YouTube is a huge source of untapped and underutilized traffic for many different types of businesses. Unfortunately, an effective business strategy isn’t build around the hope that your video will become the next viral hit.
To leverage YouTube effectively to grow your business with organic traffic, you need to focus on increasing your page rank within both Google and YouTube by finding powerful keywords, creating a great user experience, optimizing, and promoting your videos.
Find Powerful Keywords
Finding powerful keywords to use in your titles and descriptions isn’t just a bit of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) wizardry. High-quality SEO research helps you identify how your ideal customer is searching for information and what types of videos and articles they want to engage with. Researching specifically for YouTube videos does require two steps.
First, go to Google Trends and put in up to five terms related to your niche or your specific video idea. Let’s say you have a home and lifestyle blog or SAHM social media channel and want to reach and build trust with potential followers. An easy way to do that is to create video content that helps solve a problem for the type of people who are most likely to follow you so they get to know you and become fans. While you could do this with just social media or blog posts, video allows the viewer to feel like they’re getting to know the real you. For this example let’s imagine that you want to post about cleaning tips or the pros and cons of hiring a housekeeper.
First, enter several keywords related to your idea. Then you’ll need to set the filters to reflect your specific interests.
You may find you need to play around with the keywords to find several that are actively being searched for in your target area or niche.
Once you do this, head over to YouTube Trends. Once there type in one of your keywords and allow the autofill feature to help you find additional keywords based on user trends.
You can filter results by:
This makes it easy to learn more about what your audience is looking for so you have a better idea of the type of content they are likely to appreciate.
Most business owners know they should be using YouTube to reach more potential customers, but they aren’t sure how effective it will be or how to get their video in front of new prospects. This is both easy and incredibly challenging.
Ultimately, YouTube wants the best experience for their users. The better the viewer experience, the higher you will rank on YouTube.
How do you ensure you will keep your viewers captivated throughout the video, turn them into commenting subscribers who share and favorite your video? By consistently turning out awesome content they want to see.
You’ve created a great video and found the best video keywords. Now it’s time to upload and optimize. To do this, it’s important to keep in mind that search engines cannot watch your videos. They read the text in the title and description to learn what it is about. Write about 200 words and include your keyword(s) 3-4 times.
Don’t overlook this step. While it isn’t as much fun as creating a video, it is how you let the search algorithm help your potential clients know where to find the content you’ve created just for them. If they can’t find your video, it doesn’t matter how valuable the information within it is.
You should be on one or more social media platforms. Promote your video to those followers and encourage them to share with their friends and family. It’s also important to specifically request this action at the end of every video. Ask viewers to subscribe to your channel, like, and share the video if they found the content useful. This is one of the easiest ways to grow your business organically and many business owners simply forget the power of making the request.
You can also promote other videos to viewers on your channel. YouTube has a Feature Video function which can help direct viewers to other videos on your channel that you want to promote. An easy way to do this is by adding a suggested video from your channel at the end of the current video. You can also add clickable links directly into the video to direct viewers to a special offer or opt-in page outside of YouTube.
It can be tempting to focus so much on making sure people find your video that you might forget the video itself also needs to be on point. This means at a minimum taking the time to write out a script that keeps your message clear and on point, filming in a well-lit location, and editing the video to take out any unnecessary sounds or mistakes.
Another thing you can do to improve the chances that people will click on your video once it turns up in a search result is to make it visually appealing from the moment they see it. Below is a section from the trending page on YouTube. One thing several of the videos have in common is a custom thumbnail image.
Adding words to the screen makes it easy to get a short main point across. Another option is to make sure your branding is thematic and easily identifies content for your audience. A great example of micro-themes within a larger brand is NBC’s The Voice
It’s easy to see at a glance which team the video is for and the image of the singer helps viewers who may not be sure of names, find the artist they were looking for.
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