Video Marketing and SEO, 11 things you may not be doing.

Video Marketing is an aspect of online marketing that many people overlook. Video is without a doubt the content on your website that can have the largest impact. Yet many people spend hours optimizing their on page text, and never think about the optimization they need to be doing for video.

Where one minute of video has the same impact as 1.8 million words on a website, it needs to be optimized. In fact without knowing it, you can be blocking the search engines from reading your video content in the first place.

This is where Video Marketing comes in. If video has such a large impact on search, traffic, and conversions, it needs to be found in order to work for your business. So here are my video marketing tips that you may not be doing.

Optimize the Content

1.)    Write a script

Even if your script is only bullet points of the things you want to talk about, make sure you write something out. Your video will be so much easier to optimize, if you have optimization on your mind during the planning process.

2.)    Keywords exist for video too

Do keyword research and know how your customers describe your product, then describe it tha way. You may want to sound smart or expert, but if you use words your customers don’t, they will never find your video.

3.)    Look little

Things like video file names and descriptions are often overlooked by your competitors. If you do them right, you will be one step ahead.

4.)    One word, transcript

Search engines don’t watch video, so you need a transcript. Whether you write it yourself, or use captions on the video, let them know what your video is talking about.

5.)    Video Sitemaps

A video sitemap does a lot of things for your video and for your search engine rankings.

• Makes it easier for videos to be found by the search engines
• Makes views of your video that come from search results play on your page instead of youtube
• Your search results will show a video thumbnail on the results page, which will lead to an extra 2 of 5 people clicking on your link.

6.)    Schema.org markup

This is just a form of microdata HTML that lets you give more information for the search engines to use when they look at your video. Basically another chance to say what the video is about.

Optimize the Experience

7.)    Make it great

The goal of using video is to catch attention. If your content is awesome, people will like, share, remember, check out your website, etc. If your content is bad, they will go somewhere else. Never sacrifice user experience, it always comes first.

8.)    Make it social

When people love your awesome video what do they do with it? They share it online so their friends can see.  That means that your video reaches more people. If you also actively network and expand your reach, your video will be seen more, shared more, and seen more again.

9.)    Post it where it will be seen.

People don’t get on Twitter or Pintrest to watch some video. They do watch video on Facebook, and really watch video on Youtube. Put the video where it counts. (on your website too)

Optimize your Effort

10.)Do what you can, not what you cant

If you don’t have anyone on your staff that is a writer, videographer, youtube marketer, or anything else you need, hire it out. Save your time for what you are good at and let the experts do what they do best. They are the experts

11.)Post your video on Youtube first. That way they host it, you get links from them on your site(very good thing), and you can do more optimization this way such as…

• The captions I talked about in #4 can be done on youtube.
• Proper video titling has gotten our posts more views than the original on occasion
• Embed the video to your site, giving you ranking boosts for the search engines. Plus every view on your website adds to your youtube view count. That will make your video easier to find on Youtube.

*huge point* when embedding a video in Youtube, you need to select the “old” embed code option listed at the bottom or it will embed an iframe, which means the search engines won’t be able to crawl your video content.

Video Marketing is a huge opportunity for growth in companies, but these tips are only a small portion of all of the things that add to video marketing efforts.  It really is a huge field with many complexities that truly take an expert to use properly. If you have any questions and comments about this article feel free to comment below. If you loved this article be sure to like and share it. If you are ready to take your video marketing to the next level contact us now for a free consultation.