Using Video to Compete with Large Businesses

Pop Quiz: is there a particular part of the search results you see to the left that stand out? Here’s a hint: the search query that was entered to get these results was simply the word “blender.”

The answer is the video and news results, they grab your attention because they have images. You can get your small business into results just like these, even on competitive terms like the word “blender.”

You can now compete with large businesses on search terms that before would have been well out of reach. With highly competitive terms, such as “blender,” it takes months to show up on page one, if you can ever get there. So many companies do Search Engine Optimization that simple terms become too competitive. However, so few companies are optimizing their videos and images that you could establish your small business as the leader with very little effort. So this is a golden opportunity for you to compete with even the biggest companies for page one search results.

So what do you do? Let’s take a look step by step…

Create some videos and images. Basic right? Maybe, but creating videos is kind of a tricky animal. There are four basic categories of videos: testimonials, product videos, marketing videos, and webinar. They carry various length issues and attention grabbing issues. You have to decide what works best for your customers, or try to have a few of each on your site. A good rule of thumb is to keep videos to less than 2 minutes, though webinars come with some exceptions to that.
Naming your items appropriately. Make sure that you are naming your videos with a search engine friendly name such as ‘blender-what-will-blend.mov’, instead of something like ‘2673AD43.mov’. In addition to properly naming your video, write a description that includes your keywords whenever possible.

Figure out hosting. I have great news for you– my secret recommendation is to use YouTube for EVERYTHING. It’s free, it has great analytics, and Google can actually count the number of views as a positive to rank that video higher in search. Adding the views from your website with the views from YouTube itself will show Google your video is more popular and bring it higher in search.
Market your videos. Like I said above, views count so do what you can to promote the video. If you have a little budget, buy some advertising of your popular videos on YouTube, which is now the world’s second largest search engine.
Encourage your consumers to produce their own videos. Not every video has to come from you. User generated content is guaranteed to be more influential on the buying process than anything created by you because your consumers trust each other more than they trust your own marketing.
Insights. YouTube has a great section called “Insight” where you can learn which of your videos are being watched, how they are being found, how much attention they hold and more. This is critical because without information you have no idea which of your videos are actually reaching your consumers. No matter where you chose to host your videos make sure you constantly monitor their success so you can expand on your successes.

For more information feel free to ask questions below and I’ll answer them.

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