August 7, 2018

5.2 : YouTube

5.2 : YouTube

Dr. Gordon Fletcher, Senior Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

YouTube might seem initially as a surprising platform to be discussing, but YouTube is, in fact, the second largest search engine in the world. Coupled with the fact that the largest search engine in the world, Google, actually owns YouTube – it makes it an important platform.

Now YouTube is a video-based platform, so to be involved as a business you need video content. That’s the first barrier to entry, but it’s an important place to be because ultimately people use YouTube as a place for information, a place for education and, increasingly, for entertainment to the extent that YouTube is effectively a competing television channel against terrestrial TV. All of this points to the importance of YouTube.

YouTube needs good content. If you’re providing good content, informative short content, which really gets to the point, and gets to the point with a clear, carefully constructed message, then you will have people paying attention to your work and, ultimately, again being driven through to your website and to your blog.

Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK

YouTube is extremely powerful, especially, with Google prioritizing YouTube listings and video content. It’s something that you really should consider.

Embed video content into site and optimise for the benefit of SEO

What you can do is get videos clips on your website and optimize that against the different keywords and different sections that exist on your website, and have stakeholders within your industry, you know, people who you would like to have commented on your company or comment on your services, and have that on your website with keyword targeting and with relevant tags, optimize it against content on that page, share that socially, and then you’ll see the SEO benefits when the search engines pick that up. So the use of YouTube can be used for that SEO benefit and produce engaging content on your site and for PR purposes.

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece

We are using for our video also, but it’s PPC again; it’s the same pricing method but here is with CPV, per view. It’s a very cheap way to communicate, actually, it’s the cheapest pricing method online. The good thing here is that you only will pay when someone will view 20 seconds of your video plus. It’s like the same as mentioned before with search if you click in that.

YouTube currently offers one of the best value for money PPC channels

Exercise

YouTube video optimisation

Video content creative strategy

Before starting your YouTube channel, as with all social network platforms, it is important to think about your long term creative strategy. An extensive resource has been created for you by the YouTube Creator Playbook – a PDF version of their content or a video version

Watch this video on Creative Strategy:

Optimising your video

The actual process of optimising a video has similarities with on-page optimisation for a web page but there are some special aspects too.

Assuming all things being equal with your competitors, the chances of your video being discovered by your buyer persona are increased if you integrate the relevant keywords in the following places amongst others:

  • Video Title
  • Video Description
  • Video Tags

Do you want to see some advanced YouTube optimisation?

If you are already familiar with the basics of Video SEO have a look at these tools and resources which can help you to reach a more advanced level:

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/08/24/12-video-seo-tips-to-improve-your-rankings/343365/10-video-seo-tips-that-can-truly-impact-your-rankings

Competitor video analysis

However, how can you identify what keywords your competitors are targeting? YouTube does not allow you to see the keyword or “tags” being used by your competitor however, there are some tools which you can use to see this information.

The TubeBuddy tool

You can download a plugin for your web browser FireFox, Chrome or Internet Explorer from the TubeBuddy website https://www.tubebuddy.com

This allows you to inspect the tags of your competitor’s videos and more…

Additional materials

Using YouTube

How to use YouTube for business

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G20OVpmTBss

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thWqAPSiwQ8

References

YouTube Creator Academy

 https://creatoracademy.withgoogle.…

Cost-per-view (CPV)

 https://support.google.com/adwords…

Youtube & viral marketing

 http://www.researchgate.net/profil…

Youtube ads & ROI

 http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/lsh…

Ways to maximize your youtube marketing results

 http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com…

Show your ad on YouTube

 https://support.google.com/adwords…

For chapter 5 related sections, follow:

5.0 Choosing the right digital profiles for the right audience
5.1 Facebook
5.3 Twitter
5.4 LinkedIn
5.5 PPC optimisation
5.6 What makes content to go Viral?
5.7 How to create content viral?