Business Matters Magazine

April 2011

Heading: Is anybody watching?

Aegir Brands

From Surge Media

Making an online video to promote your product or service is a savvy move. With video being one of the cheapest and most effective marketing tools for business, many SMEs are jumping on the bandwagon.

But there’s no point in making a video if nobody’s watching it.

So how do you attract an audience to your online marketing video?

Just like you drive people to your website, you need to drive people to your online video. And in fact the strategies used to increase your website traffic are much the same for your online video.

Let’s start with the content of your video. Google – the number one search engine – likes content that informs and educates, so it stands to reason that ‘information’ videos will get a better ranking than pure ‘sales’ videos. According to Reelseo.com there are more than 35million searches for ‘how to’ videos on YouTube every month. So if, for example, you’re a handyman you could make a ‘how to’ video on unblocking a sink, a bookkeeper could make a video on how to read a profit and loss statement, and a make up artist could teach the audience how to apply foundation. US search engine marketing guru Marty Weintraub, founder of aimClear, told Mediapost.com that businesses need to tell their clients how to solve their problems.

When it comes to deciding where to load your video there are a number of options including hosting the video on your own website, but the platform getting the best results is YouTube. Around 85 percent of Google video search results come from YouTube.

The title that you give your video on YouTube is also important as Google will look at these keywords when doing a search. So spending a bit of time researching the keywords will be well worth it. Include these same keywords in your video tags.

Once your video is posted on YouTube have it embedded - available for viewing - on your own website as well. Video is a great search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy so it will help to boost your website ranking on search engines such as Google or Bing.

Your ranking, which influences how easily people will find your video, is also influenced by the response your video receives. If people are commenting on your video, sharing the link, or ‘liking’ the video this will help to increase your video’s visibility. And you never can tell if your video will strike a chord and go viral. Viral marketing is the phenomenon that sees a video link passed around and if it takes off, the results can be incredible. For example, the Coca Cola Happiness Machine video has been viewed more than 3.38million times on YouTube. It’s an amazing statistic and one that should convince any business owner of the importance of using video as part of their SEO strategy and being active in driving traffic to their video.

While you can produce your own video and do your own search engine optimisation there are companies that specialise in both, leaving you to focus on what you do best in your business. 

For comment or questions please email aegir@surgemedia.com.au