Optimizing YouTube for Better Views and Traffic

YouTube is a fantastic way to drive traffic to your website.

YouTube clocks millions of hours each day from viewers and generates billions of pageviews. Even if you draw a small percentage of that traffic, you can boost sales and visibility for your own site from YouTube videos. Optimizing videos is similar (yet different) to optimizing regular web pages. Here are some tips for YouTube video optimization.

Tagging

Tagging is essential for finding your videos. Bots have no way of knowing what your video is about without tags. Tags are just like the categories and tags in blogging. They are keyword phrases that identify the subject of your video. YouTube has strict rules for spamming these phrases, so don’t place any irrelevant tags on the page.

YouTube no longer prioritizes videos based on the number of views due to spammers buying traffic to their videos. Instead, YouTube ranks videos based on “watch time.” If you create irrelevant tags on your pages, the “watch time” from viewers drops and so will your video in rankings. You can use Google Trends to find relevant keywords, or think of phrases that you would use to find your video.

Transcribe Your Video to Text

Since search engines can’t understand video content, you can boost your visibility by giving them something they understand — text. Transcribing the content from your video to textual form lets search engines index and rank your video accordingly. Webmasters usually embed their videos within their websites and then transcribe the content underneath the video. This is also beneficial for users who are hearing impaired. Some people still prefer reading to watching videos, so you give viewers the best of both worlds.

Add a Call-to-Action

You can either add a CTA (call-to-action) within the video or underneath of it within your transcribed content. The CTA offers some benefit for the viewer to navigate to the site. For instance, tell viewers that they can see more if they visit your website, or promote discounts and services with your videos.

Don’t Add Poor Background Music

Background music is good when you have something to show users but don’t need to say anything. Some new video owners have a hard time matching the right background music with the video. Poor music is more distracting to the viewer and ruins your ability to convey a concept. It’s better to speak through your video than to add music that is otherwise distracting. You don’t need to use a camera, but talking through your videos gives viewers a better connection to the instructor.

Conclusion

YouTube videos are great marketing tools. You can turn a few dozen visitors a day into thousands, especially if your video goes viral. Don’t spam YouTube with tags, but ensure your tags and content match the video content and add a CTA to draw people to your site. YouTube can turn into a major marketing source for your business. The best part is that it’s totally free.