Boosting Engagement with Video Retargeting for Organic Traffic

If you think “beyond the click,” you know that getting traffic to your website is only half the battle. 

The real opportunity lies in turning that traffic into lasting customer relationships.

One powerful way to do this is by driving your organic search visitors to your social media channels.

While paid retargeting of organic traffic has been a standard practice for years, there’s a lesser-known, untapped strategy: using organic social media to “retarget” your website visitors. 

Surprisingly, SEOs rarely consider this approach as part of their content strategy, even though it holds immense potential for customer engagement and growth.

This article breaks down why this matters and how to make it work.

But let’s be clear: this isn’t about simply posting links to your blog on social media or building an audience for your blog as a go-to resource.

Instead, this is about leveraging video on your social platforms to:

• Convert one-time blog visitors into followers.
• Reappear in their feeds to stay top-of-mind.
• Gain visibility on “For You” pages and algorithm-driven recommendations.

With the right approach, you can use your SEO-driven content to feed your social media growth.

This is the typical buyer’s journey for a visitor to your blog:

The organic traffic from your SEO-driven content marketing can do more than attract visitors who read an article and bounce.

Let’s face it: unless your brand is highly prominent, most of these visitors won’t remember you or return to your website.

That is, unless you get them to:

• Sign up for an email list (which will likely have an open rate of <20%).
• Follow you on social media.
• Engage with you on a social media platform that might push you to their “For You” page even if they don’t follow you right away.

Once you turn that one-off visitor into a follower, you’ve given your organization a way to nurture that visitor into a customer.

An SEO content strategy that also focuses on converting high-intent organic traffic into social media followers transforms the buyer’s journey into something like this:

How do you do this?

By adding supplemental video content to your blogs.

You want this content to entice that one-off blog visitor to visit your socials, drive engagement, and hopefully result in followers/subscribers and/or “For You” page views.

If you do this effectively, you will see:

• Fewer of your organic search visitors become “one-off” visitors who never see you again.
• Your blog content becomes a channel for growing your social media following (and further justifying your SEO budget).

Dig deeper: A guide to creating short-form videos

How to integrate video into your SEO strategy

Here’s how you can drive organic traffic to your social media accounts and nurture potential customers effectively:

• Create videos and turn them into search-optimized blog articles.
• Add videos to existing articles that are already attracting traffic.
• Provide a compelling reason for visitors from organic search to engage with your social media content.

1. Video-first articles

As I explained in my article on video-first SEO content strategy, you can use the briefs meant for writing articles to create videos and then turn those into search-optimized articles. 

This approach saves time, but its success relies on including in-video CTAs to drive views to your other content.

2. Adding video to existing articles

If you already have articles driving qualified traffic that you’d like to nurture through social media, video can help you do that.

Video alternative to the article

Create long-form videos covering the same topic you’ve written about in your article. 

Some percentage of your visitors would prefer to watch a video anyway, and you can use the same outline for the video that you used for the article. 

Once it’s shot, add it to the top of the existing article:

Videos covering subtopics

Create short and long-form videos focused on subtopics within your existing articles.

For example, a link building agency that frequently writes about domain authority could:

• Create a short-form video on the topic.
• Host it on platforms like YouTube Shorts, Instagram, or TikTok.
• Embed it into any article mentioning domain authority.

Here’s an example where I embedded a second video into the same article:

In this example, a video on client acquisition costs – a commonly discussed topic in marketing – can be embedded across multiple relevant articles.

Remember, you can embed videos from TikTok and Instagram in addition to YouTube.

3. Drive people from your service pages to your socials

In some cases, it’s not ideal to “distract” a visitor by directing them to a social media account.

However, when visitors discover you through organic search and don’t yet trust your organization, social media can be a powerful tool to build that trust. 

For high-involvement purchase decisions, your social accounts can showcase your brand’s values and expertise, helping visitors feel more confident in you.

For instance, on our service pages, we typically include a section for an “alternative sales pitch.”

The lazy way to do this is to embed an Instagram feed.

The better way to do this is to have a call to action (CTA) that gives a reason for someone to want to visit this content. 

Talk about what someone can get from “clicking here” and checking out your content. Call out a high-performing post you know will likely get engagement should they visit. 

Make sure your CTA communicates value – generic ones like “Follow us on Instagram” won’t cut it.

Dig deeper: A guide to creating social media videos (for search and beyond)

In-video CTAs are key to making this work

No matter your approach, including in-video calls to action is essential for driving engagement with the rest of your account. 

Develop a strategy for creating compelling playlists that viewers will want to explore and call out other content they’re likely to find valuable.

Focus on promoting content that delivers real value rather than pushing a sales pitch, as the latter won’t yield the desired results.

Text drives traffic, but video drives trust

When people seek information, Google remains their first stop, which makes SEO highly effective for reaching potential customers. 

However, video excels at building trust in the person or organization behind the content – provided they deserve it.

Interest-based social media algorithms amplify this advantage. 

A single interaction with your content can prompt the algorithm to keep pushing you into their feed, making video a powerful tool for ongoing engagement.

An SEO who can drive traffic and convert it into followers and customers will have an easier time proving their value and helping their organization grow.

Dig deeper: Why video is key to building brand identity and engagement