Use the Power of YouTube in Your SEO!

Posted on May 9, 2010 by Roy Reyer

YouTube has become a monster in our culture, in that it is the fourth largest site on the Internet, has 100 million users each month and this year has risen to be the second largest search engine in the world.

What I do find most surprising overall however is that so few businesses and agencies know how to harness its full potential for marketing purposes.

I first started using video on my Radarbuster’s website back in 2001. Back then most of my visitors were still on dial up connections and my videos were hosted on my site, so they had to be very short and the quality was very poor.

However, I found that these short one minute videos reviewing the different products and answering users frequently asked questions had a dramatic effect at increasing my conversions and increasing sales.

Then the month prior of Google acquiring YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars in November of 2006, I learned about YouTube and created my RadarRoy YouTube channel reviewing radar detectors.

Over the next several months my sales took a huge spike as my videos started appearing in the natural search listings for the term “Radar Detectors” and I was killing all of my competitors.

One of these competitors, Netshops took special notice and in January of 2007 called me up, making me an offer that I couldn’t refuse and we sold the Radarbusters network for over seven figures!

Since selling RadarBusters I’ve been involved with consulting and teaching search engine optimization to others and over the course of the last four years have developed certain techniques using YouTube that I have found to be very powerful:

1: Have good and compelling content, be a story teller. A good story becomes remember able and your viewers will tell it to their friends. Remember the number one reason you’re doing a video is to create trust with your viewers.

2: People connect with People: Take close up shots of your face and more importantly make “eye contact” with the camera. Your eyes are the mirror of your soul, when people can look into your eyes you appear to be more trusting.

3: Link to other videos when you’re talking about other videos in your YouTube Channel.

4: Video responses are the #1 social indicator of quality and engagement for YouTube. Ask for your viewers to vote on your videos, join your channel, make comments.

5: Ask a question: Engage your viewer by asking them a question at the start of your video and have them answer your question in their mind as they are watching your video.

6: Remember Your Keywords! Remember to include keywords in the title of your video and in the content. Also Include a landing page website address in the text description area when publishing your video.

7: Allow your videos to be embedded on other people’s websites, however make sure that you overlay your website address in your video.

8): Ok, they watched your video, what are they supposed to do next? Think of what action you want the viewer to take next and lead them to that location.

9: If you’re optimizing your video for local search make sure you add your address to the content and add the exact location with Google Maps.

10: Think of making your YouTube Channel your home for all your videos. Here is where people will go to learn more about you, who you are, what your likes and dislike are. Remember also don’t spam! If anyone is good at detecting spam it’s Google!

11: Select your thumbnail wisely. After your video is rendered select the best thumbnail that represents your content for your video.

For those of you looking for a more complete guide on how to optimize your videos for YouTube I would recommend Chris Lang’s GBuzz Secrets guide. Chris’s is one of the masters of Google’s social media applications and in his guide he has several videos and help guides that will walk you step by step on how to properly set up your YouTube account and integrate it with other social media accounts.