9 October 2019 686 words, 3 min. read

SEO and inbound marketing: a look back at our first video shooting

By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab PhD in marketing, director of IntoTheMinds
Thirteen years after the creation of this blog, two years after the launch of our market research method, last weekend, we concretised a project that we had been preparing for many months. Thanks to our latest recruit, Rebecca, we filmed […]

Thirteen years after the creation of this blog, two years after the launch of our market research method, last weekend, we concretised a project that we had been preparing for many months. Thanks to our latest recruit, Rebecca, we filmed our first videos and this experience was enriching. I want to share this experience with you in this article, by first placing the project in a broader SEO context.

SEO and inbound marketing, the purpose of this blog

I started this blog 13 years ago as a means of expression, and it has gradually turned into a great asset for our SEO. I don’t count the backlinks, interview requests and customers who have arrived via this channel anymore. However, the work it represents is enormous, and it takes a lot of discipline to make this type of project a success over time. Our hundreds of thousands of readers are an important motivating factor. While my writing style has evolved over the years and my SEO skills have improved, I need to think about tomorrow’s formats that will allow my company to continue to be visible in the jungle of search engine results.

Videos and podcasts, two formats essential for inbound marketing

setting the scene for our first video shootingSeveral years ago, I asked myself the question about the essential evolution of this blog and had announced several times my intention to launch myself into the world of video. Since good resolutions are made to be forgotten (and my technical skills are limited), the project has never gone forward. However, complementary formats to the blog are more important than ever for good SEO. Have you noticed, for example, that Google displays video results sometimes in a better place than “normal” pages? If inbound marketing tells you something, it would be better to be prepared to become a blogger, vlogger and probably also a podcaster to stand out in search results. I can’t imagine Google continuing to index only web pages without taking into account the rising trend of video consumption.

For our company and the type of services we sell (market research, customer satisfaction studies, marketing analyses), I am convinced that, in the future, visibility on search engines will come from a combination of the different communication channels. Today SEO ranking is based on both the content, and the quality of the metadata entered; Google, of course, uses semantic analysis to “understand” your content but this semantic analysis is limited to text, and in the case of video it is limited to the description you make of it. Tomorrow we can bet that for YouTube content, Speech-to-text algorithms will transform videos into text, allowing Google (which already provides this speech-to-text service in more than 100 languages) to understand video content and who produces it even better.

Lessons learned from our first shooting.

With this conviction, we made our first shooting last weekend under the guidance of our latest recruit, Rebecca. The experience was gratifying, beyond all my expectations. First of all, I never imagined that it would take so much equipment to shoot a video: 2 cameras, multiple tripods, lighting, not far from 40 kilos in total. Then, the exercise is not easy. I was convinced that I would have no problem debiting my text in front of the camera. But being out there alone in front of that eye that fixes you is very difficult. Even when you master your subject, multiple takes are necessary to obtain a good result.

In the end, it took almost 6 hours to shoot, which will ultimately result in about 5 minutes of video. I was exhausted.

In terms of the budget, it is clear that the first videos will be costly, but with experience, the next ones should be quicker to shoot too. My respect for YouTubers who release one or more videos a week is even greater. Another practical teaching, the installation of the equipment is tedious, and it is better to make two days of shooting in a row to avoid wasting hours in the assembly and dismounting process.

If you also have been through this, please contact me as I am interested to learn about your experience.

 

 



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