Leveraging YouTube

Videos can be one of the most powerful marketing tools you can utilise in your online marketing campaigns. Research has shown videos have a higher engagement than other media types and, with YouTube being owned by Google, your videos have the opportunity to rank highly on search engine results.

Learn more about how to design and market videos to increase your brand awareness in this blog post.

Why Are Videos So Effective At Marketing?

Videos can be very effective at marketing because they play directly on the psychology of the audience. One of the main reasons they work so well is that your audience will pay attention to faces. The human brain is hard-wired to look at another human’s face to interpret information. This includes whether or not the message in the content is trustworthy.

In the day of big data, there is no richer information than speech. A video which includes someone talking is also more captivating to the audience, allowing them to take in larger amounts of information than is available through text.

Emotions can be better conveyed and will resonate with your audience more in video format.

Finally attention is also grabbed through movement. When the audience sees animated individuals on the screen it conveys strong emotions, which are catchy and excite.

Why Should You Use YouTube?

YouTube has many advantages over other video hosting platforms. One of the biggest advantages is YouTube is owned by Google, which currently has a huge majority slice of search engine market share. YouTube videos therefore rank very highly in the Google search engine results pages.

Posting to other sites will limit the exposure of your videos. This will make it more difficult for your video to be seen by your audience.

YouTube also has several other advantages. For one, it is the largest social video platform available, and the second largest search engine, after Google itself. The video platform has over 1 billion unique visitors every month. Therefore, using YouTube, your video has immediate access to a significantly large audience.

Another benefit is that with the correct descriptions and keywords your video can be connected to the various other videos. This allows those unfamiliar with your brand to discover and view your videos more easily.

How Do You Get Your Video To Be Noticed?

SEO for YouTube is very complex. The basic SEO components that allow your videos to rank highly on Google and YouTube searches include:

• Title tag information
• Audience retention
• Keywords in the description
• Tags
• Video length
• Number of subscribers after the video has been watched
• The number of comments generated
• How many likes and dislikes the video has

These basic search criteria will help your video rank in relevant searches on YouTube, but it won’t give you the highest rank possible. To get the best results you need to consider some of the more advanced SEO tricks for YouTube:

1. Write Lengthy Descriptions For Your Videos

YouTube and Google use ranking bots to index and rank your video. However, the bots cannot watch, listen or analyse your video. They rely on the description of your video to analyse its relevance to certain search criteria. Providing your videos with lengthy, relevant descriptions gives Google and YouTube confidence in their ranking and the importance of your video.

Ensure your video descriptions are at least 200 words long to get the best results. You could also add a transcription of your video to achieve even greater results – although this may look unattractive to your viewers.

2. Optimise For Video Keywords Not Just Keywords

Keywords for videos are slightly different compared to standard web results. Typing in the search query “fast dogs” in Google might yield blog posts on the fastest dogs in the world or why dogs are so fast. On YouTube that search criteria will result in videos showing fast dogs in action.

Therefore, consider what the keywords are for your video, including what order those words should be written in.

3. Use Online Communities Like Twitter, Facebook And LinkedIn To Drive Traffic

Just like with your website, funnelling traffic to your site should not just be from search engines. Use online communities like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Quora to drive traffic to your website by embedding your YouTube video in updates.

As you build links to your videos, YouTube will pick up on the inbound links and rank your video accordingly, just like inbound links support your website.

When using this method ensure you are sharing videos which people want to view. Your videos should contain valuable or highly entertaining content. Otherwise communities may shun you and your brand.

4. Encourage Subscribing, Sharing And Linking

YouTube’s algorithm includes the number of subscribers and other user metrics to indicate in their calculation. You should encourage viewers to subscribe to your videos, share them and link to them through their own social media channels.

Many professional YouTube channels even employ a tactic of having a responsive screen at the end of the videos to encourage this. The screen also displays other videos by the channel, encouraging the viewer to watch more content and subscribe.

5. Create Playlists

YouTube loves contributors to upload various videos to their channels. They encourage this by rewarding those contributors who post 10 or more videos and create a playlist which contains specific and similar keywords.

If your videos cover several different categories organise them into different playlists based on their keywords.

6. Reply To Popular Videos

When you have achieved success with one video, post a connected video as a reply to that video. This allows Google and YouTube to see the connection and gives greater prominence to both videos.

This also allows greater visibility for the second video, as it will show up underneath the video with good traffic.

Conclusion

Videos are one of the most popular customer interaction methods and YouTube is the host which offers the highest reach. Videos on the site will rank well on YouTube and Google. You can also integrate them on your social media feeds and website. To generate more traffic you should follow the above tips to increase the prominence and performance on search engines and the platform.

Action Steps:

• Re-write all your video descriptions so that they are over 200 words long.
• Re-write your video titles to include ‘video keywords’.
• Create several playlists containing at least 10 videos.