How to make Videos for Brand Impressions & Notoriety:SEO Tips

Posted By: Dhaval Shah

We continue the discussion of making SEO friendly videos...

In this post I am string to demonstrate 3^rd Approach: Video for Brand Impressions & Notoriety

If your main goal with video is getting your company and services in front of as wide an audience as possible, or make a video "go viral" - this is the approach you should be taking.

Embedding

Embed the YouTube version of the video on your site

Since Google own YouTube, they are pretty good about knowing when and where something is embedded - so there is no problem in using an iframe to embed the videos.

Hosting

Host the content with YouTube and Vimeo

Upload it to YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion and submit to any other video sharing sites you can find. Jacob Klein included a nice list of sharing sites in a recent post

Ensure you optimise both your YouTube channel and video correctly. Check out this guide for a detailed explanation of how this should be done.

Get the "As Seen On" attribution for the video

 

YouTube provide "As Seen On" links for some videos, which link to a curated page listing all of the YouTube videos embedded on a specific site or blog. These pages pull in text from the pages themselves, so can be a great way of generating brand impressions and referring traffic. 
To get the "As Seen On" attribution for your videos, ensure the video is embedded on an accessible page with rich supporting text and images. Then make sure that you're getting a lot of views of the video on your site.

Video Sitemap

Even for YouTube videos, you should be submitting a video XML sitemap. Although Google have access to all of the metadata for YouTube videos - a sitemap allows you to provide additional information - such as defining the uploader and specifying a meta description for the content. 

Content Type

If you want your content to succeed on YouTube (and any video sharing sites), then it needs to be extremely engaging. YouTube audiences are fickle and if you spend the first 10 seconds of their time on showing a branded sting, you will lose half of them.

In order to mitigate against a high bounce rate, you need to achieve emotional engagement quickly. This need is much more pressing than with a text based web page, since the way we engage with video differs dramatically from the way we interpret text. In an attempt to explain this simply, i have put my rudimentary photoshop skills to use and created a couple of informational graphics (“infographics”?)

Cognitive Engagement with Form

 

Consider that most people who view your videos through YouTube or video sharing sites  are unlikely to have prior knowledge of your brand or marketing efforts. This means that you need to consistently work for their attention  - ensuring each creation is interesting or entertaining in it's own right.

 

Don't put overly commercial content or product videos on Youtube

People rarely go to YouTube to find commercial content and as such, the high bounce rate a video may receive will potentially hinder it’s ability to rank in Google SERPs as well as YouTube - preventing you from getting significant views and brand impressions. Unless you have an exceptionally creative and fun product video (think Old Spice guy), YouTube should only be used to share creative or educationally informative pieces.
Examples of this done successfully:

This April fools offering from Lynx is excellent because it succeeds in driving a context for social engagement from the audience: Is this a joke? Is this genuinely something that has been created? If so, how could it work? could something like this exist in the future?
But you don't necessarily need high production value to create interesting content, as demonstrated by this simple but fun recording from Oddbins.

Everyone should be undertaking this "Video for Notoriety" approach in some measure. YouTube is the world’s second biggest search engine and if you don’t have a presence on there, you’re missing a huge trick.