As video becomes a larger part of your online marketing efforts, it’s important to recognize the SEO benefits of using video throughout your website. First let’s get to the bottom of what video SEO is and is not.
Video SEO means using video to get your website seen more often in Google, Yahoo, Bing etc… In many ways it’s the same as optimizing your pages with good meta titles and meta descriptions. It’s important to surround your videos with a meta title, description, and tags. Search engines now index video just like they do web pages. However, you need to submit a video sitemap to Google and an mRSS feed to other search engines like Yahoo.
Search engines increasingly use “blended” search results after inquiries are made. This means that not only are the most relevant websites showing up as always, but also images, news, blogs, and video. If you optimize your videos properly, your site can appear in organic results AND in blended search with a video thumbnail that is more visual and compelling for searchers to click on.
What About Youtube?
What about it? It’s important to understand what Youtube is and what it isn’t. Youtube is an audience. It’s probably one of the largest audiences in the world. It’s important to get your content in front of this audience as long as your content is relevant to them. Youtube is not a guaranteed source of traffic nor is it an automatic “viral” marketing tool. Very few videos go viral on Youtube. The ones that do rarely have anything to do with products and services being marketed to the audience.
Should you put your videos on youtube and on your website? The answer isn’t as simple as it seems. Search engines look for unique content. What if you have the exact same video playing on your site, Youtube, Vimeo, Daily Motion, Revver, Viddler etc….which one of those videos is going to show up in the search results? Hopefully it’s the one on your site so that users can not only watch the content, but also convert into customers.
It’s important to get an audience, but it’s more important to bring that audience to a place where they can convert on your audience. Whenever possible, use unique content for the different social media sites from that which is on your website. Ideally the content should be shorter and be more of an invitation to visit your site to learn more about the offer.
In short, don’t let Youtube compete with your site for traffic. Remember, Youtube wants traffic because they make money off of advertising. Don’t let them make more money off your content than you do.
What Video SEO is Not
There are technologies on the horizon which will look inside video content and determine what that video content is about. So if there is a red truck, it will be able to determine that and allow searchers to find videos of red trucks based on the content itself. However, those technologies are primitive and are not a part of the main search engines today. It’s important to ensure your video content is relevant and fresh, but video SEO is still about meta data surrounding the video, not the pixels inside the video itself.
Video Video Video
When done properly, video can increase conversion and traffic to your site. It’s more work, but it will pay off. Create videos about all your products, services, and brands. Create videos about targeted search phrases you want to rank well for. It will pay off. Video search results are not nearly as competitive as organic search, so get a jump on it now. In the near future, anyone without video on their site will be at a major disadvantage. In fact, many websites are already at a disadvantage because their competitors recognize the power of video while they do not.
Don’t delay any longer. Get video and get lots of it. We live in a new economy that rewards those who go the extra mile and provide unique, compelling work. Video is not easy, but it’s worth it. If you want a free consultation today, email me personally @ mark at buystream.tv and I’ll let you know which direction I feel you should go.
Buystream now offers video SEO tools that allow you to automatically create video sitemaps and mRSS feeds so you don’t have to create them by hand.