I was asked this questions a few days ago and I thought it would be a good post. Online video is very good marketing to the success of your small business. First it helps differentiate you from your competitors. You can think of online video like websites 10 years ago…you were unique if you had a website and it gave you the competitive edge. The same applies for online video.
Second, video is an excellent way to get organic traffic as it is much easier to rank in Google video than it is for a web page. Now lets not forget that videos are often placed in the organic listings for specific search terms, YOUR search terms. Online video can also help you rank well in the search engines, especially if you use tags related to your location (your city, state, etc) when publishing your videos on YouTube and other online video sharing sites.
It is also a great way for your customers to get to know you. It gives a personal touch to your brand because your customers can see you, get to know you (especially if you publish videos frequently), and they will get to like you very quickly. This will build the trusting relationship which is needed for customers to buy from you. People buy from people they know, like, and trust. Online video covers all three.
So lets talk about some of the steps you need to take:
- Get the video on your site. Two schools of thought here – host it or use a 3rd party service. Generally, I would go with a 3rd party services as it just is much easier and less headache for you. I would go with one of these options (YouTube, Delve Networks, Ooyala, Brightcove).
- Your strategy – Host, Post or Both? YouTube and Tube Mogul are the biggies. The advantages are – high traffic sites, easy to upload and maintain, and no bandwidth costs. But there are some dis advantages such as – watched outside your site, hard to monetize, no SEO value, limited web analytics, competitor ads can show up, and you length can be limited.
- Ask yourself the following questions to see which is right for you – do you need brand awareness? Are you looking to charge a premium to see these videos? Is your content long or is the quality better than average? Is your video key to driving sales? Do have concerns about bandwidth costs?
- Put short length teaser videos on video sharing sites – 90% of all videos on YouTube are less than 3minutes. Use teaser videos on YT to draw more people to your site.
- Complement your videos on your site with white papers, games, tools, articles, and other stuff.
- Put same videos on video sharing and your site – this could be considered duplicate content but with a quick change of titles, tags, and descriptions it really wont be. It give your the ability to maximize your videos. Just be careful as it could be a little frustrating to your visitors.
- Optimize your videos – A MUST – showcase your brand by using a pre roll, post roll, and logo overlay. Use descriptive filenames – use keyword phrases instead of “M34RRZ7.mp4″. Have a call to action at the end such as website address, phone number, or even coupon code. Add text to your video – Google is really getting sophisticated on their OCR and voice technology so if you put captions and other textual elements into your videos that can help both users and search engines it is a win/win. Finally, have clear audio and content worth talking about.
- Fill out all metadata on each video – yes, this can be a real pain but makes all the difference in the world. Use the same approach you’d employ when optimizing your web pages for SEO; video search is very similar to classic web search. Don’t leave any information blank since this is how the video sharing sites expose your content to their audience.
- Use attention getting titles and descriptions – This helps users know what your video is about and can assist with viral efforts. Using keywords in your title, description and tags will make it easier for users to find and discover your content – and they can help you rank higher for those keywords. But like most things in SEO, don’t go overboard – pick a few relevant keywords/tags to focus on that will have the most relevance to users viewing that video.
- Get social – set up the top social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Many of the video sharing sites make use of these channels, so having a social media channel with organized content gives your account credibility.
- Have a quality thumbnail – It is the first thing the visitor sees and it needs to be relevant.
- Wrap the video with quality and relevant content – having great indexable and meaningful content around the video will help search engines understand the context of the video and related content, give a better opportunity for this content to rank naturally, and is great for your visitors.
- Make a transcript – Some video sharing sites allow you to submit transcripts and some players will give you the ability to share this information. This can help a lot with content since transcripts can be understood and indexed by search engines.
- Have a video XML site map – The most effective way for you to show up in Google.
- Have a MRSS feed – An MRSS is a Media RSS feed and works very similar to a standard RSS feed. Within this feed you have lots of great attributes you can specify for the video including things like tags, that make it easier for the search engines to understand and index your content. You can submit the feed to Google, so as soon as you publish new video it will be pushed to them – just like RSS and your blog!
