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YouTube SEO: Closing the sales loops with compelling video

by Chris Patton on June 15th, 2010

They don’t call it show business for nothing. As YouTube channels become de rigueur, marketers need to follow a two-pronged approach to producing online video that leads with key-word strategy and follows with killer creative. If you’re not ranking on YouTube, most consumers aren’t likely to see your video to begin with. Once you’re getting a solid ranking on YouTube, then you need to make sure you have compelling content.

Crafting a YouTube SEO strategy is not unlike producing SEO for the contextual ads. The key difference is closing the loop with quality video, which doesn’t necessarily have to take a big bite out of your budget, and can provide decent exposure for your brand. Short, punchy videos work best. You don’t have a lot of time to convey the message. You want a video that talks to your audience(s) and makes them compelled to watch and read what you have to offer.

If your words did glow
With apologies to the legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans (The Godfather, Chinatown), if it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the screen. It’s sort of the same thing with an effective YouTube SEO strategy: Visuals only engage if they stem from a good story with compelling text. Here are several important aspects of YouTube SEO.

Title and description: In the same manner you apply SEO best practices for Web pages, optimize the text content describing your videos (titles and descriptions). These are set when you upload the video. The title should contain a target keyword phrase (it needs to be short because YouTube limits the length).
Outbound link: Include your site’s URL at the start of the description so it will be visible and clickable even when the rest of the description is hidden. To include a link in the description, just add a full URL (including http://) at the start of your description.
Tags: Include at least five to seven relevant keywords as tags for your video. Using tags will associate your video with other videos that use those same tags. When people watch videos with similar tags, your video will be shown as a “related video,” raising the potential for better click-through rates to your content.
Watermark: Add a watermark to your video to show the URL. It’s an opportunity to increase the potential of driving traffic to your Web page
Thumbnails: YouTube pulls thumbnails from the one-quarter, half, and three-quarter marks of every video. If possible, place a compelling image at these marks to increase the potential for people to view it.
Popularity/Views: The popularity of your video, including total views and the number of views in the past 24–48 hours, is an important factor to improve the video’s rank in search results. Popular videos are preferred on YouTube because they are most likely better videos relative to the large amount of poor videos posted.

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