There are many websites that allow you publish your videos on such as Hulu, Yahoo! Video and BlogTV, but YouTube is the runaway market leader.
Over four billion videos are viewed every single day; over 800 million unique users visit each month; and over three billion hours of video are watched each month.
The website is the front runner to video promotion and is the second most popular search engine after Google, who now own the site. But there is much more to just making a video and publishing it on YouTube; the key is to optimise the videos too.
If you want to improve your brand’s presence online and attract new visitors to the site, you can enhance your videos and boost the exposure and search engine optimisation with our top tips.
On page elements
The titles and meta descriptions are important aspects for SEO on landing pages and this relates to YouTube videos too. You can place targeted keywords in the titles and descriptions to optimise for your target search terms.
By varying this across the YouTube page and your own site, you can target several keywords and you can even add the URL to your own website in the video description so audiences know how they can find you.
Share
One of the main reasons why consumers use social networking sites is to connect, communicate and share information. People love watching high quality content but they also like sharing this, so distribute your own video by embedding the video and posting it on your own site.
You and external site owners can publish this content on a static page or in a blog post. You can also share it on your business’s Facebook page, or Twitter account. Socially sharing the content on sites such as Stumble Upon, Digg, and Google Plus is great for SEO, so try to produce video content that you would share on your own page.
By having the videos published on various sites, you expand the potential reach and it is a great cross-promoting method because your subscribers on your YouTube channel will be directed to your site and vice versa.
Other ways to optimise your videos include;
- YouTube’s PPC (pay-per-click) platform. This is relatively low risk because you only pay for the views you receive so if the marketing method fails and you generate zero views, it won’t cost you anything.
- Build up a community. YouTube is fundamentally a video hosting website but it also allows you to engage with readers, interact and form relations. So as well as posting videos, add friends, comment on their videos and socially network to build up a strong social media profile.
- Respond to videos. Further to commenting on people’s videos, another trend is to post video responses. This could be a video about another video you have watched and your opinions on it. This is hugely relevant because you are interacting with others and by doing so you can possible bring new viewers to watch your own video.
Analysis
They often say that the only way you can learn is from making mistakes so if you do suffer a flop, utilise this knowledge and grow for the next video you make. YouTube’s analytics solutions are really insightful and you can use them to work out what worked and what could have been done better. So take advantage of the tool and use the feedback for future video campaigns.
You can also improve your skills and the success rate with A/B testing and another paid service is Raven Tools. This lets you find everything out form the number if views and comments to tracking it over several channels. Monitor it over a period of time and learn what people like watching so you can do more of this!
Duration
Mini clips are far more successful than videos that are 10 minutes long so the key is that shorter is better. Do you have a lengthy clip that you simply cannot condense? Just split it up into multiple videos.
Expertise
The best way you can optimise your videos is to ensure they are made to a high quality and professional standard. First impressions really do count so hire expert video production services to make sure it doesn’t look amateur.
We at Custard Media work with a company called Vidify who specialise in making high quality corporate videos, and from dealing with them we understand the need to present your brand in the right way – and video is a great way to do that.
