In the latest episode of Hack My Growth, we’re going to take a look at how we can leverage multimedia content to expand the amount of real estate we own within the search results.
Where does multimedia content show up within the SERPs? Most of the time it’s showing up in featured snippets. We have video carousels, images, sometimes podcasts, and audio.
Table of Contents
Video Transcript:
Multimedia Content in the SERPs
There are a lot more types of media that can rank today because search engines are a lot smarter. Looking at a couple of cool stats from a study done by Similarweb as of October 2021, nearly 20% of all keyword searches result in a SERP feature. And SERP features have grown more than 15% since March of 2021 in the U.S. alone.
But as we can see based on the data, this is only one study, but they looked at different queries. SERP features are on the rise, which means multimedia content is becoming more and more of a good idea for SEOs and site owners.
Most Popular SERP Features in the U.S.
If we look at what are the most popular features within the United States, Related Questions are obviously the most popular.
Source: www.similarweb.com
Related Searches are very popular, but we see that 15.4% are images. Images are showing up as carousels, attached to a featured snippet, or in its own image box. We also see videos over here at 5%. We definitely see videos playing a big role within the SERPs as well.
We don’t only have opportunities to rank our website, but we have the opportunities to rank our images too. We have opportunities to rank our videos and a whole lot more.
MUM is Changing Search
One of the major impacts on search engines over the last few years is an integration with a technology known as MUM. MUM stands for Multitask Unified Model and it’s built on transformers that are very similar to what BERT is built on. The difference is MUM is a thousand times more powerful. MUM has the ability to acquire deep knowledge. It’s constantly crawling and learning and using that information when it’s generating answers.
It can also generate text and language. It can also translate and understand over 75 languages, and it has the ability to understand multiple modalities. What that means unlike traditional crawlers or tools that use natural language processing that is looking at the text, MUM has the ability to crawl between text, video, images, and audio and start to make sense out of the context of it all.
It’s extremely powerful and it goes to a whole new level when we start talking about search queries.
Human and AI Interaction
Today’s search engines are not necessarily these question-and-answer machines as much as they are becoming assistants and chatbots. They’re driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning, and MUM being integrated into these makes them even smarter than before. MUM can essentially understand language in context, very similar to the way that you and I would during a conversation.
It can understand what we’re saying. It can understand these more complex queries that may have a number of different nuances, depending on the language and how we’re phrasing those questions. So when it comes to search, it can deliver relevant information based on what it believes the intent of the user is. Maybe it’s text, video, audio, or images and it can even do it across languages.
There are some cool videos that Google’s done to show that it can surface information in other languages that might be relevant and translate that to the user’s native language, and that’s content that they normally wouldn’t have seen because they weren’t searching in that specific language. But now MUM allows that to be an actual possibility. So we need to look at expanding our content to meet the needs of our users regardless of the medium.
Repurposing Your Content to Increase Visibility
Some of you may be asking, how do we even do this then? It’s hard to get a blog post up. How am I going to start making videos, audio, and images and making all this work together? I’m a big believer in not doing work over and over and over again, but repurposing things with purpose.
For example, you do a lot of blog content and you create a lot of text. You could take that content and read it out loud into a microphone and create a podcast using that same content.
Or you could take that content and turn it into an infographic. Or you could take that content and record yourself doing a video, or using maybe an animation software like Powtoon where you can create videos from that content. And now you’ve taken this one piece of content and converted it into four different types of content.
This is something that I do all the time for myself. An area that I’m very comfortable creating is video. A lot of times I’ll shoot a video and the next thing I’ll do is I’ll take the audio of that and get it transcribed. Then we will add that and create a blog out of the video we created.
Sometimes we’ll create infographics out of the video in the blog, or we’ll create a PDF and then a guide around that. So there are a lot of ways that you can kind repurpose your content. Look at the content that’s performing well for you, or something that you want to target, and see how can you reuse that in another medium and in an area that you’re going to be able to scale quickly.
I’m going to show you a real example of something we’ve recently done with a piece of content like this.
SMA Marketing Content Repurpose Example
We have this blog post, How to Properly Set Up and Use Google Search Console. If you go over to this site and you’ll see this blog post, it looks like a traditional blog post with a video embedded into it. But this all started out as a video.
It started out as a YouTube training and it’s on our YouTube channel and something that I wanted to cover. Then my team took this, started to expand it, and made it look more like an ultimate guide. We’re calling it the Complete Guide. And they broke this down and took the content that we had transcribed, and turned it into this full-featured guide.
It has images, videos, and text. And inside the video, there are audio tracks. So there are a lot of different aspects to this piece of content that now Google can use and understand and see how all of these things work together. And then when someone makes a query, maybe even how to verify via HTML tags in WordPress.
They might search, “How do I verify my search console using HTML tags in WordPress?” There’s a good chance that we could rank for that part of that query. We walk through each and every one of these, and we have multiple pieces of content. All of these examples I pulled and used in the slide deck. My team took the work that we already did once and repurposed it over and over again, and allowed ourselves to leverage it in a whole new way. As you can see, you can take the time to do this and it helps.
If you’re doing a video and you want to transcribe, I recommend Rev. It’s a great tool and it helps us scale this, and you only need to go through it and edit the text. It takes a little bit of time, but this is something that scales very well. And I know that based on personal experience. So whatever type of content you want to start with, there are ways that you can take that content and repurpose it in other mediums so that you can have the potential to increase your SERP visibility.
SMA Marketing Google Search Result
As we said, there are more and more SERP features. I don’t want to only try to rank for this specific query. I want to rank for all the other queries related to it, and also possibly some of the different search features. So I’m not only banking on my Blue Link but something else.
If we went over to Google search right now and we’re going to make this long query. But you’ll notice for this query, which is very long, “how to properly set up and use Google search console.”
We have a blog listing here. Then this is Business 2 Community, a site that does syndicate some of our content. And then as you notice here, we have video. So even in this query, which is an extremely long tail, and I doubt someone would search this specifically, you can see how we have three listings right here at the top that our company controls.
Then we have some other ones down here, and Search Engine Land, Google, and the like. If we start narrowing this down, maybe get rid of the complete guide, it’s going to shift. But notice I’m not owning the top spot, this is a Featured Snippet because Google is. But look whose video is number one. So I still have SERP visibility, it’s my YouTube channel, and it’s still my brand. So my brand is still getting visibility out of these different queries and how they’re associated.
There are some pretty heavy companies up here like HubSpot. But here’s our Blue Link and here’s our search link, which is cool. Here’s our Business 2 Community, which is cool. And then we have the Related Searches down here. We have three of the top 10 results that are pointing to something that we’ve created.
And it’s because we have the opportunity to have multiple media within the search results, which we see here is pretty powerful. We’re expanding our SERP real estate by using multiple forms of media. And then obviously we have to optimize it. We have to mark it up using structured data in taking those next steps. But this can be very powerful. And what’s cool about it is that it’s scalable, because once you create one piece of content, you can convert it into multiple different types of content that can be reused and repurposed to help expand your visibility in the search engines.
Structured Data is a Game Changer
If you want to leverage structured data on these pages you want to earn more of these rich results that need to have structured data behind them, but you’re not sure how to do it, that’s what this course is all about. Mastering Structured Data and Schema.org For Rich Results.
By checking out our YouTube channel and watching these videos, we give you 25% off. You can sign up today at learn.simplifiedsearch.net. I want to say, thanks again for watching. I hope you learned something new today. And until next time happy marketing.
