When I was a kid, we had a fig tree on our farm in Schulenburg, Texas.
Every hot, searing July, when the figs were ripe, I’d transform into a monkey and raid that poor tree for every one of its delicious gems. I loved it. The tree wasn’t tall. Neither was I, so the rewards of my adventure were easy.
What does this have to do with Video SEO?
It’s low-hanging fruit.
People usually consider loading up their video to YouTube as the final stage of their production process. It’s this gap in their cycle where you can reap the easy rewards of video distribution. By researching your competition’s videos in YouTube and applying a few simple SEO techniques you can gain a serious rank advantage in both Google and YouTube search results.
1) Know Your Audience
At this point it may sound like a platitude, but understanding what your audience wants to learn about is the first step of any content creation process. If it’s good for people it’s good for the search engines and thus good for your rankings. One place to start is with commonly asked questions.
If you’ve been in your industry for a while, then you’ve probably developed a gut sense of the top 10 questions that your prospective clients always ask. Believe it or not, they’re asking those questions online as well. Nobody sits down in front of Google unless they have a question or a problem to be solved. Take a look at companies like DemandStudios or 5min and you’ll see that the majority of the videos focus on “How” to do something.
Remember that YOU are not your customer. What you may find valuable could be completely irrelevant to your constituents. One way to get over this hump is to create a buyer persona. Personas are a written representation of your customer that you’ve created from conversations or interviews with them.
At their base level, personas encapsulate your customer’s demographics, thoughts, fears, questions into one document so that you know always know who you are talking to. For more information on personas, read “Creating Personas 101″ from GrokDotCom.
2) Research Your Keywords And Competition
There are two types of research that you need to do here – keyword and competitive.
Keyword Research
Remember what we said above, “You are not your customer.” Don’t assume that you know what your customers are looking for. They could be looking for “roofers in Austin,” “How to know when you need a new roof,” “How to fix roof hail damage,” or “3 dimensional shingles versus metal.” The possibilities are infinite.
Brainstorm all the different phrases your customer would use when speaking about your product. Get very specific. People don’t think in generalities, they think about specific problems. In the roof example, we’re talking about types of shingles, metal roofs, materials, selecting a roofer, leaks, how long it takes, etc. Consider doing some competitive research to see what other people in your field are talking about for ideas as well.
Once you’ve got a list going, use a keyword tool to identify more options. A free tool that should be in everyone’s toolkit is the Google Adwords Keyword Selection Tool. Even though it is designed for Adwords, it will give you new ideas as well as tell you how may searches are being conducted per month, and how competitive the phrase is.
The columns in the image above are the results for the phrase “Austin roofer.” The columns tell you:
1) Keyword: New keywords you haven’t thought of. These may or may not be relevant to your customers. You can probably ignore “Austin restaurant guide.”
2) Competition: This column shows the number of advertisers bidding on a keyword relative to all the keywords across Google. Again, this is for paid search, but you can easily see that “Austin roofer” is very popular.
3) Local Monthly Searches: It gives you an approximate number of times people searched for in the last month, within your specific country.
Pull this list into a spreadsheet so that you can organize and rank them according to relevance, number of searches and difficulty. SEO Chat provides a free keyword difficulty tool.
Don’t be confused here. 50% means that the phrase is pretty competitive. That doesn’t mean, of course, that anyone has made a video (or optimized it properly) yet.
Once you’ve identified your big list, select 10-20 phrases for which you want to be found. Choose a mix of general and specific phrases. The more granular you get, the more likely you are to rank highly and bring in more qualified traffic.
Competitive Video Research
YouTube gives you a variety of options for doing video competitive research. Let’s take a look at them.
In the image above, you have four fields and the option to refine your search by location:
All of these words: Tells YouTube to find any video with the words “Austin,” and “roofer” in the title or description. It will also find variations of a word, like “roof.”
This exact phrase: Finds any videos have the exact phrase “austin roofer” in the title or description.
One or more of these words: When you choose this option, you’ll get videos that have the words “Austin” or “roofer.” You’ll see some really irrelevant results with this option.
Refine your search by location: This choice displays videos that were loaded up in your neck of the woods. Type in Austin, Texas to see what your local competition has created. Remember that a clip could have come from anywhere. For example, if your competitor chose a national video provider like Yellow Pages, the file could have come from some place like Nevada.
When you get your results, you’ll see a screen like this:
Let’s take a look at what the competition is doing so that you know what you can improve upon.
