10 Top Tips for YouTube Video

Videos are a great way to help increase the traffic to your site, boost your rankings in the search engine results and improve your brand exposure. When you are looking to create a video for your site you need to concentrate on producing something that will add value for your viewers. Try to think what need it is going to fulfil for the viewer. For instance you could create a video that will help the users solve a particular problem or demonstrate how to use one of your products more effectively. Another great type of video to create is something that highlights the benefits of a product or range that you sell. One great example of this is Appliances Online – https://www.youtube.com/user/AppliancesOnline
Your filming area/backdrop doesn’t have to be as polished as Appliances Online. It is very easy to setup your own viewing area and film videos with a clean back drop at little cost. We have actually seen some videos produced very well on smartphones. If you are shy and don’t want to get in front of the camera you can even look at creating a slideshow video. Slideshow videos require nice imagery of the products, which you can take or you could use stock photos. You might also want to consider recording an audio track to overlay on your video talking you through the features and benefits.
Once you have created your video you will then need to upload it to YouTube and this is when you need to have a strategy. Make sure you aren’t just uploading it and hoping it will be found. Here are some tips that will help increase your videos exposure:

1. Find keywords for your video – The first place you need to start is by finding the relevant keywords for your video. You can do this by searching for what is in the content of your video. For instance you might have a how-to video and so should go to Google and search for “how to do X”. Then you need to look at the video results listed and look at how they have been optimised and follow a similar pattern.
2. Use auto-suggest – You should also enter the search into YouTube itself and take note of the auto-suggestions as there will be traffic around these.
3. Call your video a video – Use the term video in your title as people often enter video as part of their search on search engines.
4. Link – In your video description you need to look at placing a link to your site. Although this is no-follow it will help with referral traffic to your site. Some SEOs believe that no-follow links still have positive benefits in terms of ranking, but either way it will only help your video campaign.
5. Add your NAP – As well as adding a link to your description consider adding your business name, address and phone number (NAP) as this is one factor that will strengthen your local search presence. It is extremely important to make sure your NAP matches that of your website and Google My Business listing, for the purpose of local SEO also?
6. Tag it up – Another element that you want to take advantage of when adding your video on to YouTube are tags. YouTube will auto-suggest these for you, which makes it easier to pick relevant tags. In order to help with your local listings look to add your location and the relevant business category/service that corresponds with your Google My Business Page.
7. Geo-Tag it – An advanced setting that many people overlook when they are adding their video to YouTube is the location option. You need to tag your video with the same location as your business, which you are trying to ranking for with location based keywords.
8. Use the annotation feature – Annotate your video with relevant content and consider adding a link to your site and your NAP. This content is indexable and it is a feature that is often overlooked. However be careful not to overdo it as this will detract from your video and just look like spam.
9. Share, share, share – Look at sharing your videos on social media and encouraging others to view and share them, as this will help increase their views and popularity.
10. Embed it – Once you have your video hosted on YouTube you want to embed it on your own site.

Some people will say that you should go down the route of self-hosting the video you create or using a third-party service like Wistia. That is a valid point and one that we would advocate, however this doesn’t mean that you should overlook YouTube, as you can see there are so many benefits for using this platform, which is owned by Google and often referred to as the second biggest search engine. We would recommend creating different videos that complement each other for both YouTube and self/third-part hosting to take full advantage of video. Some people actually create smaller intro versions of the videos that are then hosted on their site, although this makes embedding the YouTube videos less practical.
**Once you have multiple videos you need to look at creating a YouTube channel, which is something we will look at in the coming weeks.