How Animated Video Can Amplify your SEO hacks and brand?

Animated Videos will instantly boost the SEO of your content! Learn to benefit from the animation today

Digital marketing strategies use a wide range of efficient tools. However, recently, content marketing has proven itself to be the most efficient one. Various blogs, spreadsheets along with infographics, and, of course, social media accounts became a way for brands to communicate directly with prosperous customers and engage new ones.

However, there is one important factor that determines, whether the whole digital marketing campaign will skyrocket your business or it will turn into a huge waste of money and energy. As long as most customers won`t go further than the first search results page, SEO is the key to success in content creation and overall digital marketing.

While brands are trying to use as many content marketing tactics as possible, certain tools have already proven to be most efficient with almost any auditorium. Video content is among them.

Back in 2014, YouTube has predicted that someday video content will form 90% of the overall Internet traffic. Eventually, reality exceeded the most optimistic projections as in 2019 video traffic reached the mark of 80%. And the forced digitalization of 2020 has revolutionized our vision of video content and its role in marketing.

When there is a choice of whether to read a blog post or watch a video, most customers will instantly click the “play” button. However, even among various types of video content, there is one specific, most efficient niche. Animated videos are the most efficient ones when it comes to increasing your click-through rates and conversion.

The secret of successful Animated Videos

So how “childish” cartoons did became the most powerful SEO tools of modern digital marketing?

The raise of Animated Content started when marketers started to look for unconventional ways to engage potential customers and present the information. Thinking out of the box, they have noticed the potential of Animated Videos.

Animated Video Content has several undoubtful benefits:

• It is agile – the possibilities to create and adjust animated content are limitless;
• It represents the information most clearly;
• Animation provides video effects, unattainable for standard live video content.

Those were just the most obvious benefits of Animated Video Content. But as soon as marketing started adopting this original tool, it has revealed its true powers.

The linkage between SEO and Animated Videos

Now let`s take a closer look at how incorporating animated video content into your website or blog may instantly bring you to the first page of any search engine.

YouTube

Talking about Video Content, YouTube is naturally the first thing that comes to mind. The biggest video hosting today, it has turned into a separate universe where people address looking for information, reviews, tutorials, and, of course, entertainment.

Creating videos for YouTube and adding them to your website is the shortest way to appear on the first page of Google search results. And this is the main SEO-related advantage of animated videos. However, most of this effect is possible since Google owns YouTube and naturally incorporate its content into search results.

HTML5 and SEO data

However, Google ownership is not the only reason, why your YouTube videos are most likely to appear on the first page. And not a guarantee, by the way. We all know that every new trend instantly gets abused by various competitors. It creates additional competition and, of course, instantly decreases its efficiency.

However, creating your animated videos in HTML5 format instantly provides you a powerful SEO tool. You can include various SEO data into your code as H1 tags. Crawling through your video data the search engine recognizes this data and converts it into highly-efficient search results

Those are the main reasons why video content is most likely to bring your brand to the top lines of search results. But what is so special about Animated Videos that help them ultimately hack the SEO algorithms and skyrocket any digital marketing campaign?

Animation boosts engagement and naturally leads to higher conversion.

Statistically, once there are animated videos significantly increases the engagement. People tend to spend at least 2 minutes longer on a website that has animated video content. This phenomenon is very easy to explain through basic psychology.

There is a reason why children prefer cartoons to movies. With various video and sound effects, color patterns, and original characters they are more engaging simply because they are less real. People are instinctively more interested in things they cannot meet in routine life.

And while for children, the animation is a way to immerse into a fantasy world, grown-ups are simply attracted by original visual solutions that any animation has to offer.

Animation makes complicated things look more approachable.

Once you put any explanation into an animated format, it instantly looks much more user-friendly. Those who are interested in the technical aspects of how the manufacture or software works, can always address detailed whitepapers that you create for them.

But before digging deeper, they want to be engaged, see clearly that your solution will make their life easier and enjoyable. And what calls for joy and simplicity more than animated videos?

Animation becomes viral

It is raw statistics – 65% of users who watch an animated video will share them through messengers or social media. For example, the sharing rate of regular live videos is 45%.

As long as animated videos are the most engaging, entertaining, and approachable, people naturally percept them as more valuable and want to share them. This is how animation increases the chances of your content becoming viral.

Animated Video Boost SEO hacks.

Now that we have discussed why animated videos have become such a powerful SEO tool, let`s see how you can use their whole potential.

Except for adding SEO data to the HTML5 coding itself, there are lots of other ways to secure your success.

