After investing more man-hours than you ever thought you would, spending the money to get all the bells and whistles, and pushing your idea through each stage of the process to make it a reality, you’ve finally done it; you’ve finished your brand’s new video.
It looks great, it makes you laugh, and by Monday morning you’ve sent your video out to all of your clients and most of your friends. You are excited, you are expectant, and you are ready to begin seeing a return on your investment.
But, six months later, your enthusiasm has lessened. Despite all your efforts, your video has gotten 27 views and has not facilitated a single conversion. Your marketing team considers the effort to be a flop, and advises against investing any additional time and/or money into video marketing in the future. You are dumbfounded; you’ve seen video marketing work for your competitors. You’ve memorized the analytics that prove the value and merits of video marketing. You know that your video was created with audience interest in mind. How could it have failed?
More often than not, it’s not that people don’t like your video; it’s that they never saw it. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Most of the time, this refers to the development of written text content that is more easily devoured by search engines like Google and Yahoo, making your website easier to find. But did you know that your videos can be search-engine-optimized, too?
TITLE
Search engines register the video title as the most important content identifier. Since you want people who are interested in the concepts and information presented in the video to be able to locate the video quickly by web search, you need to give the video a title that identifies that information. If you were in the market for a new vacuum, and wanted to see whether or not a vacuum you’d had you eye on was worth the buy, you’d be likely to search ‘Turbo Vacuum 3000 Reviews’. A video titled “Turbo Vacuum 2000, 3000, 3000+ review” would quickly be seen by Google as a close match and therefore presented to the searcher; a video titled “Another great review of modern cleaning equipment” would not.
DESCRIPTION
Video platforms are smart, but not all-knowing. In order for a video to receive proper search ranking, you have to tell the video platform what your video is about. The description area of the video page is an opportunity to do just that. Don’t worry about being wordy; the overwhelming majority of your viewership will not read the description at all. The platform, however, will read said description in full. Make sure to include any necessary information about the content of your video, so as to better guide the platform on how to categorize your work.
TRANSCRIPT
Videos are rarely without sound and spoken words, and the video platforms can actually mine these spoken words for keywords and subject matter that you may not even consider to be a valuable search term. In affixing a transcript to your video, you make it possible for the video platform to do some of your most tedious work for you. As an added bonus, your transcript will also better enable the hard-of-hearing to enjoy your work!
TAGS
When you tag a photo of a friend on facebook, it’s because you want your friend and their friends to see the photo and reminisce about good times. Adding tags to a video is much the same; you are attempting to magnetize the audience that might be interested in your creation. Pick a few topics or keywords that you believe would be interesting to that audience, and type those terms into the ‘tags’ box of the video page. The platform will use these terms help index your video for the search engines, and increase the odds that your desired audience will stumble across your content.
IN CONCLUSION
Video SEO is the collaboration of several components; components that might seem fairly straightforward, but are often overlooked all the same. Of course you can usually count on your family, your friends, and your staff to share the video within their circle, but conversion doesn’t come from those circles; rather, conversion comes from consistent views beyond those circles. If you want to see a real return on your investment into the video marketing arena, you have to optimize your video for easy location by ‘the everyman’. Embrace Video SEO, and take the time to give your video its best chance at being seen.
If you need help optimizing a video, or, better yet, creating one for your business or organization, we’d love to help! Give us a call at 410.853.7892, or email us at info@myrender.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
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