that your content is optimised to search for your efforts to bear fruits. Things like Backlinks, page load speeds, mobile responsiveness are vital ranking factors for any website, including video companies and filmmakers. However, technical SEO is more vital for the video and film industry. Use the guide above to ensure you rank higher on the search engine results page. Remember, the first 5 organic results on the first page of the SERP account for 67.60% of the total number of clicks. You must do anything possible to rank up there.
Mike Khorev is a lead SEO expert at Nine Peaks Media a B2B SaaS SEO agency that helps software, IT, technology, and startup companies rank on the first page of Google. Mike offers expert advice on optimizing your company website the right way through performance-based on and off site SEO, inbound marketing, conversion rate optimization, search engine marketing and many other online practices.
