As SEO becomes more widely recognized as an essential part of any internet marketing strategy, companies have begun to focus more on making sure that they rank high in relevant search results. While video is not a mandatory or commonly adopted marketing tool, its popularity among businesses is increasing. The creation of video content is becoming increasingly important as YouTube’s popularity and influence continues to rise. It is the #2 search engine and has the added advantage of being owned by Google (the #1 search engine). Also, Google’s new social search model is making it more important than ever for companies to have a YouTube presence.
Relevance is key when it comes to YouTube content creation. You need to understand what your potential customers are looking for in an informational or marketing video. Typically, people want to be educated and/or entertained by YouTube content. If your company can offer a unique perspective or new information on a subject that your consumers are interested in then you become an opinion leader and expert in their eyes. Video is one of the most fun ways to engage and build a relationship with your potential customers.
Creating and publishing videos on video sharing sites such as YouTube is not the end of your video marketing effort. As with all forms of online content, people need to see your videos in order for them to make an impression. You need to make sure that your audience can find your videos and that brings us to the topic of Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO).
Let’s start with the things that you need to pay attention to when posting a video:
Title, Description and Keywords for Video SEO
The title of your video is the most important thing that a search engine indexer parses in order to determine where your video should be ranked in results. Apart from including the appropriate keywords in your video title, you should also include the word video whenever possible as most people search for videos using the term “video”. For example, if someone were to search for a video about how to write a blog they might search for something like “how to write a blog video” to ensure that they received video results on this topic.
In your descriptions tab, try to provide a keyword-rich description that accurately describes the content of your video. A video’s description is the second thing that search engine indexers parse after the title. You can type out a section of the transcript of the video in your description tab depending on the length of your video. One of the trickiest things about optimizing video content is that videos are invisible to search engines because they are flash based. However, your description and title can be read by search engines which is why they are so critical.
The keywords that you are optimizing your content for should be carefully selected to increase relevance. Tagging your video with related keywords provides search engines with a better idea of what your video is about.
You can also leverage YouTube’s captions annotation feature, by adding subtitles, descriptions and links on top of your video. Posting a link to your video as a reply in the comments section to a related video is also a great way of building back links to your video. In these ways you can increase your video’s visibility and target the appropriate audience.
However, VSEO is just half the story. These tactics will only help your content rank slightly higher than videos published by people who don’t take VSEO into consideration. The most important part of creating video content is ensuring that your content provides valuable, relevant information to your target audience. Reaching out to your consumers and communicating with them through video is not only a great way to engage with them but it also provides you with a means to understand more about your target viewers. By seeing the demographics, interests and intentions of your video audience you can communicate with them in a more meaningful way about your products and services and, hopefully, drive them to your website and convert them into paying customers.
More about Video Marketing
Video marketing is something that many clients are advised to do by their marketing firms and there are some good reasons behind this. Firstly, a video adds a lot to a website homepage or landing page. Videos are an interactive form of content which makes them very engaging to visitors. They can serve to boost your SEO ranking by increasing the amount of time that visitors spend on your page. It takes a lot longer for someone to watch a video than to scan the text content on a page.
Videos can also serve as a great branding tool. A piece of video content should reflect the overall look and feel of a brand. This means that a video should not only include the colors of your logo and/or website but it should also reflect how you want your potential customers to view your brand. A more serious company offering B2B technology services would probably want their video to come off looking clean and professional where as a business that supplies crayons for children might want their video to be animated and upbeat with cute characters and dynamic graphics.
With over 1.6 billion visits per month YouTube is one of the most popular sites on the web. Since being purchased by Google it has also become more popular than ever before and more content is being uploaded by corporations and individuals alike. Still, despite the fact that people are spending more and more time on YouTube television advertising still accounts for over 38 percent of ad budgets. YouTube and Google want to change all that.
Marketers and corporations should examine the kind of possibilities that video advertising on YouTube can offer. This type of content can be embedded in a company’s website but it can be available on YouTube for the public to access. This leads to a much higher chance of the public sharing a video and it becoming viral. As some companies like GoPro camera have shown a viral video can also become a branded piece of advertising. A viral video of an antelope knocking a biker to the ground was shot on a GoPro camera so GoPro took the video (with the creator’s permission), branded it, edited it and placed it both on their YouTube channel as well as on their site and in their television advertising. This just goes to show the possibilities available to brands who embrace the viral video marketing trend.