Have you thought about using YouTube to promote your business? Pretty good idea, considering YouTube is by far the world’s largest and most widely used video sharing website.
By 2017, there were more than 400 hours of content uploaded to YouTube each minute, and one billion hours of content watched by users every day.
In addition, it receives more than 15 billion visitors per month, which is far more than Vimeo, Yahoo Videos, and similar video sites. As such, small business owners and entrepreneurs can harness the power of YouTube by using it to promote their products and services.
Not convinced? Here are some reasons you should add videos into your marketing mix: https://old.contentfirst.marketing/video-marketing/
Of course, the key is getting traffic to your video. If no one ever watches your video, it’s not going to have much of an effect at driving sales.
Luckily for you, we have some ideas to share on how you can optimize your experience with YouTube. Here are some tips about basic SEO work that will encourage your videos to rank higher, resulting in more traffic.
Tips for Getting Viewers to Your Business’ YouTube Channel
The video’s title is your hook
Arguably, the single most important step in optimizing a YouTube video is to choose a relevant title and description. You can make it as relevant as possible to your target sales prospects. Offering a solution to a problem is extremely relevant to your viewers, for example. A how-to video is also highly searched for.
The title should be catchy and to the point, conveying the basic idea of what your video is about. Ideally, it should also include one or more of your target keywords, although you shouldn’t stuff it with keywords just for the sake of trying to rank higher.
The description can be a bit longer, but it should also focus on the basic idea of your video.
Want to rank even higher with SEO? Add a link to your business’ website in the video’s description.
Another key for video traffic is keyword use
Don’t underestimate the importance of adding keywords to your YouTube videos.
While they aren’t required, using them will almost certainly prove beneficial in helping your video rank. When a visitor performs a search on YouTube.com, they will be shown “relevant” videos based on a combination of titles, descriptions and keywords.
In other words, your video will be more visible if you include keywords.
To add keywords, simply type them into the keyword box at the bottom of the page after uploading a video.
Not sure what we mean by keywords? Just think of it this way: What are your customers searching for on the web to help them solve a problem? The words you can imagine them typing to find solutions are the key words.
Why transcripts are important for higher rankings
Many YouTube users overlook the use of transcripts. As you may already know, a transcript is nothing more than text of an audio or video clip (video clip in the case of YouTube).
How can transcripts yield higher search rankings for your video?
Search engines are unable to read the audio embedded in videos, but they can read text-based transcripts. As you can see (or read in this case!), including transcripts will help find your video faster and give it higher rankings.
Embedding your videos to promote your business even more
Once you’ve uploaded a video to YouTube, click the Share button followed by the Embed button to copy the embed code. You can then paste this code into your websites or even the blogs on your sites to display your video.
Studies have shown that videos with a higher number of embeds rank higher than videos with few embeds.
Need some ideas on how to make a video to drive traffic to your site? Read this post: https://old.contentfirst.marketing/video-important-brand-content/
Have any other YouTube optimization tips that you would like to share? Let us know in the comments section below!
