Video’s potential to drive commerce is overwhelming. Roughly 90 percent of all online consumers watch video, and they are 1.8 times more likely than non-video viewers to make a purchase.

According to Conductor and Invodo’s “The Marketer’s Guide to Video SEO” report, brands vary widely in how they approach video marketing. Online video SEO is becoming critical to finding an audience in an age where video content is being produced at a prolific rate. Conductor and Invodo’s survey of the largest online merchants found that the majority of those brands are underperforming in key areas such as video indexing.

Thanks to a select group of high-performing brands, the average number of indexed videos among the retailers surveyed is more than 36,600. But only 16 brands included in the study feature websites with more than 10,000 videos.

According to Charity Stebbins, senior content strategist at Conductor, the tepid embrace of video is about to change.

“Video production is low among some retailers because they haven’t caught on to the fact that it is such a game-changer,” Stebbins said. “Because of that lag, they often don’t have internal video equipment or video content marketers on staff. In the next year, I predict a big influx of video marketing professionals.”

Stebbins noted that because online search is such a critical part of finding an audience for video content—”YouTube is the second-biggest search engine in the world,” she pointed out—optimizing for search has a profound impact on how well content reaches viewers and drives conversions for retail brands.

But because of either a lack of familiarity or a lack of technology, many video marketing campaigns feature SEO well behind current market demands.

Meanwhile, the role of video in overall content marketing is going to increase sharply in the coming years. Stebbins pointed to recent research that projects almost 80 percent of all commerce traffic to be driven by video in 2018. Traditional search and its optimizations may be text-based, but they are far from comprehensive.

Some people prefer video content, and others need it; with a world illiteracy rate around 16 percent, along with people who have visual or reading impairments, video is an opportunity to reach a massive audience that is underserved by current content marketing strategies.

Brands that need to ramp up their video SEO efforts have a number of options at their disposal. Stebbins recommends looking at this marketing at both the macro and micro level, seeing video as a long-term investment and optimizing video content to be visible on both search engines and on video channels themselves, like YouTube. Video performance also needs to be analyzed to evaluate where consumers are dropping out of the video and why—and using metadata to interpret user intent.

“The surge of video marketing’s importance is new,” Stebbins said. “Video has a distinct algorithm in search, so marketers should be educating themselves on that.

“The best thing you can do is find valuable resources and continue to educate yourself.”

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