Video SEO – Key to online video services
With fall in viewership across traditional television channels, video content owners are looking to augment their revenue from digital Over-The-Top (OTT) platforms such as YouTube, Hulu etc.
Video content owners who are serious on setting up a sustainable revenue stream from digital platforms, need a clear focused digital strategy. Strategy should imbibe aspects related to video content, target watch group, video discoverability, selection of OTT platforms and its digital distribution on these OTT platforms.
Engaging quality video content is the most important driver for increased watch time leading to greater monetization. Video content needs to be re-purposed for the targeted watch group and realigned with User Generated Content (UGC). Content not easily discoverable by the target group will lead to subscriber churn and hence loss of revenue.
Video content needs to be uploaded on discovery platforms such as Shazam which will drive sales. Reach, robustness, monetization policies and multi-platform support of OTT platforms is crucial in selection of specific streaming platforms. Ease of distributing on a number of digital platforms with reduced complexities and a short go to market time will be major factor for earning those high bucks.
With over 1 billion users and 300 hours of video content uploaded per minute, YouTube provides a solid platform for video content owners to showcase and monetize their videos. For over a decade now, YouTube has built a humongous repository of uploaded videos. Video content owners, without a specific YouTube strategy, find it really difficult to differentiate and drive traffic to their videos. Video discoverability is key to video searching and monetization.
YouTube strategy encompassing Video Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will help the video content owners offer quality experience to existing and new subscribers leading to increased views, likes, watch-time, adding as favourites, comments, embeds and social shares on Facebook & Google+. This will drive organic growth and hence augment the ROI from the YouTube channel.
For enhancing YouTube quality of experience (QoE), video content owners need to adopt and implement a number of YouTube video specific strategies.
1. Content: As a rule of thumb, nothing can replace and beat the original video content. Content gets top priority by YouTube search engine over and above all video metrics. Higher ranked video in YouTube Search Results Page (YSRP) draws more users and hence higher monetization.
2. Title: YouTube video title and file name should include specific Google SEO keywords which are highly searched.
3. Description: YouTube video requires a detailed description with embedded URLs.
4. Tags and Cards: YouTube video tags should include relevant and targeted video SEO keywords. YouTube provides mobile friendly cards/annotations to include outside links and images.
5. Closed caption (CC): CC option enables automatic transcriptions on YouTube video.
Video content owners need to concentrate on creating engaging videos and outsource the publishing and optimizing videos on OTT platforms to digital video management organizations. TO THE NEW Digital is a pioneer in digital video management and video SEO providing end to end digital video services.
