What You Need to Know About Online Videos & SEO: how does it work?

Undoubtedly, online videos are one of the main ingredients in any inbound marketing campaign yet many health industry professionals avoid utilizing videos for lack of SEO skills. Others believe outlets such as YouTube are over-saturated and offer less than enthusiastic results. Not true at all. Talk about a missed opportunity!

In fact, YouTube is the hottest commodity for dentists and doctors, and has become the weapon of choice for worldwide free promotion. Potential patients are more influenced by what they see than what they read. By creating a quick instructional online video, and then complimenting with SEO, you’ll pump more life into your marketing campaigns.

Why YouTube is More Effective than Most

Video watching is the number one online activity that dominates even social media. A poll by QuantiaMD reveals 65% of physicians have switched from traditional advertising to combining ‘show and tell’ videos with social media marketing to connect and engage with potential patients. With 72% of internet users searching online for health information before making any decisions, online video marketing is a no-brainer.

Obviously, YouTube is the cheapest tool for market promotion and free for organic SEO. Because it is also great for internal links YouTube can help propel your business to the front of the line much quicker. More importantly, videos build trust. Not to mention it helps brand your business.

Videos are also flexible enough to embed into other mediums like websites, blogs and social media forums. And simply displaying a website link at the end of the video provides an added bonus that helps generate traffic.

Using SEO to Maximise the Potential of Online Videos

Submitting your video online doesn’t automatically translate into superstardom. Video optimisation is the building block that kicks your campaign into overdrive.

Optimising your online videos is pretty basic. To do this, you can follow the same techniques to optimise your content for search engines – use SEO. First, keep in mind you’ll also want to utilise all the tools that YouTube offers to support your strategy, including channel editing, detailed statistics, sharing, and integration.

The real objective here is to help search engines easily identify your videos. Most people are unaware that search engines can’t read videos. Why?  Because search engine spiders scan text, not images, and therefore cannot recognize videos. This makes SEO a key factor in your success.

Two steps is all it takes to incorporate SEO into your videos:

Title

·         The title of your video is really your first point of contact. Integrate the most appropriate tags when naming your video. Integrate good keywords that define the video.

·         The title is most important for your audience. This is what will compel them to click. Consider using the word video in your title because many people combine their keyword with the word “video” in their search.

Description

·         Make sure you use keywords to describe your video. The description box located right below the video allows you to summarize the video content. This description is also your Meta narrative, which the search engine spiders review for relevancy.

·         The video description is also an opportunity to insert a URL to your website or blog. It goes without saying it’s another avenue for free promotion.

Online videos have become an essential element for online promotion. Without a doubt, when you correctly use and compliment with SEO, your videos can propel your dental or medical practice to a new level of success.