At a time when everyone is talking about natural referencing (SEO) and trying to make their business emerge from the incessant communication flow, YouTube is increasingly establishing itself as an essential communication medium. Possessed by Google, the undisputed winner of the war of search engines, social media has in a few years gone from simple video platform to second search tool in the world, far ahead of Bing, Yahoo. Free and can pay big dividends, YouTube is a must for many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) looking to stand out on the web.
We come back here to what YouTube is, its interest in natural referencing as well as its advantages and limits for promoting a business.
YouTube, the king of video
YouTube is a video hosting site where everyone can view, comment and also share videos. Created in 2005 by three former PayPal employees, the platform was quickly bought by the giant Google. If you need an account to add your own videos, consulting the online catalog is completely free and requires no connection. Over the years, social media has become increasingly popular and has logically encouraged the creation of content that is more and more worked and interesting for users.
From this craze was born the vocation of some users to use the platform as a showcase for their work or their ideas. We then find the appearance of new functions, such as YouTubers, or vloggers in the case of bloggers using video as their main medium. It must be said that in addition to the notoriety brought to the most successful users, Youtube is financed, like its big brother Google, by the advertising viewed at the start or during the videos. A redistribution system is in place so that the video owner can receive part of the income generated by the advertising viewed on his video. This is called channel monetization.
Communication support for SMEs
At the enterprise level, monetization is generally only a negligible income, or in any case ancillary. The proliferation of content and the crazy statistics that YouTube knows, however, bring more and more traffic, and therefore potential customers who are just waiting to find information that may interest them. According to an official statement from Google in February 2017, YouTube would have more than a billion hours of videos watched every day around the world.
Making your business known on the Internet is a real challenge for SMEs. It is therefore not surprising to see that more and more of them are turning their marketing strategy towards content creation and social networks. Among them, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram are often cited among the potential choices. Regardless of the decision made by management or proposed by the company’s communications agency, the video format nevertheless always obtains excellent results.
Video then achieves different goals.
- Attract more prospects: rich, entertaining or informative content will highlight your business and automatically increase its visibility. The buying intentions of its audience are then more likely to turn to your products.
- Increase your target’s confidence. Video stands out above all by its multimedia aspect. It can indeed happily marry images, texts, and sound, as well as humanize the relations between the internet user and the company. Knowing the human behind the machine or the advertising message builds confidence.
- Improve the conversion rate. If your videos please, you encourage your target to take the act of buying , whether for a physical product or a service that you offer.
- Boost your reputation, so get more traffic and clicks, so be better referenced. Let us return to this last point in a little more detail.
YouTube to boost SEO
Remember for all intents and purposes: YouTube belongs to Google. It is therefore not surprising to find that the search engine fairly well references the content on its own platform. Having a YouTube channel offering interesting and regular content, therefore, allows an SME to boost its marketing strategy by multiplying its chances of being found on the web.
Logically, the YouTube search tool will initially be able to offer your videos to its users. Then, Google search will also tend to offer this content as a priority and therefore potentially improve your positioning on SERPs. Finally, your videos can very easily be embedded on your website or related sites, and of course be shared on social networks.
Add to these facts already more than convincing the role played by one of the flagship algorithms of Google, we called Hummingbird. Effective since 2013, this major algorithm is particularly interested in the relevance of the results proposed on the SERP. It therefore rather concerns so-called long tail requests (several keywords) and has the capacity to offer multimedia content, in other words, videos.
Therefore, it is no longer very difficult to understand the growing interest of video, and especially YouTube, for the communication of SMEs.
Business manager and Youtuber, it’s not that easy
YouTube can therefore undeniably be an effective communication medium, with a promising return on investment for SMEs. However, you should be aware of the potential difficulties encountered when executing such a marketing strategy. Indeed, if content is king, all content is not necessarily favorable, it must still be good. The judgment of the quality of a video is after all subjective, let us consider that good web content on the marketing plan is above all that will please your target and will bring you new customers. It means if your channel is providing information related to interior designing then you can not upload sports-related information on the same.
The creation of this kind of media requires certain know-how, time and/or money. Going through an agency or other web professionals can, therefore, be a guarantee of quality. Realization requires technical, graphic and marketing knowledge which can quickly prove to be time-consuming internally without being accompanied by the hoped-for results. It is therefore essential, before going into practice, to analyze your needs and prepare a solid communication strategy.
Finally, video SEO should be approached like any other organic SEO strategy. It is indeed based on the same foundations. More than just videos, we must think of any new upload as a whole containing the medium itself, but also a descriptive text, an attractive miniature, keywords and a neat title.
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Author Bio
Digvijay Rajddan is Marketing Manager at Design By Lavassa and has served as the Head of Conversion Marketing at Planet Web Solution. He’s an expert in inbound marketing and lead generation.
