Video SEO Master Class with Andy Havard
YouTube Is The World’s #2 Search Engine
Online marketers can often pass off YouTube in favour of it’s big sister Google. With Google being the #1 search engine in the world it’s easy to see why so many businesses and bloggers aim to conquer it. However, being #2 is nothing to stick your nose up at. YouTube receives over 800 million unique visits a month from users searching for video content and with over 50% of them making some form of social connection with the content they watch, it is no wonder video SEO is starting to become so highly regarded.
Video SEO Is Extremely Straightforward
Unlike your typical web SEO that takes a great deal of effort to set up and implement effectively, video SEO on YouTube is a very straightforward practice. Users simply have to fill in the metadata fields present with your usual SEO keywords and phrases as well as information relevant to the video. These data fields cover everything from meta Tags, Descriptions, Titles, Date, Location and Closed Captions.
Socially sharing your video on the likes of Facebook, Google+ and Twitter is a great way to start getting your video views rolling and encourage social activity on your video. This activity will help to communicate to YouTube that your video is relevant to a larger audience, which in turn will help YouTube to identify it as a top search result for your keywords and phrases in both YouTube and Google.
The Video SEO Battle Is Much Simpler
Now many of you might be rightly thinking that YouTube’s 800 million unique visits a month is nothing compared to Google’s 2 billion or so visits a day, but is it any easier to compete for those precious top ranking spots on YouTube?
Well, let’s do a test. Type into Google and YouTube the phrase – music studio. When you do so, YouTube shows up 2,120,000 results for that particular phrase. That may seem like a lot of results, but when you compare it to the fact that Google shows up “About 816,000,000” you see that YouTube has a lot fewer results to compete against, yet it still has a lot of traffic coming to the site. In fact these results show that it is over 384 times easier to compete on YouTube than it is on Google.
You Can Get A Page 1 Google Ranking Easier
Way back in 2007 Google launched Universal search on its site, which allowed results for images, news, local listing and video content to appear on Page 1 of its traditional search results. The videos coming into this search, more often than not, are YouTube videos. This means that your video on YouTube can jump the entire SEO competition and secure a Page 1 Google listing without having to do any extensive SEO to improve your Google ranking.
Videos Enjoy A Higher Click Through Rate
Aim Clear (aimclearblog.com) produced a study in March 2011 that concluded “Videos in universal search results have a 41% higher click through rate than plain text“. This indicates that once a video infiltrates Google’s ranks, it is far more likely to be clicked than any other link type, which is an attribute marketers should be using to their full advantage.
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Andy Havard is a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based corporate video production company. http://www.