9 Tips on Using Webinars to Improve Your SEO

Webinars have emerged as a popular and effective type of content marketing that can help businesses grow their brands and increase their sales.

The link between webinars (which are primarily in video or audio form) and SEO (primarily focused around the text) may not be obvious at first glance, but it’s there. These nine tips can help you create a webinar that also boosts your SEO.

1. Focus On The Content First

For a webinar to help your SEO efforts, it has to be of high quality. The content of the webinar is what should be focused on first.

To start, come up with an outline for how you want to organize your webinar. Make a skeletal structure of the main points first, then flesh out each point with useful, correct and interesting information.

Once completed, create a syllabus that can be given out and used to promote the webinar. This syllabus can help improve your SEO – be sure it includes keywords and phrases relating to your business that you will use across platforms when promoting your webinar.

2. Focus On Branding

Any webinars you offer should reflect your brand. This includes your business’s values as well as what it sells. Understand your target market so you can best appeal your webinar to the people most likely to be interested and benefit from it.

For example, if your employees largely work from home, you can set yourself as an expert or influence in this domain and offer a webinar on telecommuting with all the insider information that would be of interest to employees and employers alike.

This is a popular topic because many workers are actively trying to land a job that allows telecommuting or taking advantage of such useful info because their job now offers flexible hours or they run small businesses over the Internet. The audience is there, you just have to nail the topic.

3. Get It Transcribed

One of the first things you should do upon completing your webinar is to get a transcription. When working off a script without deviating from it, then this step is already taken care of for you.

Otherwise, you will need to get the webinar transcribed. You can do this yourself or send it to a transcription company to do this work for you for a reasonable cost. Having the webinar in text lets you use its content for the most effective SEO methods.

4. Have Captions

Closed captions provide several advantages for companies looking to use a webinar to enhance their SEO. The most important advantage is for webinar installments or clips that are hosted on YouTube.

YouTube is owned by Google and captions included in YouTube videos particularly help boost search engine rankings. Again, you will need to use an existing script or transcribe your webinar in order to create and time captions.

There are also specialized closed captioning transcription companies that can do this for you, especially if you are doing any events live.

Captions don’t just improve your SEO – they improve your reputation as well because you are making your webinar accessible to all.

5. Use Webinar Content In Blog Posts

A great way to reuse webinar content is to repurpose it into blog posts. Blog posts are perhaps the largest driving factor in search engine optimization for most businesses.

This is because blogs are constantly being updated and many potential customers read them for information relating to what they are researching.

Be sure to use similar keywords and phrases across all blog posts used from your webinar to increase your ranking in the search engines. Other areas that can help optimize your blog posts for SEO are the title you choose, the links you place within the article, the meta description and more.

6. Leverage Testimonials

Testimonials are one of the best ways to advertise your business. Potential customers like to hear about the experiences existing customers have had with your company.

Posting these testimonials on your website will increase the trust potential customers feel about your business and help you sell your webinar to interested parties. Because testimonials are written, they also help improve your SEO. You can get testimonials by asking for them from anyone who completes your webinar.

Aside from posting them on your site, encourage others to post their impressions of your webinar on other sites. This is because link building is so important in SEO and external testimonials will draw even more traffic to your webinar.

7. Repurpose The Transcript Into A Book

Another way to reuse parts of your webinar in ways that will improve your SEO is to repurpose it into a book (or several books). You can make these books available digitally or in print form to draw more traffic to your website.

They will help users discover your company through search engines because they will likely be hosted on major online retailers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Books will also serve as another source of revenue. Be sure all books you put out are professionally edited and have an attractive cover design.

8. Share On Social Media

It’s no secret that social media is a huge part of any successful content marketing strategy and it benefits SEO in particular.

Like blog posts, social media feeds are continuously updating and provide ample opportunity for users to find out about your business.

Your company’s social media platforms should be among the first places you go to promote your new webinar. You can do this by posting video clips, useful tidbits and other information about your webinar to generate interest. Shares and links on social media will increase your SEO.

These shared posts also serve to advertise your business to users who have never heard of your company or products before.

Today, social media marketing is effectively done with cloud-based tools like Buffer, for example. All SEO tools are also cloud-based. The benefit of managing your social channels and optimizing them lies in cloud solutions, as they can analyze huge sets of data and give you proper insights that will guide your strategy and actions.

9. Create Slides

Slides are an interactive way of sharing information on the web and can grab some serious attention. For your telecommuting webinar, for example, you can take key numbers and turn them into an attractive infographic using slides.

You can post these slides on slideshow-friendly sites such as Slideshare (which is part of LinkedIn) or embed them in your own website to help drive traffic. Make sure the text isn’t embedded in pictures – it will be easier for the search engines to pick up that way.

Webinars Are to Your Advantage

Webinars may not be the first thing you think of when considering how to improve your search engine optimization, but they can be an effective part of your SEO strategy.

You can create them to earn money from enrollment and then use the information presented in them in other ways to improve your SEO.

With a little creativity, a quality webinar has the potential to grow your company’s influence and search engine rankings in multiple ways.