Freelance Copywriting, marketing and social media tips
November 5th, 2014 — YouTube
YouTube is a formidable marketing force.
Your customers will love your videos and so with the search engines.
Did you know YouTube is the top video website and second largest search engine in the world?
To help you get more out of your YouTube marketing, here’s an infographic created by QuickSprout and published by Socialmouths:
April 28th, 2014 — search engine optimisation, seo, Video marketing, YouTube
With over 30 million visitors a day, YouTube is the second largest search engine. That’s why it makes sense to house your videos on the platform.
Millions of businesses are making the most of YouTube’s popularity by using it as a repository for their videos that they can then embed within their own website.
Not only do they benefit from YouTube’s search capabilities, but they can also use it to create a channel to which people can subscribe.
It sounds great, but its popularity also has drawbacks – namely competition for rankings and the need for an SEO strategy.
As with all content marketing strategies, every video you put out must be of a high quality and contain content that’s targeted to your audience. Then it comes down to good old-fashioned hard work to optimise your videos for maximum impact.
1. Keywords
You can’t get away from them. Whatever form your online marketing takes, keywords will always have a part to play.
This isn’t a free ticket to keyword-stuff your videos, far from it, but it is important to make sure you use words that relate to your video’s content. A great tool to use for this is YouTube’s own keyword tool.
2. Video title
Just as with your articles and blog posts, your video title will have a big impact on your click rate.
Make sure it’s short, attention grabbing and uses one or two of your keywords. But you only have 120 characters to play with, so you may have to get creative (just so long as the title is relevant to the video’s content).
3. Description
Sadly, Google can’t watch your video so the only way it will know what it’s about is through your description. Again, use your keywords (sparingly) and, if it’s a long video, add a transcription to give your SEO a boost.
4. Tags
Video tags serve the same purpose as those you use for blog posts. They help YouTube understand what you’re video is about and, by using keywords (plus locations, categories etc.) they will boost it’s search-ability.
5. Links
Links back to your video are as important as links to your website. In the same way as they help your Google rankings, links back to your video will help its YouTube rankings.
6. Thumbnail
Not as obvious is attractiveness of your video’s thumbnail.
Find an image that will appeal to your audience to try and attract clicks.
It’s also worth taking note of the factors that YouTube takes into account when it comes to rankings its videos:
Popularity appears to be a recurring factor, therefore it’s worth adding another factor to help you improve your rankings – social sharing. Getting your videos out on social media regularly will boost your audience and have a positive impact on your rankings.
