Are you familiar with the term “Digital Asset Optimization?” If you are, you may know that it is the natural evolution of search marketing. If you aren’t, you’ll want to learn how to leverage this new opportunity for competitive advantage. Here Catalyst Search Marketing Strategist Eddie Emmanuel discusses this relatively new practice and how — and why — you can get on board.
Q: What is Digital Asset Optimization?
Eddie: The idea of digital assets expands beyond the normal text-driven pages that are synonymous with Search Engine Optimization. Digital assets include video, images, animations, and even audio files. These files have become assets because the Internet is no longer a text-only environment and search engines are adapting. With the introduction of Google Universal Search (GUS) last year, these files now appear alongside links to text on the Search Engine Results Pages. When optimized properly, these files are as important as text in driving traffic to your website.
Q: Why is it significant?
Eddie: Digital Asset Optimization is a more holistic approach to search that makes it easier for people to find the content they want via search, in the format they prefer, rather than relying on text documents. It is significant because consumers’ expectations are higher now, and searchers expect to find video. There’s a growing demand for multimedia web content. Internet users actively search videos, music files, podcasts, images and other digital media.
What makes it even more significant is that search engines are starting to give these pages equal weight and authority with text and they’re being included in the regular results if they’re optimized correctly. Prior to the introduction of Google Universal Search, which has inspired Ask, Yahoo!, and MSN/Live to provide their own “blended search,” you’d have to go to a specific video property like Google Video, Metacafe or YouTube to find these types of files. They would not come up in the regular search results. Because of GUS, you can now go to Google and it is not uncommon that one of the top five results is a video.
Q: How do Digital Asset Optimization and Search Engine Optimization work together?
Eddie: They are essential to one another and they operate using the same basic principles. You still need the content to differentiate what the page is about. It still has to be relevant to what the video or image or audio file is about. One difference is that there are more opportunities because video has multiple tags and attributes to optimize in order for users to find them.
Companies need to figure out how to best adjust their search marketing strategies to maintain a competitive advantage. One way to do that is to focus the right proportion of effort on standard text optimization as well as the optimization and promotion of all other digital assets. You want to give consumers the option to engage with your brand in the format they choose, not what we as marketers choose. Consumer empowerment will only improve the brand affinity.
Q: What is the most important facet of Digital Asset Optimization?
Eddie: The most important facets are engagement and brand protection. Optimizing these assets allows you to engage with consumers using new formats. Each asset, if leveraged properly, is another opportunity to engage a consumer. Secondly, you can maintain a position of credibility by having these assets listed in the search engine results pages. For example, a pharmaceutical company needs to be the authority on what its medication’s indications, side effects and treatment options are. We’ve seen negative videos put up by competitors and unhappy consumers. Posting a video allows you to protect your brand, promote a positive, consistent message, and differentiate from the competition. If you have videos that are important to your product or message you should optimize.
Q: What are the first steps of Digital Asset Optimization?
Eddie: Optimizing starts with an inventory of your company’s digital assets. You need to identify and categorize all of your multimedia, images, audio, video and any other relevant files.
The next step is to optimize the assets that you have using the same best practice SEO techniques as for any other website. The approach is not that much different from regular html-driven content – you still want relevant file names, browser titles, and appropriate content actually on the page with the video. If you have many videos it is a good idea to create html and xml video site maps for both users and search engine spiders to crawl, as well as an RSS feed for video sharing so that your videos can be found more easily.
Continue to link to other credible and authoritative sites relevant to your video. And find influencers – bloggers — to review your videos.
Third, create a digital asset strategy for your organization. Bringing your website up to speed with Digital Asset Optimization may take extra time in the beginning, but you will be providing both search engines and customers with the information they’re looking for — in the formats they’ll respond to.
About Eddie Emmanuel
Eddie Emmanuel is a Catalyst Search Marketing Strategist who is dedicated to A&E TV, Novartis, Diomed, and RainSoft brands. He has five years of experience in Search Marketing. Before joining Catalyst he worked as a Marketing Consultant at Shoebuy.com and an SEO Marketer at iProspect. He has a B.A. from Emerson College in Communications.
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