How To Videos Are Hot Right Now Leverage Them On Your Website For SEO Benefits

Use How-To Videos To Create New And Engaging Content For Your Website

How-To videos are hot right now! With everyone completing their honey-do list at home, learning new hobbies, or just trying to be productive, there has been a surge in views for educational and How-To videos. Take advantage of this and leverage How-To videos on your website! There are many types of How To videos, and we go through some examples in this episode. Once you have the video, you can leverage it for all sorts of benefits, including transcribing the text, embedding the video into your website, extracting the audio, saving screenshots, and much more! Enjoy!

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YOU’LL LEARN

Use How-To videos on your website to get SEO benefits
How-to videos are extremely popular right now
There are many types of How-To videos you can produce
You can easily create videos, post them to YouTube, and embed them in your web pages
Leverage your videos
A How-To video does not have to be a DIY video or a tutorial video
How To make things or build things are easy videos that you can make if relevant to your business
You can make How To videos that guide customers on how to hire services like what you provide
Make educational How-To videos to help customers know when to replace or repair items you provide

Here is the transcription from Episode 58 How To Videos Are Hot Right Now – Leverage Them On Your Website For SEO Benefits;

Jesse Dolan: Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, where each week we bring you tips and tricks to help you get found online. I am your host, Jesse Dolan, joined with Bob Brennan.

Bob Brennan: Howdy.

Jesse Dolan: Virtually, via Zoom, glad to have you back again, Bob, this week for an episode, albeit another virtually.

Bob Brennan: We got about another week of this, you think, and then they’re going to roll us out, or what?

Jesse Dolan: Sounds like it for Minnesota, we should be able to get back at it here pretty soon. We’ll probably still mix in some virtual ones as we try to ramp up to doing multiple a week, like we’ve been talking for a while.

Bob Brennan: Yeah, and just a heads up, this is being recorded May 14th.

Jesse Dolan: 14, 2020.

Bob Brennan: We don’t always release them the day we record them, but we use that just so people aren’t freaking out in August [inaudible 00:00:00:59]-

Jesse Dolan: Good point, you never know when this episode may be coming in. With that, let’s talk real quick some housekeeping deals, localseotactics.com, free instant SEO audits. If you haven’t used it yet, go on out there and use it. It’s one of the most popular clicks on our website, one of the most popular pages. What you do is you plug in your website, an exact page that you want to audit, and you plug in your keyword that you want to audit against, and it’s going to give you a score and a pretty comprehensive PDF about what’s good, what’s bad, and what you need to fix on your website.

Check that out, it’s totally free, use it again and again, localseotactics.com, top right corner, instant SEO audit, and get yourself started with a good punch list for your website. This week here, we’re going to be talking about, I don’t know, like I call it a halfway, Bob, coronavirus pivot. The last handful of episodes we’ve done have been really overwritten by COVID-19, coronavirus pandemic and things you can do to pivot your business, to maybe take advantage, if your business is able to, or just how to even stay open with some ideas.

Some of them are things we’ve shared talking with customers, some of it is you listeners, the feedback that you’ve sent in. We had a couple Speak Pipe voice messages and a couple email form submissions with some ideas, so we’ve been kind of doing that. This week we’re going to get kind of 50/50, we’re going to talk specifically about things to do on your website that are not just for now, but definitely more for the future, but it’s inspired by things that are happening right now. What we’re talking about here is, over the last six to eight weeks, there has been a big surge in “how to”, and if you’re watching the video, I’m doing quotes with my fingers, “how to” searches, so how to do this, how to do that type of searches.

There is a way for you to produce content for these kinds of searches, almost regardless of your business. Bob and I are going to go through some different examples, depending on what your angle is and what you want to be found for, and how you can leverage this how to type of a search. The first one that comes to mind is the fact that you are trying to do some kind of repair or technical troubleshooting. As a guy, I lean on this all the time, I’ve got to fix my lawnmower, fix my weed whip, fix my truck, fix whatever the heck it is, kids’ toys, how do I do this?

You go to Google or YouTube and you just type that in, and hopefully you get presented with some videos that are going to show you what you need to do. That’s kind of the easy one, the DIY, how to fix, how to build, how to make type of a deal. Some businesses, that’s good, you want that kind of traffic, you want that kind of search or that kind of relevance for you. If you are providing maybe parts to do these things or materials that do these things or plans to do these things, that’s where it makes sense.

