SERP Features Course: Triggering and Optimising Video Boxes
Script from the lesson The SERP Features Course
Jason Barnard speaking: Video Boxes. What’s the situation? Approximately 25% of Brand SERPs contain Video Boxes and that number is rising. They bring a lot to your SERP. They look great and they take up two places, which means that they often kill a blue link. They push one blue link right off the bottom of the page. Here’s a great example from Semrush.
Jason Barnard speaking: This is the top part of their SERP. They’ve got the homepage, the Rich Sitelinks and then these great-looking videos. Now they make 500 top quality videos a year.
Jason Barnard speaking: Luckily, you don’t need to be that ambitious either in quantity or in quality. Here’s a less ambitious example from one of my French clients.
Jason Barnard speaking: They only have five videos and they look quite amateur and most of them are quite old. And yet they get the Video Boxes. Why? Because Google perceives Video Boxes to be relevant and useful to their audience. Here’s a quick comparison, Semrush, regular output of dozens of high quality videos a month that get engagement, tens of thousands of views, thousands of likes, loads of comments and all of this on their YouTube channel, which has tens of thousands of subscribers.
Jason Barnard speaking: My French client on the other hand has five videos that they filmed over a period of several years. They have less videos. They add them irregularly. The quality is less professional. The thumbnails are not so good and they get little engagement. They
have few views, few likes, few comments, and only a few dozen subscribers, and yet they get the Video Boxes.
Jason Barnard speaking: Several things to notice here, the video quality in itself doesn’t penalize them. The number of videos hasn’t penalized them. The fact that their videos are not popular hasn’t either. So, why did Google trigger the Video Boxes? Because it perceives their five videos as being incredibly relevant and helpful to people searching for the brand.
Jason Barnard speaking: The content on the videos are a 100% on topic, the How To videos that are incredibly helpful for the audience, and the engagement that they do get is from a very relevant audience. They are a small company and yet they own half their Brand SERP with their homepage, their Rich Sitelinks and their Video Box is just like Semrush. Brilliant!
Jason Barnard speaking: What Osyla and Semrush have in common is a coherent video content strategy.
Jason Barnard speaking: Each is according to their means, but both are demonstratively truly helpful and valuable to a very relevant audience. And importantly, neither talks only about themselves. They’re providing useful and helpful content to their target audience and using that to subtly carry their brand message and their brand name.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, don’t be pushy sales wise. Make sure you brand your videos so that you can make the most of every view. But if you overdo your sales pitch, either visually on screen or in the audio, you’ll put people off, you’ll lose engagement and you’ll probably lose the opportunity to convert that person into a client.
Jason Barnard speaking: This comparison shows really nicely that any business can get Video Boxes. Businesses with smaller budgets for video can trigger Video Boxes if they approach their video strategy wisely. Be relevant, be super helpful to your core audience and get that engagement from them.
Jason Barnard speaking: Oh, and make sure your videos grab and keep their attention, not necessarily by recording an HD video in the studio and adding fancy effects, but by making videos that are truly useful to that core audience. As a lovely side effect, that pushes sales.
Jason Barnard speaking: I know that these particular videos have paid for themselves hundreds of times over. And a quick note on thumbnails, Osyla hasn’t made much effort for their thumbnails. On YouTube, thumbnails are vital for driving views, so they missed a trick to expand their audience there. But in the context of a Brand SERP, they’ve missed an opportunity to make their SERP look a little bit more attractive and also missed an opportunity to control their brand image.
Jason Barnard speaking: Videos in your content strategy. Making a series of videos like this brings multiple advantages.
Jason Barnard speaking: Firstly, of course, the Video Boxes you trigger on your Brand SERP. They look great. They often kill a blue link, but also you can use them to push your brand name and brand message out to multiple platforms and reach new highly targeted audiences. Use your not self-serving video strategy to build a relevant and faithful audience around your brand and your product.
Jason Barnard speaking: You’ll get honest engagement and that will trigger the Video Boxes, but you’ll also get new clients. Now, what to do? As I go through the what to do part of this episode, you’ll see that most of it is off your own site, and that might seem like a bad thing, but in truth, it isn’t. Offsite is a big part of a successful digital marketing strategy. Pushing your relevant content out to people who don’t yet know you is vital.
