Video Marketing Tips and YouTube SEO Checklist for 2018 | Sefati Consulting

Video Marketing Tips and YouTube SEO Checklist for 2018 | Sefati Consulting

Video Marketing Tips and YouTube SEO Checklist for 2018
December 22, 2017
by Al Sefati
If 2017 was the year of growth of mobile SEO and mobile technologies such as AMP, 2018 will be the year of video marketing and Youtube optimization. Make no mistake, we all know YouTube and video marketing has been around for a long time but it has been neglected by many marketers, CMOs, business owners and business leaders. With the advancement of mobile technologies, more video content will be consumed in 2018 than ever before hence if video marketing isn’t part of your SEO strategy, there is a chance you are missing out on a lot of opportunities.
 5 SEO Benefits of YouTube
A Boost in Branded Search: Videos are great for branding. By creating and promoting videos, you can increase awareness of your brand hence you may see a boost in branded search. YouTube, in particular, is very helpful as it is considered to be the second largest search engine in the US. Many consumers start their journey on YouTube and we have seen those brands with active YouTube channel have a stronger brand visibility in search engines.
Increase in Referral Traffic: Videos are a great source of referral traffic when they are hosted on YouTube, social media and other video hosting sites. YouTub should be the primary place to host your videos to earn referral traffic since it has over 1.5 Billions active users watching millions of videos each day.
Easier Google Ranking: YouTube videos rank easier in Google results especially for informational searches. Don’t believe us? Simply Google “how to sing like a pro” and you’ll  find the first results are actually videos.
Searching “How to Sing Like a Pro” you’ll see the top 4 results are video results that get such a great visibility over non-video results.
 
Diversified Content: Content diversification has been an SEO strategy for a long time. Google rewards brands with diversified content by making them more visible in the search results. Generally, when you have the different type of content around the same topic, you tend to rank better for that topic. In this case, if you have a blog post on How to Sing Like a Pro and you have a quality video explaining it, your content will rank easier for those keywords.
More Shares: Good and useful videos are shared more than traditional text-based content. These videos can get shared on social media, via email, messages or even embedded on other websites; A great strategy to earn more traffic, links, and authority to rank better on Google.
5 Effective 2018 YouTube Strategies
The great thing about video marketing is that you can get creative and always see some sort of positive results. But to save time and resources, it is often a good idea to follow proven tactics and strategies adopted by others and below are some strategies that have been working for our clients in 2017 that will continue to be even more effective in 2018:
Sales Pages Videos: Create videos for your primary pages, such as homepage, product and services page. Explain an overview of your product or services and how they can benefit your consumer.
Local Videos: If you are a local business, then creating local videos will help you rank better in local results. Take advantage of local events and popular local places including them in your video if possible.
E-Commerce Videos: In addition to SEO boost, we have seen a tremendous amount of conversion in e-commerce whenever there were product videos available. Product videos give a more visual representation of the product to customers.
Resource Videos: Providing how-to videos are extremely useful for the users especially at earlier phases of consumers decision journey.
Blog Videos: Video blogging or V-Blogging may become more popular in 2018. Video blogging is not a new tactic, but it is becoming more common and our data shows that will increase in 2018.
Live Streaming Videos: Early stages of buyers’ journey, especially for B2B can utilize live streaming to their advantage to improve SEO. YouTube Live Streaming can actually boost your organics rankings because live streamings videos are more engaging and search engines reward you for it. It’s like you’re producing fresh content similar to news and search engines in particular Google like fresh relevant and useful content.
A Practical YouTube SEO checklist  for 2018
As mentioned earlier, we recommend YouTube for your video hosting for the reasons we mentioned above. But posting videos on Youtube isn’t enough! You still have to create quality and useful videos for the users, and make sure your videos are optimized. Below are some useful tips and tricks you can use to optimize your videos to youtube for SEO.
2018 YouTube SEO Checklist
Ensure targeted keywords are in your file names. For example, if keyword is “How to Sing Like a Pro”, the name of the file should be “how-to-sing-like-pro.mov”
Ensure targeted keywords in your video title included with other relevant keywords. For the same keyword example above, we should have “Singing Tips: How to Sing Like a Pro “
Place additional relevant keywords within the video description naturally
Embed your video on different relevant sites/blogs and share on social media
Encourage your users to like and share your Youtube videos and subscribe to your Youtube Channel
Create engaging and quality content that viewers can use and will watch until the end
Add new videos to your Youtube channel frequently
Group videos under the same topic category
Additional YouTube SEO Insights & Factors
In addition to youtube SEO checklist above, it is important to understand YouTube’s ranking algorithm which is a bit different than Google ranking algorithm. How users react to your videos seem to have great impact on your YouTube rankings and below are some insights to keep in mind when optimizing your youtube videos.
The number of unique views may help in your YouTube ranking
The rate of viewer growth over time seems to also have positive impact on your ranking
The percentage of viewers who watch the video until the end seems to be another ranking factor
Data shows that videos whose viewers drop off too quickly, don’t rank as well
The diversity of locations from which you get viewers helps rankings for that location
How many total subscribers you have to your YouTube channel seems to be a factor as well
YouTube Statistics:
– YouTube has over 1.5 billion logged-in monthly users.
– Over 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute!
– Near 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube each day.
– Daily visitors to Youtube exceeds 30 million visitors.
Video marketing and YouTube SEO will become even more important 2018. Advancement of mobile device technology simply means more consumption of video content hence creating, optimizing and promoting videos should be one of your organizations’  top 2018 SEO strategies in addition to your efforts for  technical SEO in 2018 .
YouTube SEO is one of the services we have been offering for past couple of years that we are officially introducing next year, so please feel free to contact us should you need any assistance for your YouTube SEO campaings.

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