If you’re a business that sells, let’s just say if it’s, I don’t know, a four-wheeler or an ATV, unless, Bob, you’ve got a better example, but if something happens to my four-wheeler and I’ve got to fix it, probably a company that sells four-wheelers shouldn’t be giving me a video on how to fix my four-wheeler. Like that doesn’t make much sense for you as a business, you’d much rather sell me a new four-wheeler than show me how to fix my existing one. Just because there’s a bunch of people looking for how to videos to fix stuff doesn’t mean you need to jump on the bandwagon and show people how to fix things.

Just if that’s your business, is fixing things, again, I wouldn’t want to show people how to fix things, I would want to fix them for them. That’s that’s my job, that’s what I’m doing.

Bob Brennan: Well, there’s two schools of thought, let me just run this by you. There’s people like me that want to have some understanding of the troubleshooting, so how to know if it’s this or this. In other words, how to know, is it my alternator or battery? The reason I want to know that, is when I take my car and I do decide to take it into a shop, because I don’t want to deal with it, I either want to guide the mechanic or know if I’m getting pushed in the wrong direction. If I’m getting pushed in the wrong direction, then, you know what I mean, your video has given me insight on how to do that, and then subsequently, ideally I want to take it to you, or I don’t know.

The objective of the video in the end is to get traffic on your site to get you up higher, is really the primary reason. Then also as a consumer, what keeps me on your video is an understanding of the repair process, so therefore when I do get it repaired or even ask you about it, I’m somewhat educated, so I’m not just, “Okay, I guess it’s the [fibulator dibulator 00:06:28], and that’s $1,000.” I don’t know, does that make sense?

Jesse Dolan: Oh, total sense, yeah. You might want to not actually do this repair, but you want to know what the heck it is so you can be intelligent about it, and not come in there as a total green horn, if you will, and get taken for a lot of money, and this would be a repair example. I think that makes a ton of sense. I think what we can do is, we’ve got a list of some examples, I’m just going to go through them. We’ll do this a little shooting from the hip, talk about a type of how to video, and then just bounce back and forth on usage scenarios exactly like this one, which is pretty much the first one we’re doing, how to fix or how to repair something.

Everybody listening, just to kind of reset, we’re going to go through the types of how to not just videos, but how to content that’s really out there that we distilled it down to on the web, and try to give some usage examples on how you can leverage this for your business. Not only is it important to put this out there to find people, like you’re saying, Bob, to rank higher in the searches and get that traffic, but also, again, with Google with their machine learning and their artificial intelligence, putting this kind of information out there helps establish your authority and your relevance.

It’s one thing to have a sales page saying that you do this or do that, it’s another to have how to content or FAQs or more of that supporting material, just kind of a different intent and a different type of information. Adding this to your portfolio or to your website is going to help you as well. See if you can, as we go through this, tease out a couple of examples or get your mind working on how you can apply some of this to your website for this how to type of content. Again, first one, how to fix or how to repair something, so for that, like Bob said, one great example is putting that content out there so you can educate your customers, how to know when that needs to be repaired, maybe, or it needs to be fixed.

If that wasn’t the original intent to your video, your customers can still find that and leverage your information that way. Another one is how to make or build things, so could be how to make or build a dog house. If you sell lumber or if you sell kits on how to make the dog house or some things like that, that’s a natural in. If you’re in the business of providing materials or kits or resources, doing videos on how to build. Actually, I should back up, I think I started a thought that I never finished.

It’s not just videos. We’ll probably say videos a lot because Bob and I gravitate towards this, but it doesn’t have to be videos. It can be some graphics, it can be some screenshots, it can be a before and after photo with some text. I think video, to pause there for a second, is an extremely effective way to communicate these things. Bob, you know from how we do it in the business, is taking a three to five-minute video about something can translate, if you just transcribe that into 1,000 words or more, and anybody who goes to localseotactics.com, checks out our show pages for the podcast, you’ll see that manifested.

We do a 15 to 30-minute video/podcast session, and that transcript is gigantic, you have a ton of content. Point on that is, if you do your video and maybe throw it up on your YouTube, you can still leverage that video back on a webpage that shows it, and then you can transcribe that episode and pull out some nuggets, pull out some paragraphs of text. You don’t have to sit down and maybe rewrite the whole process for not a lot of money, it’s usually about $1 or $2 a minute, you can get that transcribed, maybe save yourself an hour of sitting there trying to figure out how to type up something that you just did on the video.

It’s kind of a quick cheat there, but however you want to manifest this, videos, pictures, guides, before and afters, the important part with any of these how tos is that there is some kind of illustration, I think, a drawing, photo, video, whatever it is. That’s something that I found pretty much in common with all of them, is if you’re looking on how to do something, you’re not just going to read how to do it, there’s always some kind of screenshot.

