marketing-Depositphotos_40628299_m-2015Use YouTube to Improve your SEO

Adding video to your website not only adds interactivity and interest, it can help your search rankings. YouTube is the second only to Google (who owns YouTube) in search. According to Hootsuite’s blog, by 2019 video will account for 80 percent of global internet traffic. It’s important that people interact with your video by favoriting, subscribing, commenting and giving it a thumbs up. You can also use SEO tricks like the right keywords in your title, description and file name. Don’t forget to share your videos on social media and blog posts. This is a great article about how to rank YouTube videos.

Quality Content

Like anything in search, Google favors quality content. Not to say there isn’t a lot of low quality content that gets a huge number of hits (cat videos?). If you can sell your service or product and make it entertaining, great. But a lot of people are looking for straightforward information. Some of the videos that rank the highest on YouTube are “How To” videos. Also, videos that are at least 5 minutes long rank better.

Know How to Create Your YouTube Channel

Your channel should be another piece of your marketing efforts. Make sure your channel looks good. Use channel art that is either a professional photo or illustration. Be consistent with your overall brand. Make sure your titles and descriptions are well written. You don’t want it to appear as an afterthought. It’s possible that your YouTube channel could be getting more hits than your website.

Unfortunately, if you are new to YouTube and Google+, Google currently requires you to create a Google+ page if you create a YouTube page. As of a 7/27/15, Google was promising that you could create YouTube without Google+, but there’s no firm date. This article explains How to Create a YouTube Account for Business including setting up Google+. It is always a good idea to set up a Google+ account because it’s also great for search. See our article on “10 Things You Can Do To Improve Organic Search“.

Here’s a couple of YouTube videos on How to Make a YouTube Channel and How To Upload A YouTube Videos. This article How to Boost Your YouTube Visibility also explains how to do titles, descriptions and tags. It also explains how to create custom thumbnails, playlists and annotations.

YouTube’s #2

There are other video sharing services, but here are the facts about YouTube from an article on sprout social:

  • More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month
  • Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
  • 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute

This article explains the pros and cons of Vimeo vs. YouTube.

So if you are promoting your brand through video, YouTube is your friend.