While my primary focus here is to demonstrate how to optimize your YouTube videos to gain more online exposure for your business, I think it’s crucial to understand the background of YouTube and how big of a powerhouse it really is. Let’s briefly discuss the background of YouTube and how it all began.
Background of YouTube
In 2004, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, three former Paypal employees, envisioned a place where users can upload, view, and share videos via the Internet. In February of 2005, their envision became reality when the three masterminds launched what is now known as “YouTube”. A year later YouTube was named one of the fastest growing websites on the web and was ranked the 5th most popular website in the world.
Google saw the rapid growth and potential of YouTube and knew they had to make some moves. In late 2006, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion dollars (whoa!). YouTube is now the 3rd most popular website in the world, getting over 800 million unique visitors each month. Here are a few mind blowing statistics regarding YouTube’s website traffic.
YouTube’s Website Traffic
Source: Youtube
Top 5 Most Popular Websites in the World – 2012
Source: Alexa
A Powerful Marketing Tool
If these statistics haven’t convinced you to start using YouTube for marketing purposes then I don’t know what will. Maybe I can shed some more light for you. Let me give you an industry specific example of how YouTube can benefit a business.
Let’s say you own a small auto detailing business and are looking for ways to acquire more clients. The first thing you want to do is analyze how your current and past clients found out about your detailing services/products. How would you go about finding an auto detailing business? Chances are you’d use Google or perhaps another reputable search engine like Yahoo or Bing. Let’s face it. Consumers turn to the Internet to find information about products and services. Therefore, business owners should turn to the Internet to find consumers. This makes sense right?
“There are hundreds of fish in the sea. You just have to use the right bait to catch the one you’re looking for.”
So, if I’m a consumer looking to get my car waxed, what might I do first? Personally, I would try to tackle the job myself to save some money. I might search Google for “How to wax a black car“. If you search “How to wax a black car” on Google, this is what you get:
Using the phrase “How to” in a Google search query will not only show YouTube videos on the first page, but rather in the first three results. In this case, searching “How to wax a black car” shows us a YouTube video in the third organic result. This is why you should be creating informative videos and uploading them to YouTube. You’ll gain exposure and will most certainly acquire new business.
Uploading your videos to YouTube is easy. Optimizing your videos so that they have a greater potential of showing up in search results for specific keywords and phrases is the part that most people overlook. However, it’s simple. Here are some important aspects of YouTube video optimization:
Title
Just like with SEO (search engine optimization), the title of your video is very important. This is the first thing that Google/YouTube looks at when deciding what results to show for a specific search query. You’ll want to title your video using keywords and phrases that you wish to be found for. In this case, “How to wax a black car”. Notice how most of the words used in my search query are in the title of the video.
Description
The description of your video is what people read to get a better understanding of what your video is all about. It’s best to include a link to your website at the end of your description. This will help increase traffic to your website and could potentially lead to more sales.
Tags
Tags are another important part of video optimization. You should include at least 5 to 7 relevant keywords as tags for each of your videos. Using tags will associate your video with other similarly tagged videos, which will allow your video to be shown as a “related video.” This will help you generate additional views from people who were originally watching other videos.
While there are other things that influence what videos show up in search results, these are certainly the most important. If you create quality, informative videos that people will want to watch, and incorporate these optimization tactics, you’ll be in good shape. Good luck!
