6 July 2014

How to increase traffic to your videos

Video can be a powerful way to market your business and get your brand in front of a large audience. People love video, and it provides a way to get to know your company's product or service in a way that blogs and other forms of media can't. That said, no matter how awesome or informative your video is, if the right people don’t see it, it doesn't matter.

Here are six easy steps to double traffic to your videos:

1. Make your video title search-engine friendly

This may be obvious, but it can be easily overlooked. Creating a catchy and search-engine friendly title will help your video get found by the right people. Google Trends is a useful tool to identify relevant, non-brand keywords than can help drive more traffic to your video. Bonus: Include a written transcript of your video in the description area of your video on YouTube and other video engines, which can also help boost SEO.

2. Make good use of tags

Tags are another great way to help your videos get found by search engines and users. Remember tags are a form of metadata that describes an item with a keyword and helps both search engines and users find relevant content. Unlike categories, tags should focus on specific keywords that help identify the content of your video.

3. Diversify your publishing

The next step is to submit your video to a variety of video engines, as it can help capture a greater swath of your target audience. Your first stop should be the second largest search engine, YouTube. Aside from that, Vimeo and Vine are other up-and-coming sites that can generate large amounts of traffic.

4. Share your videos on your social-media accounts

Social networks like Facebook and Google+ can positively affect the ranking of your videos within search engines like Bing and Google. These search engines look at social cues when indexing and ranking content within their search engines. Thus the more likes, shares and +1s your video receives, the better chance it has to rank higher within these engines.

When posting to these sites, don't forget to create a catchy title that is appropriate for the site and to use hash tags. Remember to keep in mind the platform to which you are posting, when you create titles. For Twitter, you need to keep it short and catchy. For Facebook and Google+ you can create a compelling title, a short description and a call to action.

5. Publish your video on your blog

This may seem like a no-brainer but can have compounding effects on traffic. One of the most important things to remember when publishing a video on a blog is to include a written transcript and any other useful commentary. Search-engine bots aren’t able to crawl video content, thus transcript help those bots better understand what you’re sharing and how to index it.

When sharing your videos on your blog or social network, don't forget to add a call to action. A call to action to share your video or subscribe to your channel can make a huge difference when trying to garner more views.

6. Continue your outreach

Reaching out to others in your industry can be a good way to promote your video content to a wider audience. Use personal connections or networking to reach out to ask others to share your video with their audiences.

Video is a powerful addition to your content marketing. When done right, it can greatly improve the visibility and authority of your brand.

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The above article has been adapted from an article originally published by the Entrepreneur and can be seen here.