brand marketing blog

Guest post by Hariet Waffenschmidt - International E-Marketing Manager at the University of Waikato

I feel that video as a online marketing tactic is hugely underutilised in New Zealand mostly because there is the perception out there that producing video content is an expensive undertaking for small and medium sized businesses without much ROI. On the other hand, businesses put a lot of effort and money into optimising their websites in order to improve their rankings.

Fact is that optimised online video is one of the “easiest” ways to increase your company’s organic Google ranking (and that of other major search engines too).

You have probably noticed that search engines started to display “blended search” results where various types of results – i.e. videos, images, news stories, maps etc – are merged with traditional Web results.

Forrester research found that videos stand about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index and almost every video Google blends into its search results comes from YouTube.

In my role as international e-marketing manager at the University of Waikato, I have experimented a fair bit with online video, starting out by simply uploading student video profiles onto YouTube without paying too much attention to the title, description, tags etc. Only recently I started optimising every video’s meta data and have noticed an immediate improvement in our YouTube result rankings for selected keywords.

Relevant video content also has a good chance of being embedded by other video directories, Blogs or related websites and hence drives natural search-engine ranking, particularly inbound links. This happened to one of our latest videos with the title “Surf lesson in Raglan – study in New Zealand at Waikato University” which was picked up by a directory. “How to…” videos are particularly popular on YouTube and have a lot of views.

Now a couple of ideas on how you can optimize your videos:

• Host your video on YouTube (seeing that Google seems to pick them up most) and also embed them on your website and Blog

• Optimise the title of your YouTube video: this is most important for your search ability; do a thorough keyword research analysis (i.e. YouTube & Google keyword tools).

• Optimise the description of your YouTube video: needs to compliment the title and can be an extension of it that encourages the video to be watched. Also add relevant urls (ideally optimised landing pages).

• Optimise the tags of your YouTube video: tags are the keywords. Use only a few of the most relevant keywords that match the total video’s meta data.

• Share your video: submit your video onto multiple platforms (i.e. with “Tubemogul”) and related directories Tubemogul is a free video distribution service that deploys your videos to the top video and social networking sites (i.e. YouTube, Facebook, Bing, Yahoo Video etc) and also provides powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed.

So, don’t be afraid of using video as an online marketing tool. It can be a very cost effective way to boost your visibility – all you really need is a handy cam or even a web cam will do in some cases. And who knows, one of your videos might just go viral!