Today, a comprehensive SEO content strategy includes written content such as blog posts and ebooks, as well as media such as podcasts and video.
Read along to find out more about Hopin’s video efforts on YouTube and discover tips on how to best utilize SERPs and video SEO to drive business growth.
Hopin is an all-in-one platform for live online events that – thanks to the surging demand for virtual events – has been gaining traction at exponential rates.
Praising itself as a virtual venue, the company is enabling users to create engaging events that connect people around the globe. Even more, the platform is offering deep analytics and user data for lead generation and marketing objectives.
Where previously SEO and PPC peacefully existed across clearly defined sections of the SERP, the lines between organic results and paid ads are now more blurred than ever.
Because the SERP includes organic search results, paid ads, features, and videos, it’s a good starting point for learning more about Hopin’s digital strategies.
Right now, the first result in the SERP for Hopin’s brand term is occupied by a competitor’s ad. This means that Hopin is not protecting that real estate with their own ad, and is likely losing customers that otherwise would have landed on their website.Protecting your brand in the SERPs is essential, especially for businesses in competitive industries. Using synergy between PPC and SEO is one of the best ways to shut out other players and boost your presence.
SERPs may look different for different queries, but they’re all made up of the same three elements – paid ads, organic results, and SERP features.
SERP features refer to any element (or widget) beyond the traditional organic results and paid ads. They help improve user experience and have a significant effect on SEO.Let’s take a look at the features that appear on Hopin’s brand search.
‘People Also Ask’ is an extremely useful feature, especially on mobile devices. It’s usually located in the middle of the SERP and, when you click on a question, it expands out with an answer. Every time you click to reveal an answer, Google loads more related questions.
Currently, the answers to the most commonly asked Hopin-related questions are pulled from other websites (e.g. Trustradius and Hopin’s Zendesk page). Because this is a very important SERP battleground, not claiming this real estate is a big missed opportunity.
Ultimately, all of these are fantastic questions to answer in the form of dedicated pages, blog posts, and videos. Producing content that answers these questions better than the current publishers will help Google replace them, ensuring that you are not steering users to answers that you’re not in control of.
Tweet boxes are another feature that appears in the SERP for Hopin’s brand name.
Here, Google displays popular tweets in a carousel. In most cases, these come from an official Twitter account associated with the searcher’s query.
More and more, Google is posting video thumbnails in their SERPs. This is another crucial area for SaaS marketers in competitive niches.
The three videos that show up in the SERP for Hopin are:
In the next section, we’ll walk through these videos in more detail to gain a better understanding of Hopin’s YouTube video marketing.
By now, it’s clear that video is a powerful tool for SaaS, and leveraging video SEO and PPC tactics can have countless benefits, such as broader brand awareness, increased sales, and longer watch time.
Because today’s users want to be entertained, learn, and engage with brands through video, building a long-term video marketing strategy is crucial.
As a video content distribution platform, YouTube is incredible because it makes it very easy to share and digest content.
Let’s look at how Hopin is utilizing the platform as part of its overall digital efforts.
Youtube is the second largest search engine in the world, and as such it has its own SEO best practices.Engaging with comments is one of the more important aspects of YouTube SEO. After all, if your videos get a lot of comments and engagement, that indicates to YouTube that they are popular (and are more likely to appear higher in YouTube’s SERPs).
The videos featured on Google’s SERP for Hopin’s brand term are pulled in from YouTube, however, there is virtually no engagement from the company’s side.In effect, all three videos are a huge missed opportunity for Hopin to directly answer prospective customers’ questions, address objections, and defend their brand.
To dive even deeper into Hopin’s YouTube activities, let’s take a look at the number of people who are actually encountering the brand on the platform.
On Google Trends, there isn’t any noticeable seasonality in the past 12 months. That said, in the case of Hopin, seeing actual statistics under YouTube search means that the search term has high volume within YouTube. Here’s what Hopin’s Google Trends graph looks like:
Naturally, YouTube marketing can feel intimidating as it combines SEO with one of the most resource-intensive media forms – video.
That said, combining your SEO and video strategy to promote your business on YouTube is a wonderful way to get customers’ attention, boost conversions, and even get some extra help further down the line with things like remarketing.
YouTube hosts a few different advertising formats – from in-stream YouTube video ads to text ads that appear on the platform’s search results pages.Just like the SERPs on Google, paid results on YouTube often push the organic rankings down in the SERP.On Hopin’s YouTube SERP, for example, you can see competitors’ ads occupying a big chunk of the above-the-fold screen real estate. Effectively, these competitors are also stealing Hopin’s brand intent.
To avoid being pushed all the way down YouTube’s SERP, you need to be present and have a position.
Scrolling further on Hopin’s YouTube result page, there is some great user-generated content (UGC).UGC is one of the most powerful weapons in the quest for conversions, and the company should take advantage of it.User-generated video content is especially useful for helping users during the consideration stage of the buyer journey because it provides the necessary social proof to legitimize the product and, consequently, turn browsers into customers.
When users are having good experiences with Hopin, the brand should be encouraging these ambassadors to come out and help promote the product or the experience that they had with it.
At the end of the day, Hopin is still one of the fastest-growing startups in the world, and an overall great SaaS platform. Having said that, they are facing some issues with their SERP and video marketing from the standpoints of video SEO, YouTube SEO, and YouTube PPC.
Next, check out Airtable’s Teardown to learn more about how PPC and SEO can work together for more powerful results.
I lead the PPC and Analytics teams. My professional goals are happy clients and colleagues. Also I love numbers, charts, and data-driven decisions.
