SEO Best Practices for Video Marketing

When you create a video to promote your business, how do you get anyone to see it? Search Engine Optimization, of course!

SEO isn’t just for Web sites. Your videos can reach more online viewers when you create them using best SEO practices.

Here are 6 tips to remember regarding SEO for Video:

1. Create Useful, Relevant Content – Videos won’t be a successful marketing tool unless they contain useful content. Remember – you’re not making a music video! Think substance, over style. Be sure to include relevant keywords in your audio and video content as well.
2. Shorter is Better – Attention spans are short today. Your videos should run between 3 and 5 minutes for optimal viewing.  Don’t despair if that’s not enough time to cover everything. Just break up the content into two or three parts. Tease the second part at the end of the first video to entice your viewer to keep watching!
3. Keyword-rich Titles – Include relevant keywords in your video’s title, as this will likely be the first thing the search engines look for in deciding where to rank your content.
4. Keyword-rich Descriptions  – Make sure your video has a keyword-rich description that details what the video is about.
5. Tags – Tag your videos with relevant keywords.  You may also consider adding the word “video” to the title, description and tag, such many people add the word “video” to their search phrase. 
6. Ratings and Reviews – Allow viewers to rate and review your video. The higher your rating, the more authority your video is perceived to have by the search engines. In addition, if your video gets a great review, it’s more likely to be shared – so your video gets seen by more people.

Web Analytics – Improving Website Performance

We all know that SEO and social media marketing are great tools to get your website to rank high on the search engines.  But another tool is even more vital to an online business’ success, even though it doesn’t always get the attention it deserves: web site analytics.

With web analytics, you can measure:

• how a visitor arrived at your site
• what pages were viewed
• what action was taken – ideally, a conversion

Web analytics can be confusing. There are so many different charts and graphs available to review. Google Analytics, for instance, tells you how long someone stayed on your site, what keywords were used to find you, and the percentage of new visits, among other things.

Here’s one example of how you can use analytics to effectively measure a marketing campaign:
Let’s say you offer a white paper for download to your target audience. Of the 100 people who visit your landing page, only five of them complete the download (conversion). This suggests there may be a problem with your landing page.  Maybe the design is poor, the copy is confusing, or a visitor has to give too much personal information. Now, you have the opportunity to make some changes, and use analytics again to see if there’s any improvement in conversions.

Web analytics can help you keep track of what areas of your site are working, and which need to be updated. For instance, if visitors aren’t going to a web page as often as they once did, you may need to freshen up the content. Or if one of your pages isn’t getting any traffic, that may indicate a problem with navigation or promotional channels. Maybe a link is broken, or visitor didn’t find what they expected when they clicked on an ad.

Spend some time exploring the opportunities web analytics offers. The more familiar you become with the measurements it offers, the more you can use it to help you improve your website’s performance, and ultimately, your company’s profitability.