YouTube claims it has over a billion users. That’s almost a third of people who are on the Internet. These same users watch billions of hours daily. Video is one marketing practice that keeps growing, providing an easy and inexpensive way to market online to a larger audience when you leverage a platform like YouTube. To get those views businesses have to use best practices that help get their videos ranked higher by YouTube’s search engine as well as Google’s.
Top 6 Best Practices To Get Your Visual Content Noticed Online
You can put your videos on your own auto parts website, but it is easier to gain wider exposure on YouTube and still have the capability of embedding your videos into your own website, without any penalty. Thus, it makes good sense to optimize the clips for YouTube as well as Google to help get more people sharing your online content quickly. Here’s how to get started:
1. Use Keywords In Important Places – Just like it’s important to use keywords in written content (in titles, subheadings, and within the copy) there is a similar strategy that relies on the title, the tags, and description boxes to add keywords for visual content. Pick keywords that appeal to both YouTube and Google search ranking algorithms or keywords that indicate the subject is something in viewable format.
2. Create a Schema or Map of Your Viewable Content – This tells the crawlers where to go and what’s in your visual content. A schema is an HTML markup format that Google advises to use when putting visual content on your site.
3. Create Entertaining and Relevant Visual Content – Part of the popularity of videos is that they can be fun to watch, so don’t make them boring! The topic you pick should relate to your keywords and your business model. It should be relevant and it should have either an educational or entertainment (or both) slant to it. For instance, the popular radio show CarTalk dominated NPR for decades because the content was relevant to auto enthusiasts interested in car repair advice and jokes. The show eventually ended around the time video started taking over radio and now we see similar YouTube content by Scotty Kilmer. Scotty has almost 1M subscribers that tune into his weekly video posts to gain information about auto repair, tools of the trade and general automotive-geared social banter. He is a mechanic that has garnered himself quite the reputation for being a “go to” when it comes to advice!
4. Don’t Forget to Promote Your Business – It can be distracting to try and film short videos and you can forget that the whole point is to promote your business. It is best practice to always include a way to plug your business within the script, in the description, via name and URL link back to your website and also in social media feeds or profiles where you might be sharing the videos.
5. Make It Easy to Share – Part of putting your video on YouTube is that it makes it easy to share. However, you want to be sure the settings are set for maximum sharing potential. Set the privacy setting to public. Allow comments, comment voting, and responses. Let people rate the content and allow it to be embedded and syndicated too. These settings will help you share your content to a broader audience.
6. Include Social Networking in Your SEO Strategy – Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, and other social networking sites can be ideal ways to start syndicating content on your own. You can even share clips with others and allow them to publish on their social networking feeds. If you want to get really sophisticated with your visual content and create campaigns with multiple channels, use a service like tubemogul.com.
Why YouTube and Video Content Are Here to Stay
Most people can speak 130 words per minute. If you take an approximately 750 word article and convert it to a short speech, you only have to create a 5.8 minute clip. Busy people, who may not have time to read a 750 word article, usually can sneak in a 5 to 6 minute video as they wait in line or eat lunch. That’s why visual content will only get more popular. The time it takes to consume the content is drastically reduced and entertainment value is increased. YouTube is capitalizing on our short attention span and the ability to convey information quickly to a larger audience, but to get ahead of the pack businesses need to understand how to use SEO to position their content so that it ranks highly, is relevant, and entertaining all at the same time.