3) The Most Important SEO Components
Title: Move your keyword phrase to the front of your title. Google spiders like important keyword phrases to be towards the beginning of titles. You can see that the second and third results have done that.
Description: Place your keyword towards the front of the description and include a hyperlink to your site. Adding a hyperlink may not help with link juice directly, but if your customers like what you have to offer, they need to contact you right?
Also insure that your exact phrase is in the description. Note that none of these companies have done that. Don’t be too spammy, but be sure to include the phrase you want to rank for.
Timeframe, Number of Views and Ratings: Here you can see how popular the video is and how active your competition is. YouTube uses a variety of instruments to determine the rank of a video – title, tags, description, number of views and ratings. In order to get the last two, you need to go back to step one and create something your viewers want to watch.
Ask yourself if your customers would “Like,” comment on or share an advertisement like we see in the first result. If you’re going to make a video, why not make it engaging and helpful? Ads are a one-way transmission in a two-way world.
There are some opportunities for improvement here.
Hyperlink: Note that the hotlink is buried at the bottom of the description. Let’s move that up toward the front. Remember how you first saw the video? It was in a results page that only had a few lines of description text. You only have a few seconds to grab your customer’s attention, don’t waste your energy by hiding your light under the bushel of the description.
Category: I have no evidence that getting your category right will help with ranking. I do know, however, that if your customer is looking for roofing in Austin, they’re not looking for a night on the town.
Tags: In the tag field, make sure that you have your keyword phrases by entering “Austin roofer” into the tag field. It will give you some extra terms that your competitors aren’t using.
Filename: Before you load up your video, rename your file to something like “austin-roofer-how-to-select-a-roofer.mov” or something topical. See the pattern? Make sure that your most important keywords are in the filename and towards the front.
4) Clean Up Your YouTube Captions
Not long ago, YouTube automatically started adding captions to videos. There is some recent evidence that Google is indexing this information. Most people aren’t looking at their own CC (closed-captions). Use it to your advantage.
The easiest way to spruce up your captions is to follow these steps.
1) Log in to YouTube. Go to My Videos.
2) Scroll to your recently uploaded video.
3) Click Captions
4) Download the file “English: Machine transcription.” It will be in .SBV.
5) Open your file in a text editor.
6) Clean up the ums, ahs and make sure your keywords are in the copy.
7) Save the file as .txt with your keywords in the filename.
8 ) Go back to YouTube and click “Add new Captions or Transcript”
9) Select your file to upload.
10) Click the “Transcript” radio button
11) Click Upload
12) Select the new track and de-select the old track
5) Create a Video Sitemap
Video sitemaps are another way that you can get your video searched and indexed by Google. The video sitemap allows you to publish and syndicate online video content and its relevant metadata to Google in order to make it searchable in the Google Video index.
The big plus of course is it get your video listed so that you can increase your search rankings for your keywords.
The video sitemap will require a location for your content or a location for the player. Barring having the content or player on your own site, YouTube always works in a pinch, and, well, with a hundred million unique viewers, it’s still pretty much the market leader.
How To Create The Video Sitemap
a) The first bit tells Google that this is a a video sitemap and gives the location of the file.
Explain<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
b) Next, you’ll tell Google where the content and the player are located.
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.site.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc allow_embed="yes">http://www.site.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>c) For good ol’ Video SEO you’ll tell Google what the title, description, and tags are.
<video:title>Grilling steaks for summer</video:title>
<video:description>Get perfectly done steaks every time</video:description>
<video:tag>meat</video:tag>d) Finally, you’ll tell Google that you’re closing the file
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>e) Save the file as .xml
Submit Your Video Sitemap
After you’ve created the file, load it up into your root directory and then log in to Google Webmaster tools. Once you’re there, submit the file as you would normally submit a sitemap.
6) Embed Your Video On Your Site
After this point, it’s all downhill. Grab your embed code from Google and place it on your page or blog post.
7) Add Descriptive Text To Your Page
Search engine spiders don’t actually crawl video files. Rather, they look at the text that surrounds the embedded clip. Add copy to your website that describes the content in your video.
8 ) Social bookmarking
Once you’re done use a tool like Onlywire to submit your page to all of the major social bookmarking sites. OnlyWire gives you a one stop shop for submission to multiple sites.
Final Thoughts
Though it may seem complicated at first, researching your competition and keywords can be a quick way to gain an edge on your competition. Most people consider it an afterthought, but with a few tweaks you’ll be able to make pie while your competition is still chewing on the pits.
What have you tried that’s worked for you?
