What activities did you do this month to specifically improve your SEO efforts? When is the last time you looked at the way your YouTube videos were optimized? If you’re doing webinars, are you using them to drive traffic 4 ways?
Sometimes circling back to digital marketing tactics you thought you had handled can result in some quick wins in terms of building awareness and interest and driving traffic.
Search Engine Optimization
Among the hundreds of blog posts you’ve produced, do you have “pillar content”? Pillar content should be longer, deeper dive pieces of content, maybe 2,000 – 3,000 words or more, that are your most important posts. And your other pages and posts should link to these pillar content pieces.
- You should designate these key pieces of content as “pillar content” (in Rank Math; or “cornerstone content” in Yoast.) If you’re using WordPress, most SEO plug-ins have a box you can check to indicate a post is pillar content.
- Ideally, you should have one of these deep-dive posts in each of your blog categories to designate as pillar content. Then link each post in the category to that pillar content post. This gives Google a signal that the pillar content piece is the most important post in that category.
We produced an “Ultimate Guide” to something for a client at maybe 1800 words. Our plan was to add additional sections to make it a more comprehensive guide, and do more extensive linking into and out of the document to related posts.
To break up all that content, we added a testimonial, a video snippet, and a few periodic graphic calls to action. The Guide is now over 3000 words, designated as pillar content in one of the blog categories, and each of the posts in the category link into the Guide. The Guide is now one of the most visited pages on the site from Organic traffic.
How can you create pillar content for all your other blog categories? We created a new blog post in each category (of at least 2000 words) that delivers a summary on each key topic covered in the category. We linked into the new summary post from each blog in the category, to make each summary document the pillar content in the category.
Optimize Your Videos on YouTube
Are you sure your videos are optimized on YouTube? If they’ve been posted for a while, it’s probably a good idea to review them.
For each video you load on YouTube, be sure to:
- Create a Title using keywords that will attract the attention of your target audience. Search for similar videos on YouTube to see how others are attracting attention with their Title. Could your Title use some updating?
- Write a Description that will illustrate the value of the content in the video
- Create a thumbnail that will attract attention, with the Title of the video. It’s easy to upload a new thumbnail for videos over a minute. So if your thumbnail is looking tired, time for a refresh.
Our client had posted numerous webinars on YouTube, all using the same “brand template.” It was a blue background with white type — and no visuals at all. So on their channel, all you saw was a sea of blue boxes . . . when we searched through some videos in their category on YouTube, most (if not all) of them featured a visual. Most used a person which is usually the best visual (because the eye is drawn to people). So we created new thumbnails for 32 videos in just a day or two to make their videos more appealing when visitors search in their category.
Don’t forget to create Playlists on YouTube to group your videos that cover similar topics. With the new YouTube Shorts of less than a minute (see below), you can get creative with “One-Minute Tips about . . .” or something similar.
When you set up your videos on YouTube, be sure to click “See More” to scroll down to Tags. Although they play a small role in finding your videos, they still can be helpful. Search on YouTube for topics your videos cover (as you’re typing, you’ll see a drop-down list of keyword phrases others have searched for). Once you’ve identified the phrases your audience is using, make those your Tags.
What’s New on YouTube?
You can breathe new life into your YouTube traffic by taking snippets from your existing videos and webinars. YouTube now has “Shorts” — mobile-sized videos of less than a minute which YouTube promotes heavily. We took a client’s YouTube channel from an average of 151 views per month to an average of 1630 views/month by adding snippets — both Shorts, as well as other snippets from 1-2 minutes long.
The snippets made the client’s YouTube channel more visible, so subscribers and overall views increased (with 82% of views coming from Shorts).
How do you create snippets economically? The online service we used was Opus Clip. For about $15/month, you can upload a video, and Opus will create snippets automatically for your review. You can then edit the snippets right in the software, and download the files for use on YouTube as well as on your website. So the client’s website now benefits from more video content as well.
How to Use Webinars Four Ways to Reach Your Targets
Of course, you’ll post each video or webinar on your website as well as on YouTube. Be sure to post the video/webinar at the top of your web page, so it’s clear to Google this is a video-focused page on your website. Yoast has a Video SEO add-on (to Yoast SEO plug-in for WordPress) you can purchase to add Video Schema Markup to the page, which gives Google more information about the video on the page and helps with indexing. The Yoast Video SEO add-on also creates a Video sitemap you can load into your Google Search Console. (If you have one or two videos, you may not need this. Our client had 32 videos, so we thought it was worth the $79/year.)
Keep in mind that some visitors want to get the message a little faster than a video delivers — they want to skim the content. So when you load a video/webinar on your website, be sure to also load the transcript. That gives those who prefer to read exactly what they want. (We use rev.com for fast and inexpensive video transcripts.)
And you can convert each webinar into a podcast to attract even more attention . . .
Are You Creating Podcasts from Your Videos?
If you’ve got video files, you can create podcasts. Here’s one way to do it:
1. Convert the original video file to an MP3 file: Online-audio-converter.com is a free downloadable tool, so the cost is just your time to run the conversion.
2. Create a 1400 x 1400 thumbnail with the name of each podcast to submit with the audio file. Cost: minimal design time.
3. Upload the MP3 file and image to a podcasting host. RSS.com is one option at $143.88 for a year or $15.99/month.
4. Set up a free account with the major directories like Spotify, Amazon Music, Samsung Podcasts, Podcast Index, Listen Notes, Pandora and Stitcher, TuneIn Radio, Podchaser, iHeartRadio, and Apple Podcast Connect.
5. RSS.com will submit the RSS feed to the major directories you’ve signed up for.
Then we copy the code from rss.com (an easy process) to put each podcast file on our client’s website. Now we have podcasts we can pitch via social media to drive more traffic. Over two years time, we’ve had 16,000 downloads of our client’s podcasts — that’s 16,000 more ears consuming that content.
If you need more ideas for attracting attention and driving traffic, our BEST-SELLING book, “The Results Obsession: ROI-Focused Digital Strategies to Transform Your Marketing” is available on Amazon, now in its second edition!
Learn more about The Results Obsession and see the Table of Contents
The Results Obsession has an entire chapter devoted to SEO, including Video SEO.
Plus multiple chapters on copywriting for websites and email.
Includes a chapter on marketing math and budgeting (as well as a chapter devoted to analyzing Google Analytics 4, email, and social media results).
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