Videos and YouTube continue to be powerful for SEO and Online Marketing in 2016. Videos are the most engaging form of content. Google knows this. That is why they bought YouTube and continue to believe in it.
YouTube is also the 2nd biggest search engine (more searches than Yahoo and Bing).
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Using videos has many benefits that go well beyond Search Engine Optimization. Even without those benefits there are some nice rankings boosts you can get when you use videos as part of your digital marketing strategy.
I discuss more of the what and why in the following video:
A quick preview of my video on YouTube about Video and YouTube SEO…hah! 🙂
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Approximate Transcript:
Hi, David Hood here, the Dallas SEO Geek and this video is about Video SEO in 2016. Videos have been powerful for a very long time. I mean Google bought YouTube … What was it, about ten years ago, and so they’re highly invested in YouTube. They still love YouTube and I think the primary reason is because videos are engaging. When you think about the kind of content that you can interact with online, the most rich content that is the easiest to consume is videos. I can just press a button, sit back and get video and audio together as opposed to like reading an article and you just kind of read.
There’s nothing wrong with that and there’s a place for that, but video is the most engaging. It’s rich media and it’s actually pretty easy to make. I love making videos. There’s so many benefits to it, but one of the main benefits is that they’re engaging to the user and this is what Google wants. When you send someone to a place that has video, let’s say on your website or if someone goes directly to your video and they sit back and they watch it for five or ten minutes, that’s extremely valuable. Google sees that and they recognize, “Wow, this person is spending a lot of time on there. It must have answered their question. We’re going to send more visitors there.”
Creating and engaging content is very important, not just from an SEO standpoint, but from a conversion standpoint as well. The more people, the longer that someone is exposed to your brand, the more you can keep them engaged with your website or any of your properties or any of your videos in any place, the better it is going to be for you to sell to them. They’re going to feel more and more comfortable potentially buying from you. Yes, I do use YouTube as the centerpiece because it is owned by Google, so they do give it a little bit of benefit, but I mean in a lot of ways it is the most authoritative video sharing site on the internet, by far.
In fact, it’s the second biggest search engine in the world. It gets more searches than Bing and Yahoo. You can actually rank videos in the organic search results regularly and you can also rank the YouTube video search results. It’s better in the organic in a lot of cases, but in some cases, it can be great in the video because there’s some things that gets searched a lot in YouTube. I recommend making each video about a specific topic. One long video can be okay, but from an SEO standpoint, it’s better to break that big video up into smaller pieces that address a specific question, so you can answer one specific question or one specific problem or one specific very narrow topic for that video.
It’s going to make it easier to rank for those specific search phrases and there are lots and lots of those search phrases for you to target. Not only that, but it’ll help you, you channel rank for some of the bigger search phrases as well. Let’s take a quick look at some of the stuff that you need to change in the video. Let’s see, I’ll go ahead and I’ll make this italics, so these are the things that we kind of look at primarily for our video. We’ll go to one of my latest videos, so here’s the title. I think if I click it … No, sorry. Oh, here’s the title.
This is the most important part of what you’re trying to rank for. I’m obviously not trying to rank this for a specific search phrase, but if I were to try to rank it for Dallas Plumbing, Dallas Water Heater Repair, okay. Let’s say we’re doing Dallas Water Heater Repair. Then … Or maybe a better would be like Dallas, website penalty recovery, I might do that. Sometimes you don’t necessarily need the Dallas, I’m going to put it more in here or I might put it towards the end, sometimes it’s Dallas…
I’ve got the Dallas right there, so website penalty recovery, okay, so this … The earlier in the title that you put the search phrase you want to rank for, the easier it is going to be to rank for that. That’s really important. It’s also one of the first things that the user sees and they see it in search results. Now the description. There’s a lot that you can do with the description. I want to talk about just a few things real quick. I’m going to make it bigger.
First, I try to get a call to action as early as possible, so you can see right here I’m telling the user, the visitor what to do and you get them to do what you want them to do when you tell them what to do. Ideally, I would actually probably have that above there, but I think this still does show up above the [fold 00:04:44], at least the start of it so they can see essentially my free offer. You can write text here. You can write quite a bit of text. You can write 200, 300, 400 words if you wanted to. I can’t remember what the maximum is, but you can write basically a full article and that’s definitely going to help you rank.
I don’t usually do that, but the video itself will rank better with an article and it will be a little bit more engaging. I don’t think very many people click on the More and read the whole article, but it can be useful. Then what you can do here is you can link out to your different properties and this can drive the traffic through here. These are also valuable links, they are no-follow, which essentially reduces their overall power significantly, but it’s still a link from YouTube that Google sees and it indexes very quickly and that can drive traffic.
I’ve started using hashtags lately and I think you get some extra value out of it so you can put the additional things on there. Maybe I’ll do a search. Let’s do SEO search engine, it’s like when I put a space in there, maybe it doesn’t catch it all away. Let’s see. You can put tags in there, you can also see my address, put my address so it’s essentially a business citation. I’ve also got the location to go to the Advanced Settings. Let’s change this back. Here we go. I would go to Advanced Settings, there is a location, it looks like you got to set it … Oh, wait there we go.
It’s right here, for some reason it was displaying something weird, but it actually had the location right, so you can put in an address and it will go there. I suggest you do that. That’s kind of another form of doing or putting your information in if you’re wanting to rank in maps, that can help just a little bit. Another tip that I think is really important to keeping your videos engaging is putting your brand name somewhere in the tags, so when someone watches one of your videos, if they have more, they will show up in the suggested videos right next to it because of the tags.
Then I generally am pretty conservative with the tags and don’t try to tag up too many, maybe three to four tags that are relevant to exactly what you’re trying to target and also kind of your higher level markets. You can see here, just search engine optimization, 2016 Dallas SEO Geek. I would put … Again, if it was doing website penalty recovery, I would make that a search phrase, whatever the main thing that I want to rank for, I’m going to put some variation in there. Probably once or twice.
Now there are ways to do live events and it is a … Oops I made some changes I don’t like. These can help you rank more … It’s still, there we go, but they’re kind of a pain to do and but that there’s some … And they’re just kind of releasing it, so it has … It can be a little bit buggy and hard to do and if you have a really poor internet connection, you definitely shouldn’t do this, but it can give your videos some extra juice and there’s some extra options available to you there in terms of kind of the ways in which you can promote it.
This is definitely not going to be a live streaming video training. You could watch, too, that can be three, four hours long. I generally don’t do it a whole lot because it’s kind of a pain and it doesn’t always come out to be the highest quality, but you do get a ranking boost and if you’re internet connection is fast, that extra ranking boost can be the difference. Okay, so that’s all I got and I appreciate you watching. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.
If you’d like for me to help you do video SEO, go to my website DallasSEOGeek.com. Click on the Get Free SEO Analysis or click on the Discovery Form, it takes you to the same place. Fill out a Discovery Form so that I can know more information about your business and I will give you a call and we’ll go from there, so thank
