How To Optimise YouTube Videos For Success

3 Minutes
Sara Armitage

According to Google, every month, more than 1 billion people watch more than 6 billion hours of YouTube video. In addition, more than half of YouTube video views come from mobile devices.

Sight, sound and movement can evoke a much deeper emotional bond with the viewer than a basic visual advert, providing a message that they are more likely to remember and share with others.

This is an awful lot of potential customers, both at home and on the go, able to view and react to content wherever they are. Videos are therefore becoming an increasingly powerful part of the online marketing mix and yet video optimisation is often overlooked.

As an example, Cricket bat manufacturer Kippax Willow posted a video that showed how their bats are made from start to finish –

The clip received over 32,000 viewings.

By making your videos easier to find and ensuring they reach the right audiences, you can engage with millions in an impactful manner that will be highly influential in the purchasing process.

Research released by Google in May 2015, showed that more and more people are using YouTube as a search engine, in particular searches related to ‘how to’ do something. Including YouTube in both Google web and video search engine results pages, has also increased its popularity, making it easy to click and view a video when the viewer may not normally otherwise have visited YouTube.

YouTube Tips

So once you have created some great video content, you need to ensure that it gets found, viewed and hopefully shared. As well as showing or educating customers on what they want to know, a video can help build a relationship between the customer and the brand, with long-lasting impact.

Here are some techniques to consider that will help optimise your videos:

1. Right Content

In order to improve the length of time people will stay watching, your video has to be worth watching! That means that it is relevant to their search enquiry, provide value and not be overly promotional or too heavily branded.

Don’t make it too long, most of the top videos on YouTube are around 3 minutes long.

Focus on the emotional and the educational. If you can produce emotional content which really resonates with the viewer, this will most likely be shared, as it says something personal about the viewers opinions and interests.

The other group of viewers will be looking to learn something and hoping that the video will provide a simpler and faster way to providing the information they seek.

2. Help Google and YouTube to rank your video

Google and YouTube do not watch and understand your video so you need to provide them with the relevant information to make an informed decision.

  • Create an optimised title – include major key words, these should communicate the video’s value
  • Think about the tags you use – use plenty of relevant tags that fit the people you intend to reach
  • Provide a comprehensive description – use as many words as necessary to describe the content
  • Think about using closed-captions or a transcript

3. Create a strong call to action

As you have the viewers attention, you want to keep it for as long as possible so try to encourage them to engage further with you, to look at what else you have to offer. So include calls to action and a link.

4. Promote your video

Encourage visitors to view the video by promoting it on your social media accounts, including your Google+ page. Encourage your followers to feedback and interact with you with response or comments on the video. The more people who watch it, the more will want to watch it for fear of missing something.

By thinking logically and optimising your videos you could potentially reach millions of viewers. Adding a fun element or some useful piece of information that could have a key impact on their day and in so doing promote your brand and key messages.

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