Take advantage of the next big wave in web marketing – Video SEO
One of the hottest trends on the web and in e-commerce today is using videos on your website to show how a product is used, highlight its strongest features, and display more powerful testimonials. In the recent past, video didn’t gain much traction because they were largely ignored by search engines. Well folks, the game has changed.
Google’s universal search format combines videos, blogs, news, maps, and other vertical search content into its results. The video thus becomes content and is now searchable. The other key video trend is the growth of broadband. As a result, advertisers, merchants, and e-retailers are using more video-based content. And with the popularity of YouTube, user-generated videos are viewed by hundreds of millions of members who watch literally billions of videos a month.
Google and SEO
With this new development in organic search, posting a video is no longer enough. The video can be viewed as properly optimized content for search engines (Video SEO). Most importantly, relative to Google, video SEO is quite different than standard SEO. Google searches for content (text) all over the web, but it only searches for videos on Google Video and YouTube.
Your competition is less and your SEO results will be more effective. Now, once you get your video on search engines, it’s critical to link to your own site for more traffic and more ROI. Remember that if they don’t click back to your site, you won’t get any more business.
formula one for success
TubeMogul has created a simple yet effective formula for positioning your videos online for maximum exposure and impact. They suggest spending 50% of the time producing and creating the actual video, 15% of the time creating metadata (keywords, tags, etc.), and 20% of the time choosing the right thumbnail (the single image that draws people to watch the video) and the remaining 15% for your efforts in promoting and marketing the video once it’s online.
In summary
Online video is a powerful and results-oriented marketing tool due to its visibility, SEO, and measurement values. In order to produce a successful online video/campaign, certain steps must be followed. First, choose content that is engaging and elicits an emotional response from the viewer; second, SEO is essential for people to find your video (remember, the more eyes, the more traffic/business); third, select a thumbnail to separate you from the crowd and draw viewers into your video; and finally, use various online communities to go viral with your message.
