We live in an era that is always awaiting the next big event which will completely transform the way we traditionally engaged with brands or products. Video, in its current, past, and possible future forms has always remained the top choice of engagement and will continue to do so with the rapid advancements we see in smartphone & 4G (and now 5G) adoption.
Audience size of online video streaming in India
Be it Short Videos, where India saw the consumption go up by 100% riding on the back of Global platforms like Instagram & YouTube Shorts as well as home-grown platforms like Zili, Moj, Josh, Roposo & more. RedSeer is projecting that the Indian Short Video apps market will have a $19 billion monetization opportunity by 2030, as against today, where they only amount to 1% of the overall digital money being spent.
Video Consumption Size in India
The most traditional form of video consumption which is across living rooms in India, also saw a fresh and exciting transformation with the adoption of Connected TVs (CTV). So much so, that in December 2021 alone, over 55 million people in India streamed YouTube on their TVs, a 2.7X growth in an astonishing six months. Google claims that this number will only increase exponentially with CTV penetration in India expected to double by 2025. How does this change things, you ask? Well, with attention spans higher on TV, 2X longer videos are consumed, thus providing an immersive experience for users, and thus helping brands connect more effectively with their audiences. Certain brands have claimed that 90% of engagement with their CTV campaigns saw a positive lift in their brand metrics.
So, why are we here? Well, with video becoming an incredibly important aspect of any user journey, Search continues to play an important role in the discovery, of the biggest Search Engines in the world – Google & YouTube. 14% of the overall traffic driven to the top Video consumption platforms in India is powered by Google’s Organic Search. In fact, if we remove traffic from users who directly open a preferred app for consumption, then 82% of video discovery is done via Google’s Organic Search.
This warrants video content creators and brands that invest in videos to evaluate how their videos perform on organic search. Or ask us to evaluate for you!
While video optimization is an extensive process on its own, getting your videos discovered by Google is where most of our effort needs to be focused. There are 4 key steps in this journey that we need to address –
Video needs to be the hero of the page it is being discovered on. If the video is just a byproduct of the content on the page, think again. Do ensure it is also coded on the page within the correct HTML tags so that Google knows what it has encountered. If you have this tick marked, then allowing Google to discover and seamlessly crawl this page is mandatory. How you ask? Let us audit your page and tell you if your video content is Discovery ready.
If you are using a 3rd party embedded player, like YouTube, do note that the video will get indexed on your platform as well as on YouTube, and hence both stand a chance to compete on Search for the same set of keywords
Getting a video to become indexation ready is about fulfilling Google’s basic needs about listing it on the SERP. A perfect Thumbnail is a must-have, either custom generated and provided to Google or letting them self-generate it. This is mandatory considering Google would not index a video that it cannot list on its SERP
All other critical information that Google needs about a video beyond Thumbnails, is to be marked up on the page using the right Structured Data. Supplementary information about the video helping Google understand its contents, the file where the video is stored, its location, and more is to be provided via Structured Data. Getting the attributes right at scale across all video assets on your website is imperative. Ask us how to do it at scale.
Google is keen to make a lot of decisions based on what it discovers naturally on your platform and video is no different. Opening your video files for Google to discover and learn from, not only helps them understand the content better but also enables enhanced features on your video like previews, key moments, etc.
Do note that Google will never directly expose your video file on search, but this is only done to ensure that the content being served is understood better.
One of the critical ask here is to have stable URLs for your video files. Self-renewing or expiring URLs served via a CDN or your own server are not recommended and could destabilize the overall Performance of your videos.
There are several features that Google recognizes as a value add to further enhance a user’s viewing experience. Adding these to your videos not only enables a healthier discovery from Google but also enriches the viewing experience. How may you ask? There are 3 features that you can enable for each of your videos, either via structured data or directly via provisions provided on platforms like YouTube –
2. Key Moments – Highlight moments you believe a user normally would be interested in so that they need not manually navigate through the entire content
3. Carousels – Allow users to explore more of your video content within the same SERP using a list-like search result of multiple video cards.
4. Live Badge – Mark your video as LIVE during an actual live stream so that users know that this is red hot now!
At the risk of this sounding like a broken record, video needs to be at the center of your content strategy and organic search as a key lever for promoting it.
If you are already someone who is investing in video or plan to do so, let us do a quick diagnosis of your readiness to run with it and scale.
Top 5 Takeaways to Help your Videos Grow Organically
Ask us how we achieved 80% growth in organic traffic and a 50% increase in app installs for a Popular short form Video platform.
If Video is one of the primary focus areas of your growth strategy, then let us help you realize their true SEO potential today via our proprietary Video Discovery Diagnosis for SEO. Drop us a message at this growth@performics.com
Credits: Gaurav Jhala & Almog Ramrajkar
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