Take Advantage of the Next Big Wave in Web Marketing – Video SEO
Today, one of the hottest trends on the web and for e-commerce is to use video on your website – to showcase how a product is used, to highlight its strongest features and to depict more powerful testimonials. In the recent past, video didn’t gain much traction because they were largely ignored by the search engines. Well folks, the game has changed.
Google’s universal search format blends video as well as blogs, news, maps and other vertical search content into its results. Video thus becomes content and is now searchable. The other key video trend is the growth of broadband. As a result, advertisers, marketers and e-tailers are using more video-based content. And with the popularity of YouTube, user-generated videos are being viewed by hundreds of millions of members watching literally billions of videos a month.
Google and SEO
With this new development in organic search, it is no longer enough to post a video. Video can be viewed as content it optimized correctly for search engines (Video SEO). Most importantly, in relation to Google, video SEO is quite different than standard SEO . Google searches the entire web for content (text), but only searches Google Video and YouTube for video.
Your competition is fewer and your SEO results will be more effective. Now once you get your video onto search engines, it is critical to link back to your own site so you get more traffic and more ROI. Remember if they don’t click back to your site, you don’t get more business.
Formula One for Success
TubeMogul has created a simple but effective formula to position your videos online to have the greatest exposure and impact. They suggest spending 50% time on the actual video production and creation, 15% of time on creating metadata (keywords, tags, etc) 20% of time on choosing the correct thumbnail (the single image that draws people to view the video), and the remaining 15% of your efforts on promotion and marketing of the video once it is online.
In Summary
Online video is a powerful and results driven marketing tool because of its viewability, SEO and measurement values. In order to produce a successful online video / campaign, certain steps need to be taken. First, choose content that is both engaging and elicits an emotional response with the viewer; second, SEO is critical for people to find your video (remember, the more eyeballs, 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.