• Title. Everything starts with the title. To make your video content SEO-friendly, make sure that its very title attracts and promises to bring value. The search engine judges the context of your video from the title. In other words, it picks videos for the search results from the title of the videos.
• Description. While writing the description, remember that the first 150 characters will appear in the search results. The best way to use this volume is to briefly describe the problem and promise an easy solution in the video.
• Captions. Though quality sound production is important for an animated video, at least 80% of users are likely to watch your video content without sound. Especially if you emphasize social media platforms. Users often scroll through social media feeds during lunchtime at work or in public transportation. Therefore, captures are important when you want to deliver a certain message through your video. Also, it forces users to hit the pause and focus on your video. Search algorithms tend to see it as a sign of high engagement.
• Metadata. It is very important to use the potential of tags, descriptions, and categories of your video. However, there are certain most efficient ways to improve the metadata of your video.
• The file name – make sure that the very name of your file describes the video. For example instead of “Video3” call it “statistics” or “explanation”
• Video sitemap. Use Google Console to create a video sitemap for site-hosted videos. It will increase the views significantly.
• Schema markup. Describing the technical properties of the animation, you may benefit from provided search engine information. Details like vide length and upload date are crucial in this matter.

• CTA buttons. Offering people to perform a certain action – follow you on social media or share the video – will boost up the efficiency of your content. Not only do they help to make your video viral but create an atmosphere of actual communication between a brand and a customer.
• Data. Video hosting constantly tracks and analyzes users` activity around your content. The number of people who saw the video till the end, shared, or commented is the indicator for search engines whether the content is engaging and valuable for potential users. Having access to this data, you can adjust and maintain video production, test different kinds of animation and track their performance.

As you see, although animation is the most powerful type of video content, it follows the standard rules when you want to improve its SEO. However, animated video content has its specifics. Understanding and observing them will help you avoid the most common mistakes of animated video content strategy that can devalue the image of the brand.

Childish perception

Although the fact, that animated videos call for a user`s inner child is one of their main advantages, it may turn into a serious downfall. While creating the video, it is important to observe the style, overall mood, and communication format that will allow benefiting from the down-to-earth simplicity of animation without exaggeration.

Unjustified austerity

Animated videos are relatively cheap to produce. Of course, comparing to all the complicated process of hiring actors and narrators, production, and post-production spending, the costs of animated videos seem more than reasonable. However, sometimes animated content may look like a money-saving opportunity, which is a big mistake. As long as the competition in this content sector is growing rapidly, the requirements towards the quality of animated video grow.

Distracting elements

Being entertaining and fun to watch, animated videos are certainly the most engaging type of video content. However, there is a certain downgrade, discovered by the European Journal of Psychology and Education. According to their data, viewers often get distracted by the overall mood of the animated video, missing the actual message that it aims to deliver. In other words, once overloaded with video effects, animated videos tend to prevent a prosperous customer from understanding the purpose and value of your product or service. However, there is opposing data that shows that 70% of viewers tend to look a business up in the search engine after watching animated content.

Time-consuming

In the era, when most businesses were forced to follow their potential users to the social media field, instant reaction and sense of live communication became the main success factors. Naturally, animated videos take more time to produce than live translations and video posts. Therefore, basing the whole video content strategy on animation only is a serious mistake. Animation videos are an integral part of long-term perspective strategies.

While the role of video content is undeniable in modern marketing. Animation videos obtain a larger segment in this vast industry every day. Soon enough, it will become a highly-competitive field. The standards and requirements will grow. The trends of animated video creation will shape the overall principle of content marketing.

Therefore today, we witness the dawn of SEO principles and rules for animated video content. It has certain pros and cons at the same time. On the other hand, animated videos seem to be restricted in their SEO tools comparing to text format. But at the same time, using the standard SEO principles, animated videos today stand out from the crowd of standard videos. It is one of the main benefits of animation and a reason to address it today before video hosting became overpopulated with animated content.

Informative and educational, animated videos tend to seem more joyful and entertaining even when dedicated to serious topics and complicated technical matters. Therefore, average users instantly value animation more than standard videos.

Also, due to limitless creative options, animated videos are more original and eye-catching. In other words, they provide any company or brand an opportunity to create ultimately original image that will only be associated with them.

All said above significantly increases the engagement rate of animated video content comparing to standard videos, which is one of the most powerful SEO features today. So, although animated videos cannot fully use the traditional SEO features of text content like subtitles and keywords, animated videos today are the most efficient type of the most prosperous content format.