Blogs and content are so popular these days that our Content Director reinforced the industry sentiment (with good reason) that “content is king” in Reunion Marketing’s last blog. Content is huge these days. For those who think it’s merely a fad, earning traffic with fresh, quality content helps your brand build long-term relevance in the online sphere in a way that rivals paid advertisements. People love authentic information, and we can’t argue with them.
Speaking of content, car dealers have grown evermore fond of the inventory video blog as another way to show off current inventory and build fresh pages on their site as they get new cars in stock, but is it really helping them earn more traffic?
The Dark Side of the Video Blog
Adding a video blog to your website adds a TON of new pages…usually hundreds because there are pages for each category (new, CPO, & used inventory), tag (things like the vehicle make or year), and author (whoever publishes the videos), and often these pages aren’t set up according to best practices. Even though we stand by content being important, it could harm your site if done wrong!
“How do we know what’s right?” you might ask. MOZ releases a list of search ranking factors each year, and complying with Google’s recommendation for each of these can be a bit tricky with all those new video blog pages. Here are a few things to check for:
- Does each video, tag, and category page have unique meta titles and descriptions? These are hugely important to ranking organically.
- Do many tags and categories pages create duplicate content because they’re applied to all the same blogs?
- Are videos for sold vehicles still being listed, and if so, what’s your strategy with these videos? Many times, old inventory videos create 404 errors, meaning the video and page are still linked to but can’t be found.
- If you have multiple authors, do each have a short bio and photo added? Chances are, shoppers won’t end up on author pages but if they do, it helps having a complete profile instead of a sad, empty text field where they could have written a bio.
- Is there a description of the video added to each page? Having wording on each page helps the user experience and also tells Google what that page and video is about.
With all that being said, there’s no quick answer to optimizing your video blog. What makes the biggest difference is diligently putting time into adding unique meta, fixing 404 errors, ensuring correct information, and more, but you’re short on time, right? We understand, so here are a few things that can help you or your marketing agency speed things up:
- Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools) gives you insight into internal errors on your site. How many 404 errors does your video blog have, and which pages are they coming from? Can Google crawl your site or is it being blocked?
- Google Analytics has an impressive amount of data available at your fingertips, so take a few minutes and dive in! Are people bouncing from your video blogs, and if so, where do you want them to go? Are they converting to shoppers by submitting leads and browsing inventory? Are shoppers even watching the videos?
- Find a good website crawling software to dig into each page on your site and figure out exactly where errors are coming from. Fix the root of the issue instead of just using bandages!
At the end of the day, optimizing your video blog can give your site an extra boost in SEO and relevance, helping your business show up for more local, organic traffic searches that will ultimately drive sales to your showroom. It will take some dedication and maybe even some blood, sweat, and tears, but once your blog is up to SEO par, you’ll see the rewards in the numbers! As we like to say at Reunion Marketing: Data Beats Intuition.