Business decision makers LOVE online video because it gives them the most amount of information in the shortest amount of time. Many businesses and corporate marketers realize the power of marketing with online video on YouTube, the web’s 2nd largest search engine, but neglect it because they lack the time or expertise to get started.
Getting found on YouTube will generate leads by targeting the 60% of business executives who would watch an online video before reading text (Forbes Insight Study, Dec 2010). And convert leads into sales from the 40% of people who will visit a company’s website or contact a company via phone after watching a video (eMarketer, Jan 2011).
A well-executed YouTube video marketing strategy will drive new business opportunities by improving your search algorithm rankings to catapult you ahead of your competition and give you ongoing investment returns to your online video production.
Now is the perfect time to establish your firm’s YouTube presence and ensure that your content rises above the crowd with these simple steps.
OPTIMIZE THE VIDEO TITLE
The title of your video is the most important element for video optimization and critical to it being found. Perform some preliminary video keyword research and add them to the title. If you have older videos, go back and optimize your video tags and metadata to reflect changes in your keyword strategy.
INCLUDE URLs IN YOUR DESCRIPTION
This will improve your Google and YouTube algorithm rankings and make it easy for viewers to get more relevant content. Adding at least three URLs in your video SEO rich description. Your homepage URL (ex, http://www.yourdomanin.com), link to product or category landing pages, other videos in your channel and/or a link to your Subscribe button (see direct Subscribe link TIP! below).
CREATE YOUTUBE PLAYLISTS
Organize similar videos in to sets, or playlists. Create YouTube playlists based on highly searched keywords, viewer interest or topics and follow best SEO practices when writing your title and description.
COORDINATE DESCRIPTION AND TAGS WITH CONTEXTUAL SEO
Add your most important keywords at the beginning of your description and within your tags. These should be consistent with the Title of your video and textual SEO keywords on your website to produce best video marketing results. YouTube is always changing their algorithms, but at the time of this publication 15 – 20 VSEO keyword phrase tags are optimal.
DIRECT VIEWERS TO TAKE ACTION
Depending on your goals, direct viewers towards actions you want them to take – Likes, Sharing Comments, Subscribing or website traffic. YouTube, and Google, loves when viewers interact with your content and these actions are key algorithm metrics to get your videos higher search engine rankings.
In the pre-production process, think about making a “YouTube only version” of your videos that include call YouTube’s functionality for Likes, Comments, Sharing and Subscribing.
TIP! – Get subscribers automatically. Use following link structure to automatically subscribe viewers to your channel –
http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=USERNAME for example
http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=MVProductionsNYC
Just like any sound SEO strategy, getting found on YouTube takes research, time and consistency.