Video SEO for Lawyers
Video SEO is similar to the search engine optimization you do for your law firm’s website and it’s pages, except this applies specifically to the videos you host on your website, or third-party hosting site, such as YouTube, Local Lawyer Guide, Vimeo, and Wistia.
When you begin applying some of the proven practices associated with proper video SEO, your law firm’s videos can achieve higher rankings on Google and typically the hosting solution you are using. This is important, because typically, higher rankings results in greater amounts of traffic to your law firm’s website.
Lawyer Video Marketing
Before we dive into how to improve video SEO for your law firm, you need to evaluate your law firm’s video marketing strategy. Ask yourself, “what do I want to accomplish”. For example, maybe you are looking to increase the amount of inbound traffic to your law firm website, or perhaps, working on your law firm’s overall branding. These are two very different goals, and thus, result in two very different strategies, at least initially.
If you have questions regarding you law firm’s video marketing strategy, please leave a comment below or call (480) 970-1180 to speak with a video marketing representative. Remember, lawyers and law firms are our niche.
Video SEO Tips for Law Firms
As previously mentioned, there is not one quick solution to improving your law firm’s video SEO. It takes time and requires attention to detail, much like traditional SEO. Alright, now let’s take a look at some of the most basic, yet important criteria associated with video SEO.
Great Content
Your law firm needs to stop focusing on manipulating Google to the highest degree and simply focus on creating genuine, helpful content. For example, this article is meant to actually help lawyers and law firms with their video SEO and video marketing strategies.
Video Sitemap
These provide search engines with information about video content on your website. Depending on where your videos are hosted you may or may not need this on your law firm’s website. The information within these sitemaps are typically referred to as “metadata”. The more of it you provide to search engine bots, the better! Seriously.
Duration
The duration of your legal videos should be short. Unless, you are publishing an E-Book, figure out how to tell your potential clients what they need to know in under (2) minutes. A significant amount of users tend to stop watching web videos after (2) minutes. For more information on this, please review Wistia’s case study on average view times below.
File Names
These should be optimized for the keywords your law firm is looking rank better for. Don’t keyword stuff your video file names, but it certainly helps to have naming conventions that are relevant to the content within each video. That means stop naming your files “xyg315-John.mp4” and start naming them like “John-Smith-Calculates-Child-Support”.
Schema Markup
This is a universally accepted language (Google, Bing, Yahoo) used to structure information about your law firm’s videos. Schema markups provide search engines with information about a video, such as the topic, actor, date, duration, title, and much more. Just think, the goal is to provide structured data markup on each element on a page, not just the page itself.
Transcriptions
Search engines can’t crawl the audio content within your legal videos (coming soon). That said, you need to either transcribe your legal videos or write a quick 300-400 words to go along with your video. We recommend doing both!
Summary
So now let’s review. Hopefully, video SEO is not a scary term anymore. However, it should be respected. There are many strategies and techniques that your law firm can implement. Of course, it now depends on how much time you would like to spend on improving your law firm’s video marketing efforts.
Local Lawyer Guide is a national video production, marketing, and advertising agency for attorneys. Please contact a representative at (480) 970-1180 if you would like assistance with anything related to video for your law firm.
By: Tighe Wilhelmy
Transcript
Hello everyone. In today’s video marketing tip session, I’ll be answering the question, “What is Video SEO?” For starters, it means Search Engine Optimization for videos. But what does that even mean? It’s the way by which a video can be optimized, and achieve higher rankings on Google, YouTube, and other websites. This is very important, because typically, higher rankings equals greater amounts of traffic.
At this point, you’re probably wondering, and should be wondering, “How can my law firm accomplish this?” But when it comes to Video SEO for lawyers, there are numerous things you can do to improve you law firms overall video marketing strategy. However, please keep in mind that your law firm’s video marketing strategy will need adjustments, depending on the platform for which you’re optimizing your legal videos for.
Some of the criteria associated with Video SEO, includes schema markup, a video site map, the length in content in that video, and the video and thumbnail file names.
For more information on each of these elements and many more, please feel free to subscribe to our newsletter and you’ll be notified of newly published videos covering these topics in-depth. Also, please feel free to leave a comment, and I’ll be sure to post a response. Till next time, I’m Tighe Wilhelmy with Local Lawyer Guide. See you soon!