Part of online reputation management is ensuring your company has a large search footprint on sites throughout the web and for queries that customers will use to research you.
Video can be used very effectively to help manage your reputation. As I had mentioned in a previous post about negative online reviews, video testimonials from customers are fantastic for this. But what is the best way to utilize video to ensure you get the best benefit?
YouTube vs. Self Hosted Video
One of the goals of video testimonials is to rank the video in the search engine results page (SERP). If you load your video onto YouTube, it will be that YouTube page on your channel that gets the SEO value and ranks for a particular query. And when someone clicks on the Google search result they go to your YouTube page. The problem with sending traffic to your YouTube channel is that people can easily click away to other videos, even competitor videos, and if you don’t have ads turned off on your channel visitors could even be seeing competitor ads too. Professionally hosted videos that reside on your website make it easier to monetize that traffic once someone does click through to your landing page, and there are no other videos showing nor ads.
Best Place to Put Your Testimonial Video
Put several of your video testimonials on your website. Create a page on your site with an optimized Title tag and Meta Description for your company name + the words “review” and “testimonial”. Write an intro paragraph introducing the video content. Then find a professional video host that is set up to host videos for you and that is optimized for video SEO. The goal again is that your site gets the SEO credit for the video, not YouTube, and that the page your video is on shows in the search results pages of Google.
If you end up producing many video testimonials then load several onto a page on your site, and the others onto your YouTube channel.
Help the Search Engines Understand Video Content
Three things can greatly help the search engines understand your video content, and thus what searches to show it for:
- Title: write an effective title for your video, generally 6 -10 words.
- Description: provide a detailed description of what the video is about. Descriptions can usually be very detailed and lengthy covering 2 or more paragraphs depending on the length of the video. Testimonial videos are generally short so the descriptions should not be more than a paragraph.
- Transcribe the audio content of the video and load it as closed captioning text. The closed captioning content is all readable and accessible to search engines which helps them further understand what the video is about. Even if you’re loading videos onto your YouTube channel you should still transcribe the audio and load it.
And here’s a pro tip if you’re a small business, instead of transcribing the audio files yourself, which can be very time consuming, go to Fiverr and pay $5 bucks to have someone transcribe it for you.
Have you tried video testimonials? What are your thoughts, or questions?
Photo credit: CalypsoCrystal, Flickr dot com
