BY BRUCE NEWMAN
Video marketing is rapidly gaining in importance and popularity. Vendor videos now influence more than 65 percent of business purchase decisions. On YouTube alone, more than 6 billion hours of video are watched each month and 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute. Furthermore, YouTube is now the second-most frequently used search engine after Google, and various parameters, such as the number of people who watch a video in its entirety, can greatly influence search engine ranking.
It is always important to realize that search engine optimization should never be the goal of any campaign. It is a tool that is used by a campaign to drive people to a landing page, website or to take action. You can have the greatest SEO in the world, but if your content or video is poor, it won”™t matter. SEO might drive people to where you want them to go, but it is still great content that produces results.
Not surprisingly, many of the principles behind article optimization also exist for videos. Since search engines are unable to “read” videos (or images), they still utilize the keywords and content in your title and description along with social factors, such as the number and quality of comments, as part of their ranking strategies. The quality of the keywords is dependent on their relevance to the content.
Similarly to an article, the title of your video is of great importance. It must be descriptive, enticing to the potential viewer and contain relevant keywords and phrases. Changing even one or two words in a title can have an enormous effect on the percentage of people who view your video. For example, in a book I recently read, the developer of a video tested four different titles. Nothing else changed on the page, and yet one title showed a 134 percent higher conversion rate than the control (simple) title. Since he was selling a product with his video, he more than doubled his sales by merely changing a few words in one short sentence.
The video description is also very important. Since many of the search engines only display a limited number of characters in their results, it is very important to include keywords and some very enticing content in the first 100 characters. And here”™s a useful hint: Put the URL (or domain name) in the beginning of the description. Not only do you get additional placement benefit of your URL, but you provide a location for both video and description viewers to easily find you from the text.
One powerful feature found only on YouTube is annotations. Annotations allow you to easily add comments and links to any of your videos. Whether or not they help SEO is currently being debated, but the effective use of simple content embedded in a video can greatly increase user interaction and enhance the potency of your message. One additional and very nice feature of annotations is that they allow you to include a clickable link to an external URL from within the YouTube video.
Tags are also very important for video optimization. People can find your video by using tags, similar to keywords used for blogs. For this reason, tags should contain relevant keywords and phrases along with words that reflect your video channel. No more that twelve tags should be used for any video.
Having a well-crafted and consistent video channel that reflects your brand will also increase the number of viewers and ranking of your video and channel. If you are known as an expert in a particular niche, then people who find one of your videos (and presumably like it) will be motivated to view more and learn more about you, usually by first checking out your website. Platforms like Vimeo actively promote the use of channels around a common theme. It”™s how Zappos drives over 250,000 monthly viewers from its YouTube channel to its website.
Video optimization requires careful planning and thought, particularly since the number of videos being produced and uploaded is increasing so rapidly. Fortunately, they can be promoted on many social media platforms in their entirety or divided into smaller “bite-sized” clips that can be slowly fed to an audience. While still dependent on the quality of content, when done properly, video and its optimization will significantly enhance the prevalence of your brand while improving your traffic and business.
Bruce Newman is the vice president at The Productivity Institute L.L.C. He specializes in content creation and digital marketing. Most of his time is spent in the creation of content for webinars and their promotion, email marketing, education and social media campaigns for clients. He is also the creator of the highly popular The Complete Webinar Training Course. He can be reached at bnewman@prodinst.com.
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