Bob Brennan: Infographics are kind of a big deal. I don’t know anything about them, you probably have a better understanding in there. To be honest, there isn’t something that we actually implemented, so I don’t know what knowledge you have of that, but I know they’re a big thing, and have been for a while.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, infographics are, basically it’s just a large graphic, at the end of the day, but it’s illustrative. It keeps you on the page, it’s sticky. An infographic isn’t just an image or a picture or even a diagram, it’s comprehensive, it takes a while to digest. Those can be a little more labor intensive to create or to make, kind of like a flowchart or something like that. Again, I think the concept there, the important takeaway is supporting your how to with some kind of visual assistance, an infographic, video [crosstalk 00:11:24]-

Bob Brennan: Videos, yeah.

Jesse Dolan: Maybe, but to really provide a valuable resource for your customers and a good user experience, you have to have some kind of visual guide that goes with it. Again, we’ve got how to fix or repair things, we’ve got how to make or build things next. The next area is, how to know if you need to hire for something. Maybe your lawn is just toast, or I don’t know if you’ve got any of the examples to fire off, Bob, but in your first iteration there of the car repair, how to become educated on the topic, really at the end of the day, it what that’s all about.

Let me rephrase it this way. If you’re a business, you obviously want to promote yourself. You want to position yourself as an expert, so if you’re going to put out a piece of information on how to hire me for copier repair, I’d definitely want to make sure that the things I’m going to be telling you about to look for are things that I possess. Take advantage, you’re producing this content, don’t paint yourself into a bad light. You can definitely skew it a little bit, this is your propaganda, this is your video.

That being said, be legitimate. If you can cite some sources, if there are certain credentials to look for, if you’re going to tell somebody, “Here’s what you need to look for to hire somebody like me,” or, “Here’s what I would look for if I was hiring somebody in my business, those dirty little secrets,” that’s great information to put out there to know.

Bob Brennan: Yeah, and maybe this jumps a few topics ahead, but it’s really the empathy and the anxiety of getting into your customer’s shoes, to figure out … This is why organizations like Home Advisors and Angie’s List and all these other organizations, they understand it. They understand that anxiety of the customer, who’s like, “Oh, I’ve never had to put in a patio,” or, “I’ve never had to have a roof done,” or, “I’ve never had to hire somebody to do a deck. I’ll just go to Angie’s List or I’ll go to Home Advisor, and they’ve vetted it out for me.”If you can do that vetting and educating the customer, there’s a chance that you’re going to come up over some of those organizations.

Jesse Dolan: Absolutely.

Bob Brennan: Or more importantly, it’s just the need, the need is there, that anxiety. If you can solve that anxiety for the person searching, you’re going to win.

Jesse Dolan: I think there is another element. I was talking with a customer last week, there’s an element of this too that we should bring up quick. This isn’t just to be found in search engines, this can be very useful for your sales team. Let’s just say, if you had a bunch of videos or a bunch of how to materials you put out there surrounding a certain topic, maybe you have a webpage that you put together that houses these or links them together, or acts as kind of an index. This is great information to use internally to either reinforce messages or help kind of round out that you are an expert.

This doesn’t just have to be content that’s produced to be found in search engines, think about how to use these things internally for staff or for training, for customers alike. Now, when I say that, my intent on this, it’s still public facing. Like none of this is internal you don’t want customers to see, but if it can serve a dual purpose and can be out there in the search engines to help provide relevancy and build that knowledge around you, then it’s going to be a win-win for you.

Keep that in mind too, there’s different ways to leverage it there. How to know if you need to hire for X, likewise, how do you know to replace X? Let’s just go back to your car mechanic deal. Your car is making a certain strange noise or you’re wondering, “I’m at 80,000 miles, do I need some kind of regular maintenance maybe?” or some things like that, those are great educational videos to put out there for your customers to help not really create a call to action, but if you can educate them on, “When this happens, you need to come in. If that happens, stop what you’re doing and call us, we’ll be out there to fix it.” Just making them aware of these situations where they shouldn’t just take it for granted.

I’ve got a family member who shall remain nameless that I remember, the SUV pulled up into the driveway just making a horrible screeching sound, like, “Okay, those brakes need to be replaced.” The conversation basically went like, “Well, on my last vehicle, that went away after a few weeks or a couple months and then it was fine, until I had my brakes replaced, and they told me they were just horrible.” I was like, “Well …” A quick how to video is, “If you’re hearing the sound, you’re going to want to come come and get your brakes checked,” that’s your notification tab or whatever it’s called, things like that that may seem … We have the curse of knowledge as business owners in [crosstalk 00:16:18].