Jason Barnard speaking: You’re filling the top of the acquisition funnel with people who would otherwise probably not find you and search alone will no longer do this for you. Google has gone from sending the majority of searches through to other sites to less than 50%. Google is becoming less of an open source of access to third-party information and more of a walled garden by giving answers right there on its SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: And that trend is likely to continue, so sooner or later you’ll be seeing less visits from Google to your site. You’ll need to go out there and start looking for new clients. Now is a good time to start building your audience and getting brand awareness on other platforms. And video is a great vehicle for doing that.
Jason Barnard speaking: And the great thing with the type of video strategy I’m describing here is that when these people first encounter your brand, it will be in a context where you’re helping them. That’s a great way to start a relationship. And it brings a lot of good feeling when it comes to the decision to convert. So what do we need to do? Make videos for your audience, topics that bring them value in a format that’s suitable for them on platforms they use.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, the choice of topic. Choose subjects that are a good match between your products and services and the needs of your users. Videos about your products are salesy and won’t get much traction or engagement. Save those for the bottom of funnel when you’re clinching the deal. In this case, share information that’s more suitable to top or middle of funnel when the user is looking for a more general information around a topic or when they’re moving towards finding a solution to the problem that they have. Obviously you have expertise about your products, but more importantly, in this context, you have expertise in related areas around your products. Share that expertise with your audience.
Jason Barnard speaking: Be helpful and bring value. Look at this from their point of view, put yourself in their shoes, find topics they need help with. Providing video that brings real value to your audience will build your audience, drive engagement, trigger the Video Boxes, and maybe even pull people into the acquisition funnel and end in a sale.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, what formats make great video content? Here are some ideas that have worked for me and all of them have brought ranking opportunities for other search terms and gain visibility, traffic and built top and mid funnel audiences. Firstly, How-To Videos about topics related to your product. These are valuable for your existing clients and they’re helpful for your prospects.
Jason Barnard speaking: That makes them perfect candidates for a Brand SERP since they cover multiple types of people who are googling your brand name. Plus, this type of video will rank in a wider context than just your Brand SERP. They’ll rank when somebody searches for a how-to question and that gives you brand visibility on all sorts of different SERPs if you optimize them well.
Jason Barnard speaking: Video interviews are another great idea. Interviews of your C-level employees are an easy option, but are your audience truly interested? Is it helpful to them to know your CEO better? Probably not. Better still would be a recognised industry, expert or influencer. A famous face always looks good on your Brand SERP and that will help the authority and trust aspects of your E-A-T.
Jason Barnard speaking: You’re associating yourself with experts on authoritative figures, which makes you slightly more authoritative and slightly more expert. Or perhaps a client with a helpful story to tell about how your products help them with a specific problem. That’s really good because a client is someone your prospects can relate to and they could potentially see a solution to their problem and that might push them through to convert.
Jason Barnard speaking: Webinars. Invite one or more experts to talk about a topic that’s relevant and helpful to your audience and make sure that the content of the webinar brings them value. That’s a win on every front. The promotion you do before will widen your reach, the webinar itself will have an engaged audience.
Jason Barnard speaking: And in that respect, the live aspect is actually quite powerful in people’s minds. And then the video remains available after the event. And that gives you the opportunity to continue promoting it and widen your audience even further, generate lots of engagement, and push it up onto your Brand SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: Make sure not to make it too salesy. I see this all too often, pushing your product down people’s throats too early in the acquisition process is a big turnoff. The video is branded, hosted on your channel and your brand name will pop into the conversation at some point, that’s enough. Your aim is to make the webinar truly valuable to them and get your name into their minds. You aren’t going to sell anything to them right off the back of this webinar alone, so don’t overdo the sales aspect.
Jason Barnard speaking: Out and about reporting. Here’s an example with a GoPro. The interview is about DIY video marketing. Anders Hjorth on the right has been using his iPhone to film a series of videos that he has molded into a strategy using multiple formats on multiple platforms, and he’s had great success with it. The camera work and the editing of his videos are not very professional, but the message he is communicating doesn’t need professional quality video, and his audience is comfortable with the DIY aspect. And my interview of him using GoPro is also adapted to my audience. On the video podcast, people are interested in our conversation and the video serves more to create context and an atmosphere than anything else.
