Jay Leonard
Since 2007 YouTube videos have had the great benefit of being able to influence the search engine results on page 1 of Google. Many Internet marketers have been using this benefit to their full advantage over the years, but there are still many businesses, brands and bloggers missing out on some fantastic underused YouTube Internet marketing tools. The following article outlines five key underused Internet marketing tips and assesses how they can help to boost your SEO, improve conversion rates and generate higher levels of traffic to your site.
Closed Captions
Closed Captions have been around on YouTube for years, they are by all accounts one very old YouTube feature, yet so many videos lack them. Closed Captions (Transcripts) are not only practically useful by providing a visual aid for viewers hard of hearing, but they also offer a great deal of SEO value. All text fields on YouTube are scanned by both YouTube and Google search engines and the same goes for the text submitted in your Closed Captions. This means you can textually include keywords and phrases within your video content to help your content get found by searching Internet users.
Keep Your Old Videos Updated:
As YouTube videos impact Google searches you want to be on as good terms with the YouTube search engine as possible. One of the easiest and most powerful ways to do so is to keep your old video content updated. Changing video titles, descriptions, tags and adding Closed Captions to old videos are great ways of doing this. Keeping your content updated showcases your Channel to YouTube as being active and useful. YouTube rarely flags up old content in searches, especially content that is not being used, so by maintaining your old content and keeping it fresh you will help to give it a great chance of appearing in the search results.
Use It As A Social Platform:
YouTube has and always will be a social platform, yet so many users forget that. Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn are all very popular social media websites, but that doesn’t mean YouTube is any less of a social website. Its nature as a ‘sharing’ website has always brought about huge amounts of audience interaction in its video content, and that shows no sign of stopping. Become Friends with other users, Subscribe to other users content, Comment, Video Respond and Like/Dislike content similar to your videos niche. By being an active user you will help to encourage activity and engagement with your own content. This will give you great promotional benefits and help to spread the awareness of your video content across the web and get the message it’s portraying out to the world.
Use Calls To Action:
YouTube Annotations are ironically an ‘overused’ YouTube feature, but an incredibly ‘underused’ marketing tool. Annotations can be carefully placed in your Internet video content to give viewers extra pieces of information, whether it’s a website URL, a link to another video or an important call to action. One of the biggest difficulties of using a video to market content is to then send traffic from that video to a desired location. By using calls to action in your Annotations you can make sure viewers get essential instructions and encourage them to go beyond watching your video, and get them to check out your website, article or download.
Embed Your Videos
A stigma attached to using a site like YouTube as a marketing tool is that it’s a giant diversion, that it takes audiences away from blogs and websites and onto a very distracting media platform. This is actually a very good point, and in fact quite a true one. Yet, so many users neglect to use the embedding ability YouTube gives videos in order for users to promote it on their own websites. Many websites and blogs get a huge amount of traffic already and have no need to fragment their audience by sending them to other websites. Embedding their YouTube video on their website is a perfect way to use the power of Internet video and still keep audiences on their site.
Although, one of the biggest pitfalls with this approach is that so many people forget to Sitemap their embedded video on Google. A Sitemap informs the Google search engine that your embedded video content is actually on your website, which gives both video and your website essential SEO power. If you want Internet users to check out your video content on your website then creating a Sitemap is essential. Especially if you don’t want them to end up on that pesky ‘distracting media platform’.
Summary
So there you have it, five essential underused YouTube Internet marketing tips. By using these tips and tools to your full advantage you can help pick up extra SEO value for your videos and boost traffic to your site and your newsroom. And encourage those sought after conversion rates to increase.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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Hi, interesting read. However, you cannot drive traffic to external destinations using Annotations on YouTube. For this purpose, in order to get a CTA in the video, you need to activate it as a promoted video in AdWords too. This means you have to bid for certain keywords, but then again, you don’t need to win the bid (a $0.01 bid also works).
Further clarification: annotations do not allow for external links to be included.
Never thought about spicying up the older videos and adding the transcriptions in each video for SEO. Thanks