Incorporating videos into your marketing mix is no longer an afterthought – it’s a necessity.
NB: This is an article from eTourism
But as with every other form of content marketing, it’s not enough to simply create high quality videos, you’ve got to stick to a range of best practices to ensure your content actually gets seen by the right people and clicked-on. When it comes to videos, understanding the basic principles of YouTube SEO is what will make the difference between your carefully crafted videos finding their audience or falling flat.
1. Do Your Research
Just like when creating a new blog post or written piece of content for your hotel’s website, it’s essential to carry out keyword research before you even start thinking about ideas for your next video.
One of the easiest ways to do this is simply to check whether your chosen keywords have YouTube autosuggestions and results. You should also take a look at Google Trends to analyse the search volume for your chosen keywords over time.
By doing this, you’ll have a good idea if your guests are likely to be interested in your video content ideas.
2. Optimize Your Video Title
Your video title should contain at least five words, including those you’ve identified from your keyword research in step one.
Since it’s the first thing travellers will notice, your title should also act just like a blog headline in that in should be as eye-catching and snappy as possible. Remember that the content of your video needs to be relevant to your title, or you’re going to suffer from short viewing times which will negatively impact your ranking over time.
3. Optimize Your Video Description
Your video description should set out what your video is about in clear, concise terms.
Why? It’s not just potential guests that are using your descriptions to get a feel for your videos, it’s search engines too.
Include a link to your hotel’s website in the first part of your description. This boosts rankings as well as driving more people to your website to find out more and book.
Aim for a description length of at least 250 words, including your targeted keywords, sprinkled around 3 times throughout. Even though it’s important to incorporate these key terms, don’t over-stuff them. A video description that sounds clunky and unnatural takes away from the credibility of your brand.
4. Choose An Enticing Thumbnail
Your video thumbnail is right up there with its title when it comes to grabbing your guests’ attention in the YouTube search results.
The platform will automatically offer you a choice of three thumbnails after you’ve uploaded your video. If you have a verified account, you also have the option of uploading a custom image to ensure you pick the most interesting and click-worthy thumbnail. YouTube recommends a resolution of 1280×720 pixels.
Have you optimised your videos to rank highly in the YouTube search results and get discovered by more of your guests?