Jason Barnard speaking: Conference talks. I do lots of conferences and the organizer sometimes film them. Those recordings keep popping up in the Video Boxes too. Talks and public appearances are great opportunities to build brand, build audience on and offline, and a great way to feed and fill your Video Boxes.
Jason Barnard speaking: Lastly, product help videos. “How to” and “help” videos about your own products and services don’t widen your audience or help fill the funnel from the top, but they’re great for existing clients and they are wonderful for your Brand SERPs because they’re truly helpful to your existing audience, so Google likes to put this type of video in front of them when they search your brand name. They’ll also rank well in results when people search Google for information about your products or services. There’s little top of the funnel audience building here, but you’ll boost bottom funnel audience and improve your post-sale service.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, what resolution to choose? As far as it’s reasonable, try to record your videos in full HD and record uncompressed sound. Starting from that high quality, you can publish them at lower resolution and lower sound quality, but the opposite isn’t true. If your initial recording is low quality, you can never publish at a higher quality. That’s sad. As you can see in these cases, image quality isn’t that good and it hasn’t killed the value the video brings to the audience.
Jason Barnard speaking: The content of the videos is what makes all the difference. Your ideas need to engage, get people involved and bring value. The content needs to be interesting to your audience. And that’s the key, not a big budget with a professional studio, actor and script writer.
Jason Barnard speaking: Sound quality. Pay particular attention to the audio quality. Make sure the sound is as clear as possible with very little background noise. People won’t watch a video all the way through if the sound quality isn’t very good. Or if there are lots of distracting noises in the background.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, you need to choose the right platforms. You need platforms that are appropriate to your audience. Choose platforms where they hang out. Video Boxes contain a lot of videos from YouTube and that’s the obvious candidate, but don’t ignore Facebook, Twitter, and even your own site. All of those can get a place on the SERP if Google perceives them as being highly relevant. And that means either optimizing really well if they’re on your site or getting genuine engagement from a relevant audience on the social channels.
Jason Barnard speaking: And a quick word on repurposing. I’ve had a lot of success filling the Video Boxes with short extracts and teasers I’ve pushed out onto Twitter and YouTube. That’s definitely an idea worth pursuing. Pull quotes from your interviews and webinars and make stand-alone clips out of them.
Jason Barnard speaking: Or record teasers to announce a conference. There are lots of possibilities and for Video Boxes on Brand SERPs, Google likes to use these just as much as the full-length videos. Now, what do you need to do on each platform? We’ll start with YouTube. They’re the really big player. YouTube is the one that fills up most of these Video Boxes.
Jason Barnard speaking: Remember that the key to getting the Video Boxes is engagement. So you need to optimize to drive views, comments, shares, and so on. That obviously has multiple benefits. You’ll better engage with your existing audience, you’ll widen your audience, and you’ll get the Video Boxes too.
Jason Barnard speaking: First, you need a YouTube channel. Use your brand name as the channel name. Before you start building your channel, think about the vocabulary. The vocabulary you will use across everything you post to this channel needs to be very pertinent to your brand and your business and your users. Think about the words your audience uses and words that are truly relevant to your industry and product.
Jason Barnard speaking: Write them all down in a document because you’ll be using them in all the steps that are just coming up now. When you look at them as a group, it should be very, very clear immediately what this channel is about. Let’s call it your context cloud. Now, onto optimizing the channel. Fill in all the fields YouTube offers. The description in particular is important. It should focus on the value this channel will bring to your audience.
Jason Barnard speaking: Obviously you want to talk a little bit about your brand, but don’t overdo it. This description aims to attract curious viewers on YouTube.
Jason Barnard speaking: Heavy selling is counterproductive. They’ll get your commercial message little by little when they watch your videos. Then, optimize each and every video. Use a file name that describes the content. If the video is on topic, that should naturally include vocabulary from your context cloud.
Jason Barnard speaking: Next, you need a relevant title. If you’ve got your context cloud less to hand, you’ll be able to write an attractive, descriptive, well-focused title very quickly. It needs to be pertinent to your audience and pertinent to Google, and it needs to look great when it appears on your Brand SERP. Same thing for the description. You need to write a great description that pulls people in and makes them want to watch the video. Once again, you need to use the vocabulary that you set up at the start.
