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Diversify the kinds of content you produce to attract different types of people: How to and advice-based blog posts should be short and scannable. White papers go more in depth on a given subject, and can be used as bait to get people to sign up for your emails. Videos attract people who learn through audio and visual imagery.
Infographics draw in potential customers who prefer graphical representations of data, rather than only words. Get Your Head in the Clouds Another benefit the Internet has brought small businesses is cloud storage. That includes: Contracts and agreements. Client data. Articles, spreadsheets, and presentations. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn. Posted in Industry Insights 3 Comments Tags: content strategy. David Black says:. December 29, at Osgood says:.
January 2, at January 3, at Leave a Reply Click here to cancel reply. Check with your specific host for guidelines on uploading videos to your website or blog. Video represents a unique place in the SEO world. Companies who want to use video as part of their SEO strategies need to use a combination of traditional SEO techniques as well as new techniques that target video SEO. Before you can begin to optimize your videos for search engines, you need great video content that people want to watch.
Incorporating video into your SEO strategy is pointless unless your videos can be found by search engines, so your next step is to ensure that Google and other search engines can, and do, index your videos properly. There are three basic elements of video search engine optimization that must be used in conjunction with high quality video content: video title, description, and metadata. Brands can create the most stellar videos on the web, but if these basic elements are not optimized as well, no one will ever discover the content. Whose product is it? What is the product? Instead, tell potential viewers what the video is about with a title that gives search engines the context required to start indexing the video properly.
Pro Tip : Even descriptive titles suffer from being too long. The next step is crafting a description that completes the picture.
Descriptions are crucial to video SEO. A video description should be written to attract the attention of search engines and consumers. Write your description like a movie trailer, giving enticing info about the content without spoiling the end. Video increases the chance of a front-page Google result x53, so a strategic video description and message are crucial to your success. YouTube and other video upload sites allow and require you to include other metadata with your video.
Data including genre required , date filmed, author, company, location and keywords help to further cement your video into search indexes in the context you want.
Take time to make sure you have the right words with your post. Consider adding a transcription of your video as another way of sharing the content, often a necessary step for creating subtitles. Thumbnails can be screenshots from the video content or they may be created separately to advertise the video. If your thumbnail is boring, blank, or difficult to make out, people may not click your video. All video sharing sites, including YouTube, allow you to pick from several different thumbnails from your video. Take a moment to consider all of your options and choose an image that represents your video well.
Here are four easy steps to extend and enhance the SEO strength of your videos and website :. Your YouTube channel is a great warehouse for all your videos and will help Google understand more about your company as a whole. But make sure you embed your videos on your own website as well. This helps Google to see not just the video, but the context of related content. The thumbnails of your video can either inspire clicks or send potential customers on their merry way.
The video thumbnail is usually a frame of the video itself. If, however, your thumbnail features a boring frame such as a blank screen or a surplus of words, consumers may assume that the video is uninteresting.
Choose thumbnails with action, color, and excitement. Be sure that all of your videos have keyword-rich descriptions that communicate precisely what the video is about. Descriptions should appeal to search engines and consumers, so a teaser at the end may increase video clicks. Optimizing your video landing pages for search involves many of the same techniques and practices common to content search engine optimization. Keywords should describe the specific video and the message on the page itself, and not be filled with extraneous, irrelevant keywords.
Be SEO smart and only use the words that match the content. Using video social media sites, like YouTube, is a great way to research popular search strings. When you type in a keyword, YouTube will provide a list of common phrases associated with that word. Add transcripts of any videos that you post to your website. Since Google and other search engine algorithms are incapable of assessing the content of a video, a transcription document provides a search engine and human friendly version of your video content that can be indexed.
Including widgets for popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest will make it easier for consumers to share your videos with their friends and followers. Social media activity is a great rankings booster as Google is also using the number of times a video has been shared as a ranking factor. Solve that problem by creating a video sitemap.
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Google enabled sitemap protocol for video content in Creating a video sitemap will tell Google precisely where all of your videos are located and what the content is in each video. A video sitemap is, in essence, a text document that utilizes officially recognized Google sitemap protocol. This text document will have specific video tags embedded within the text. Use Google Webmaster tools to create a sitemap for the videos on your site to be walked through the process with easy-to-follow steps.
Incredibly, each sitemap allows you to provide information for up to 50, video files. Use tags within the sitemap document to state the location of the video landing page, specific video URL, recommended video player, recommended thumbnail for your video, a title and description, video length and even encode alerts that will tell users whether or not content is appropriate for all ages.
Use Google Analytics to see how your website is ranking with Google and track your video views. Given that landing pages with video are known to generate four to seven times more engagement and response rates, you should see a considerable boost. Check your social media accounts to see how often videos were shared via Facebook, retweeted via Twitter or viewed on YouTube. Watch the trends including time of day and day of the week when looking at your data to see if you can get better results by changing when you post and share videos.
Keep a record of different videos and the response each generated to help you understand what types of videos and content performs well within your target audience. Now, how do you get people to actually watch them? Just like blogs, or any other inbound-angled marketing, videos need strategy to fuel their success. Use these publishing and promoting guidelines to get the maximum mileage out of your video marketing. Add video all over your blog and website, to support and supplement your other content.
Instead, consider uploading your video to a video-hosting website such as YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia or Vidyard. This code or codes can be copied and pasted to directly into your website CMS or blog to generate a copy of your video anywhere you want it to appear. Anyone should be able to share it with ease. While there are other places to upload videos, more than one third of all internet users are on YouTube.
So your brand should be too. Use this step-by-step guide to upload your videos to YouTube after exploring the tips and tricks below.
According to a TechCrunch report, million hours of video are watched on Facebook every day. A successful video marketing strategy will include publishing and promoting on all of your social media channels, in the same way you would use them to boost engagement with any other content. Simply follow the guidelines below to get started leveraging video on social, then explore channel-specific information as your video library grows.
Use this channel to post and promote ONLY business-centric or videos or those dealing with the issues of professionals. Try not to be overwhelmed by daily new features, like filters or split screen broadcasting, and focus instead on mastering the art of a smooth, successful live video without a lot of frills. Ensure that you have a good internet connection before the broadcast starts. To boost your live audience, promote your live video well in advance of pressing record.
Make regular social posts including the details of who is going live, when and why, leading up to the event. Facebook Live allows you to stream video on mobile or desktop in real-time to friends and followers.