A little known fact is that YouTube is the world’s second biggest search engine behind Google itself. More searches are performed at YouTube than at Yahoo.com, or live.com!
Businesses who leverage YouTube often use videos for product demonstrations, how something is manufactured, “how to do xyz” or indeed industry commentary.
By the way, our keyword research shows that there are a LOT of people who type “how to” do something. Think about how you can optimise the title of your YouTube video to include “how to…”.
The way we help our clients leverage YouTube is by taking their videos (no matter how boring!) and replicating them in their own YouTube channel. It never ceases to amaze me how the most boring videos still get a tonne of views!
Last year we instructed a client to actually make a video. He dutifully went ahead and did so, but was a bit grumpy about the amount it cost ($1800 for around two minutes). We optimised his YouTube video page and started linking to it.
It now ranks top three at Google UK for a highly competitive and targeted key phrase! The amount of views his video gets is astounding- about 1500 per day. The traffic he receives from the YouTube page is also very respectable, and from Google Analytics reports we can see that it also delivers good conversion rates and revenue. Well worth the investment!
The following techniques aren’t the be-all and end-all, but will help get your videos viewed more and (hopefully) deliver more traffic to your site so you can improve your sales!
Create a YouTube channel in the country you’re targeting! This is critical. If your market is in Britain, then create a channel at www.youtube.co.uk.
Your videos must be uploaded into the correct category.
All uploaded videos should have an optimised title. Use keyword research tools to discover the best key phrase to use in your title.
All uploaded videos should have a link in the description to https://www.yourwebsite.com.au so that visitors who are viewing the video at YouTube have an opportunity to click on a hyperlink and visit the website. The link must be the first content written in the description as there is only one line of description displayed (unless you “open the description”). The https:// must be included in the link, otherwise it will not be active (clickable).
The description should have at least 50 words so that the page is deemed relevant by YouTube and, importantly, by Google itself.
The tags should contain the main words in the video title.
It helps if staff and friends “favourite” the video and create comments about it.
The key to Google Universal ranking success is linking using optimised anchor text. Google is using its existing ranking algorithm to assess the relevance of video content. If a YouTube video has optimised titles, heading, body text and tags, then this is a great first step towards having the video appear in the Google search results.
For a successful linking strategy the video should be linked to from a variety of other sources. I recommend you create links on various pages within your own site which point to the YouTube videos using anchor text that accurately describes what the videos are about. Ideally the anchor text should replicate the titles of each video.
Post the videos on social media websites like Digg to share with others and create more links and traffic to the video.
If the video has a geographic location, it should be added to Google Maps during the YouTube upload process to enable users to play the video in context within the Google Maps environment. See the screenshot below.
The next screenshot shows the results on Google Maps.
YouTube can create risks for your business on several fronts. Obviously YouTube is a social media environment which means that it can sometimes be possible for users to write comments regarding the video content you upload.
That said, user comments are vital in creating continual optimisation on the YouTube video page. User comments actually create more content on the YouTube page helping with your organic Google ranking. They also seem to help your rank at YouTube itself.
Hopefully the steps above will get your videos seen by more people!
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Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.
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