In a recent post on international video search, we looked at the new portals being launched by YouTube and MySpace, and how they could open new marketing channels to a global audience. But how exactly does a YouTube video translate into SEO results, and does that traffic have any commercial value?
Videos grab attention
The connection between SEO and online videos is simple: people link to content they like, and links power SEO performance.
Most marketers familiar with YouTube have a hard time imagining how they can extract real customers from a massive audience of clip-surfing entertainment seekers. After all, we all want targeted traffic, traffic that represents prospective customers.
But the concept of grabbing people’s attention with entertaining content is nothing new. P&G produced soap operas to literally sell soap. In 2000, BMW created BMWFilms.com, a pre-YouTube video campaign designed as a brand-building exercise. In retrospect, both these marketing efforts were very effective, providing entertainment but also targeting a valuable audience.
Leveraging YouTube Videos
The key to making online video work for a serious marketing campaign is to recognize that there are three distinct waves of attention that a popular video can generate. This is something I touched on in an earlier post on linkbaiting:
First, a popular story can generate a large quantities of traffic for a brief period of time - this is the “sugar rush” aspect of linkbaiting. The secondary effect is much more significant: bloggers will tend to write posts about hot topics, providing a permanent set of links to your site. This is the “protein” portion of linkbaiting, and the true payoff for marketers. Those links translate into permanent equity for your site, leading to continuing traffic and stronger search engine rankings.
That first “sugar rush” may or may not be well-targeted: it depends on the video’s creative concept, and on how it tries to hook the audience. Your video may have a very broad appeal, one that works for you if you sell a commodity product (the Mentos videos, or even soap operas.) Or it may have a tight focus on your product or demographic (BMWfilms, the Smirnoff Tea Partay.) Either way, the result is lots of traffic and attention.
The second wave is where it starts to get interesting. If the video is somehow remarkable, people will remark on it. Specifically, bloggers will post about it and create links to that video. If the video is properly named, those links will contain the keywords that are applicable to your products, resulting in more traffic to that page.
Teaser Strategy
If we’ve gotten this far, and have videos on YouTube etc. that get popular, get blogged, and get linked, we still have one final barrier to overcome: the page that’s benefiting from all this popularity is on YouTube, not on your website.
The key to getting past this is a teaser strategy. One video on YouTube can become popular, but there can be related videos that you can offer on your own website. Providing a link to your site on the YouTube page, and in the video itself, will drive traffic, attention, and permanent links to your website.
2 Comments
Nice post. I like the idea of adding a final call-to-action at the end of each video, even if it is simply the video producer’s domain name or specific web page. Of course, there better be content on that landing page (in an easy to digest format) that will then compel the user to continue to come back or perform additional actions.
Totally agree about the need for a great landing page. After all the acrobatics required to get to the point of receiving a visitor on your site, you want to make sure that they have to best experience possible.
That experience should satisfy their expectations, and also provide some way to get them closer to *your* goal - whether that’s viewing a video ad, a sign-up form on the page, or a purchase elsewhere on the site.