Of course, you should know what that is, come on people. Not everybody does, not everybody does out there. Putting out that kind of content to help educate people to know when they need to take action, when they need some kind of service, when they need to look at X, that’s very good. As you can see here these last two, we’re getting out of the how to build, how to fix, that DIY, and we’re starting to transition to, as a business that doesn’t want to show people how to do it themselves, that doesn’t want to show you how to fix something yourself, there’s still a very strong case for you to put out how to type content, which is really, again, back to the beginning, what we’re talking about, a huge surge in how to type content.

Google’s really serving that up, people are looking for it. It’s a hot topic right now. You don’t have to just show how to build or make things to do how to, you can do these other areas as well. Even further, how to maybe diagnose, or in this example, how to tell, let’s say if you’re car repair, your transmission is leaking, is slipping, is whatever, some slight troubleshooting. Not only how do you need to hire somebody, how to know if it needs to be replaced, but, “Here’s the things to be looking for to know that it’s your transmission versus maybe your radiator.”

Again, some of this might sound basic to somebody in the know, but I’ve got fluid on the floor of my garage. What color is it? Where did it seem to be in relation to the vehicle? Might seem elementary stuff, but if somebody just doesn’t deal with this, this is extremely empowering information. You just frame that up again in how to know what the hell is leaking on your garage floor, as an example.

Bob Brennan: What I would throw out too is what you can expect to pay, that’s a valid search term, what can you expect to pay for a furnace, and/or what can you expect to pay for HVAC, whatever? If you have a good, concise video that shows the full range and as many variables as you can throw out there, again, that’s going to get traffic, because as a consumer, I want to know what to pay for a furnace. I had my furnace replaced, gosh, five or six years ago, and fortunately, I was in a business networking group prior to this and one of our members was a furnace HVAC place.

They told us what their costs for a furnace was, and it’s like somewhere between $800 and $1,500. $1,500 is the high end efficient furnace, and $800 was a non-efficient, cheap furnace. These guys are charging five to seven grand, which is a lot, but then they have a lot of liability, a lot of overhead and everything else, and that’s what they’ve got to get paid. somewhere in that neighborhood. To that end, when our furnace went out, I had people come out and give me, or over the phone, give me estimates or whatever the case is. It ranged from the low end of of $7,000, all the way up to $16,000, in the $16,000 guy was good-looking, could have been a model, he had a Rolex on his hand, and my wife fell in love with him and left me.

Just kidding, but seriously, she’s like, “Why don’t we use this guy?” It’s like, “Because he’s got a Rolex, honey.” If somebody could educate you and say, “Hey, this is the range,” then that’s valid information that it’s going to be sticky, they’re going to stay there, it’s going to help you with your SEO. If you’re not giving away any secrets, you know it’s good information, and that’s what they want.

Jesse Dolan: No, totally agree. Again, some of this, depending on where you’re going with that, this information doesn’t even need to be buried on your website somewhere on some obscure content page. Some of these videos or graphics or whatever you might create or content blocks might be awesome on your homepage. If it’s super relevant right now, or maybe it’s seasonal, things like that, this content is very frontal and should be very frontal with your customers, depending on what your position is. Transition, and this is a good one to get into next, is how to vet out a service provider, again, like a plumber or a mechanic or an HVAC technician or a company.

Not just what to look for maybe in what’s broken or when to service it or when to call, but now, kind of like we were talking a little bit earlier, how to really vet somebody out. I don’t think he ever wanted to be negative, like bashing other people, but more about, again, “Look for these credentials, look for these things, look for these assurances, look for this kind of history,” All while trying to, of course, position yourself in the best light. This can be a powerful tool, we’ve talked before in episodes, and personally, it’s hard to self edify sometimes. People like to get a third party to recommend or to somehow endorse you.

This can help that a little bit, even though it’s still kind of self-driven. If you can get out there and say, “This is what you need to look for. These are the kinds of things that are going to make a good plumber or a good X,” you’re inviting these customers and prospects to evaluate you on those exact same things. While it’s not a straight up edification, it’s a little bit of an open book, kind of like, “Hey, test me. Look, this is what you should look for, we’ve got check boxes in all these areas, make sure your other person does too or your other company does too.” That can be a very powerful tool for conversion as well to help people.

Then again, just great knowledge, building a great knowledge base for Google and everybody else for those topics, so that’s how to vet out, let’s say. Then there’s a slight variation on how to hire. Maybe some of this is tactically driven, like let’s take carpeting, or let’s go back to your HVAC guys, because that $16,000 good-looking Rolex dude is a good example of what I’m going with in here. How to hire can be educational maybe for a risk, or some people don’t get taken for a ride.

