Written by YouTube Video Marketing Secrets
We were asked to build a YouTube channel for our client, Doug Camozzi, whom we previously built a video website for at www.NautiqueSports.com. Nautique Sports provides high performance boat rentals with instructors for water sports in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Doug Camozzi, Founder of Nautique Sports, Turks and Caicos Islands
Mr. Camozzi wanted to create a “web presence” beyond the domain of NautiqueSports.com. The goal was to inform a global audience of water sports enthusiasts that they can get professional instruction from star athletes during a holiday vacation in the Caribbean.
YouTube allows each user to have their own channel that can be customized through a control panel and some basic scripting.
Once we created an appealing YouTube channel for Nautique Sports, we put our Social Networking Team to work promoting it.
This is what a customized YouTube Channel can look like.
YouTube has an analytics program called Insight which collects data to help marketers get the most out of their videos. Most visitors to Turks and Caicos are affluent and live in the USA, Canada and the United Kingdom (Turks and Caicos is a British province). Our online marketing plan targeted those demographics.
Over several months, we uploaded videos in measured steps and carefully worded titles, descriptions and tags loaded with keywords and links. The video below was viewed over 50,000 times within the first six months online and continues to build its audience.
Here is another YouTube video marketing secret. The best way to get well placed on search engines is to use keyword infused text, especially in your Title Tag. If you want to rank high for “How to Land a 360 on a Wakeboard” then use that as the title of your video. We also use keywords in the video file names, before we upload them to YouTube.
Just as people judge a book by its cover, viewers tend to pick a video based on its thumbnail image. So we manipulate the thumbnail image which represent each video, carefully choosing the exact frame that might generate the most clicks. How? When you upload a video, still images are automatically pulled from the video. A user gets to select one to use as a thumbnail. By understanding how YouTube pulls still frames from a video you can control the images that YouTube offers you as your thumbnail choices. The thumbnail also becomes the still frame image you see when a video is not yet played.
Does the image below tempt you to watch this video?
The video called “Best Turks and Caicos Islands Video” got over 10,000 views within its first 6 months and is currently sitting in the #3 position on page one YouTube search results for the keywords, “turks and caicos.”
TubeMogul reports that about 30% of YouTube videos have less than 100 views and about 50% have less than 500 views. Examine the Chart of the Day from an article on The Business Insider website.
If you search for the keywords “turks and caicos waterski” you will see that Nautique Sports completely dominates YouTube page one search results. How is this possible? Look at the keywords we used. YouTube is displaying them in bold text. If someone wanted to watch a video about waterskiing in Turks and Caicos, odds are they would find Nautique Sports.
Invest the time to add keywords in your titles, descriptions and tags. It will pay off.
In addition to dominating YouTube search results, we are also able to get our clients to dominate Google page one search results. Worth noting is that the videos do not have to be expensive productions to be effective. The example below is a simple video, 9 seconds long, but optimized for search engines.
Examine the screenshot below of Google page one search results. The nine second video is in the #1 position out of 252,000 other search results. In fact, both videos on top are for our client, Nautique Sports, as well as the next five listings and position #9. That adds up to 8 out of 10 spots on page one search results for our client. And this is just one set of keywords we optimized his website for.
In Nate Elliot’s Blog “The Easiest Way to a First-Page Ranking on Google” he says…
“…videos stand a much better chance than your text pages of being shown on the first results page… any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index.”
Search Google for the keywords “turks caicos wakesurf” and we see two more Nautique Sports YouTube videos at the top of page one Google search results.
Examine the search results above and you will see that they all promote Nautique Sports. Once again, internet video and a well planned SEO campaign can lead to total domination of page one Google search results.
Internet video can also get you listed on Google for a broader spectrum of keywords. While Nautique Sports has little to do with dolphins, we managed to be in top position on Google with a YouTube video for “dolphin turks caicos” (beating out 104,000 other webpages).
The video is about a dolphin named Jojo who occasional swims along side the Nautique Sports charter boats.
We also got this video featured on television and included in an upcoming documentary about dolphins by Dean Bernal. This video drives additional traffic to the website and also generates a new revenue stream for Nautique Sports which now charters boats to tourists who want to see the dolphin.
For certain keywords such as “boat rental” we were having trouble getting the Nautique Sports website listed on Google page one. We infused a few videos with the keywords “boat rental” and uploaded them to YouTube. Below you can see these videos are now listed on the middle of page one Google search results, ahead of 63,100 results.
Experts say that it doesn’t matter if the video thumbnail is first or fifth on the page, the eye is drawn to the visual image. In an eye-tracking study done by Search Engine Land they examine a series of heat maps and conclude…
“While we still seem to swing our eyes up to the upper left, we almost immediately (in under a second) move our eyes to the image (A) to determine if it’s relevant. A graphic image appears to be a powerful attractor to the eye.”
Heat map image courtesy of SearchEngineLand.com
There are many effective YouTube marketing strategies. The bottom line is that properly tagged and encoded videos are an excellent way to market products and services on the internet, driving traffic to your website and increasing revenue.
Informative article. Thanks.