Could Video Work for You?

by Shannon Suetos

A study conducted by ComScore is reporting that, “clips generated by Facebook users were watched by 41 million people in April, more than three times as many as a year earlier, when there were 13 million. YouTube grew 25 percent to 135 million unique viewers over the same period.” So what does this mean? If you aren’t using video as part of your marketing strategy, you could be missing out on a lot of potential customers.

Educational Purposes

Educating your audience on your product, service or even industry is a great way to pull them in. In a study conducted by King Fish Media, Hubspot, and Junta 42, they concluded that the number one reason marketers use video is for education. Video doesn’t have to be a costly production, and can actually be done for fairly cheap.

Just like writing, the video needs to have content that is useful. If you are producing an educational video—make sure it is just that educational. Have VALUE in your video, this will make the video more viral, and useful for your clients.

Great For SEO

Nate Elliot, a Forrester Research analyst points out that, “because of less competition, a video is about 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of results than a text page using the same keyword.” This is extremely important for businesses that may have a hard time competing with high volume keywords.

Before you load your video you need to have a home for it. YouTube is great for a number of reasons, and SEO wise it will get you indexed by Google right away. If you want to host video on your page, you need to make sure Google knows it is there. For now Google can’t read Flash files very well so, “the best way to appear in Google’s blended search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap. This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools,” recommends Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne to TechCrunch.

Inc. recommends to, “optimize the URLs of pages on your site [that are video] by including in them information about the page itself (In other words www.store.com/maytag-dishwashers.html is a better URL than www.store.com/product12345.html.)

The same logic should be applied to the page that contains your video:
www.mysite.com/video/seo-tips.html is a stronger URL than www.mysite.com/seo-tips.html”

Test

The best way to decide if a new marketing strategy is right for your company is to test it out. Instead of spending a lot of time making and producing multiple videos start with just one or two and see how it goes. Test the waters and see if video is a viable option for you. A quick search on Google can give you numerous ways to help optimize your video for SEO.

Shannon Suetos is an expert writer on POS systems based in San Diego, California. She writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as point of sale systems at Resource Nation.