Let’s say if your Rolex guy comes out and is saying, “Half down, and we’ll be out in six weeks to do the install or something,” what things are you going to not want to do when you sign that contract? Depending on the industry, of course, I’m talking very generally, and with the mob’s example, don’t ever put more than X down, don’t ever put anything down. What are some things to avoid to not get scammed, and things like that.

Again, past vetting out, but now that you’ve chosen the $16,000 Rolex dude because you thought that you vetted them out good, how do you hire them the right way? What do you hold them to, and some things like that, and if there’s anything within your business that kind of makes sense in this area that we’re talking about, write that down and put out some how to type content for that.

You’re going to help yourself out, and your customers again, kind of feel a little more empowered in working with you, that you’re helping to educate them on this and explain it to them. Because you’ve got to think about the context here, just because you’re putting this content out there doesn’t mean everybody’s going to read it and digest it. The people who do, you’re really bringing them into the fold for your business, and you’re really building a lot of trust with them specifically. That should lead to easier conversions with that when you get to that point.

This is not just to be found in SEO, this is also a conversion and building trust type of a situation here. Then the last one in this series is, how to choose the right X. Not that different than how to vet out or even how to hire, but a slightly different angle, how to choose, whether it’s based on, you can position here based on your price, how to choose, based on your need, how to choose, based on your season, maybe how to choose, if there’s any variances there. Again, this last two-thirds of these examples, really just trying to dissect and peel away the layers of the examples that are not based on how to build or how to repair or some kind of a technical guide and follow through. Hopefully that helps helps you guys out there.

Like we always say, content is king. With your website, you can optimize your content and you can kind of give it a fresh coat of paint to look better and things like that, but at the end of the day, we should always be striving for, what am I ranking for, what am I not ranking for? Whatever I’m not ranking for, I need content for that. You either need to redeploy existing content somehow or come up with new content.

That’s kind of the intent of this episode is, here’s a content area that you’re probably under utilizing, you probably don’t have a ton of how to type information in these kind of areas that we go through. Marry that with, right now this is a very hot topic, something people are looking for, and hopefully that inspires you and gives you some things to take action on with your website. You got any more comments on that topic, Bob, [crosstalk 00:25:42]?

Bob Brennan: I think if you’re not sure, look to your customers, find out … If you’re not sure right now, that’s okay, get your listening ears on to listen to why your customers are choosing you. What kind of statements are they saying, either during the conversation that they’re vetting you out, what kind of questions are they asking you to see if you’re the right contractor or whatever, references or whatever the case is. If you’ve been in business for awhile for yourself, I’d say three to five years, you should have a pretty good understanding of your customers. If not, I don’t know you’re going to be in business much longer.

It’s one of those deals where if we can listen to our customers and improve on each process, then our businesses should grow, in theory. It’s having that empathy, it’s something, been in business for 25 years, I still haven’t done enough of. Still if I want to be where I really want to be, I’ve got to get good at that skill.

Jesse Dolan: No, I think that’s perfect. Expand on that a little bit, like you’re saying, voice of the customer, what are their questions. In that same vein, if you have FAQs on your website or if you’re doing some search and if there are some people that are above you in Google that seem pretty dominant, they may have certain types of FAQs. Look at your or their FAQs through that same lens of, is there any how to, can I spin any how to stuff out of this? That’s perfect.

Okay, let’s get into our five-star review of the week, got another one here. This week, five stars from [Feya Tevos 00:27:21], I believe I’m saying it the right way, says, “I listen to many marketing podcasts, and you guys are the most informative and useful for me and my clients. Great topics and information, thank you. So glad you’re back with new episodes.” Yes, we did have a little hiatus there, and we’ve got that same feedback from a number of people, so we’re glad you are happy as well, and we’ll keep the show chugging along as long as we keep getting reviews from people like you, Feya.

That’s how we know, there’s no call in live, this is not radio or anything else, like the only way we get this delayed information and gratification that we’re actually reaching people is to get your feedback or reviews like this, so really appreciate it. If you haven’t left us a review yet, we’d love for you to leave a review, go to localseotactics.com, go down on the bottom where it says reviews.

It has links to Google My Business, Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else that we get reviews, Facebook. I would really appreciate it, and share the podcast with somebody too, if you think that this episode or any of our other episodes are beneficial to other business owners or managers in your circle. We’d really appreciate that, it helps the show out and helps our reach as well. All right, that about does it for this episode. Thanks for tuning in everybody, and we’ll talk to you next time.

Bob Brennan: Thanks everybody, take care.