How to Improve YouTube SEO Efforts
Writing by Brick Marketing in SEO
If you want your business to succeed online and with SEO in particular, you need to create content that can be optimized and shared. Many business owners and marketers are catching on to this content marketing /inbound marketing initiative and are setting up blogs and maintaining an active presence in social media. While this may have been enough to get noticed years ago, now that “everybody” is doing it, it’s a lot harder. One area of opportunity that is still largely untapped when it comes to content marketing efforts for SEO is video marketing. YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google and there are many people out there that would prefer to watch something to learn rather than read something.
Businesses are hesitant to get involved with video marketing on YouTube for a variety of reasons. It certainly takes some effort and resources to create a good video and this is enough to scare them off. If you are willing to spend some time and money, a collection of good video content can help separate your business from the rest.
What’s important to understand is that video marketing is really only getting started once you’ve done the filming and editing. A video is only useful if people watch it. YouTube videos appear in both a traditional web search and a video search within Google. Of course, like a blog post or any other kind of written content it will take time to get your videos appearing prominently in the search engines. YouTube videos are ranked based on trust which is based on the number of views of the video, links to the video from trusted sources, and the engagement level of the video (Likes, Comments, etc.).
In order to build this trust it’s important not only to share and promote the video on your website, blog, social media channels, and within email newsletters but also to include and optimize all of the text information that goes along with the video within YouTube for the search spiders to crawl since the spiders can’t actually “see” the video.
One option is to transcribe the video and upload the text file along with the video. If you are going to go this route, it’s recommended to take the time to transcribe it yourself. YouTube has a feature that is available to some users that transcribes a video for you, but it’s somewhat unreliable. If the wrong words or phrases are in there, it could result in the wrong traffic. If you are going to include a transcription, you will need to think about SEO when creating the script for the video.
Whether you are including a transcription or not, each video should have a customized and optimized title and description. Incorporate keywords for SEO, but the title and description also help to “sell” the video and get people interested enough to click on it. Be sure to include a link back to your website and a company phone number in the description so that viewers can easily find more information. Select a category that is the best fit for your video content and add a few keywords as the video tags which further tells people (and Google and YouTube) what the video is about and related to so that it can be found in related searches.
If your video allows comments, be sure to monitor them. The engagement level of a video is a ranking factor, but more importantly it establishes a relationship with current and potential clients or customers. Remember, you aren’t just another person trying to get a laugh on YouTube. You are doing this on behalf of a business and you need to be professional and respond to questions or concerns that appear in the comments section.
Creating marketing videos for YouTube can be challenging, but if you are willing to put in the work these videos can help get your business noticed and improve your search presence.