Jason Barnard speaking: YouTube uses the description and its algorithm, so that’s really important. And then you want to add lots and lots of relevant tags. On YouTube, tagging is incredibly important and used in the algorithm. You also want to be sure to choose the correct category for every single video. It might be the same for all of the videos, but it might also be different, so be very careful about that.
Jason Barnard speaking: Spend the time to make an attractive custom thumbnail. This is vital to YouTube optimisation since a great thumbnail attracts the eye, gets the click and therefore views and engagement. But more than that, like the title, the thumbnail is going to be very visible on your Brand SERP, so make sure it’s flattering for you. Take the time to make a custom thumbnail for every video and make it look great. But YouTube isn’t the only platform out there. Other platforms can get a place in Video Boxes and pushing videos on multiple platforms will help you trigger the Video Boxes, even videos on your own sites will work here.
Jason Barnard speaking: Here’s an example with Twitter. There’s two YouTube videos on one Twitter video. Twitter videos are shorter, more to the point, but they do come up a lot. So, repurpose your content and push it out onto Twitter. Make this part of your strategy to trigger Twitter Boxes. If you watch the Twitter Boxes episode, you’ll know that Twitter has a feed directly into Google.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, Twitter is a great alternative platform to YouTube for your video content. Here’s an example of somebody who’s got all their videos coming from Twitter. Anton doesn’t have a YouTube channel, but he’s very active on Twitter and that was enough for him to trigger the Video Boxes. Facebook comes up, but a lot less often. Perhaps because Facebook simply has too much content and Google can’t crawl it all, or perhaps because Facebook don’t make much effort to optimize their pages for Google.
Jason Barnard speaking: Either way, you can get a place with a video on Facebook, but it’s less common than YouTube or Twitter. Any platform that carries video can potentially rank in the Video Boxes, perhaps Instagram or Vimeo, but also importantly, your own site.
Jason Barnard speaking: Semrush have got a video from their own site ranking in the Video Boxes and that’s even more powerful than social because they have direct control of the page. This is a great example. Once again, it’s Semrush. They’ve done some good SEO on their pages and two videos from their website are ranking in the Video Boxes right underneath the homepage. That’s a phenomenal amount of control of half the SERP. And you’ll notice that I said good. The SEO on your site doesn’t need to be spectacularly good to get a place in the Video Boxes, so add YouTube videos to your website and spend some time and effort optimizing the pages. Watch the SEO lesson in the Fundamentals course for more on how to do that. I also think we tend to imagine that we need to make all the video content ourselves, and that isn’t necessarily true.
Jason Barnard speaking: It depends on your product. It depends on your brand. But here’s a great example: Gretsch, they’ve got partners and distributors making lots of videos for themselves, and they’re actually ranking on Gretsch’s Brand SERP. And here’s some reviewers,
once again, Gretsch Guitars send the vlogger your product, they do a review of it and that gives a third party independent opinion right on your Brand SERP, which is really powerful.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, the timeframe. Your video strategy won’t trigger Video Boxes overnight. You need to stick at it. Google needs to understand that the videos you’ve produced really are relevant to your audience if it’s to give you Video Boxes. That takes a little time.
Jason Barnard speaking: So the key here is perseverance. You need to promote and push the videos on platforms you’ve chosen. Push multiple videos out there, widen your audience, get engagement, do this week in week out and you’ll get the Video Boxes. If you already have great video out there and you push that successfully, triggering Video Boxes could take only a couple of months.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you don’t have suitable videos out there already, you’re looking at six months or more. Making multiple videos might take a couple of months already, then getting the traction and engagement on the different channels takes time and effort. You need to persevere with the promotion and be patient.
Jason Barnard speaking: Either way, getting the necessary engagement is like a flywheel. It starts off slowly. You seem to go backwards. Then it starts to go forwards and it picks up a bit of speed and once it gets rolling, it just keeps going and going and going. Then, you trigger the Video Boxes and they look great to your audience.
Jason Barnard speaking: You’ve killed a blue link and they are on your Brand SERP to stay. Video Boxes are pretty stable. Once you trigger them, they tend to stick around. And lastly for a bit of encouragement, remember the example from earlier. Video Boxes are not just for brands with big budgets.
Jason Barnard speaking: As a small brand with a less ambitious video content strategy, you can trigger Video Boxes on your Brand SERP if you make truly interesting and helpful content that gets engagement from your audience.
Jason Barnard speaking: Thank you.
