Your promotional video production company has just sent you your final video and now it’s time share it with the world! Before spending money on advertising, it’s important to optimize your promotional video production for search engines so that it draws in viewers organically (i.e. without you having to spend any money!). In this post, you’ll find actionable tips to help you achieve an improvement in viewership, reach, and overall engagement on your videos through video SEO. We will be using the following travel video as a reference to help illustrate each of the tips. Take a look!

Step 1: Upload Your Promotional Video to YouTube

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With over a billion users and four billion views per day, YouTube is by far the best site to upload your videos to if you’re looking for views. However, with over 300 hours of new videos uploaded to YouTube every minute, you are going to have to put in some work in order to stand out from the crowd! Make sure you don’t publish your video until you’ve completed the following steps.

 

Step 2: Pick the Best Title for Your Promotional Video

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We know we want to include the words “Travel” “Montage Film” and “Promo”, but as a video production company, we know that one of our big keyword phrases is “Video Production Los Angeles” so we included that too.

When coming up with a title, aim for a short phrase that best describes the video and that utilizes strong keywords. A common mistake is to ask yourself what users should search in order to find your video. However, it would be more beneficial for you to ask yourself the following: “What are people searching to find videos similar to mine?” In other words, don’t make viewers put in any effort to find your video. Instead, bring your video to your viewers!

To come up with keywords, you can try using a free keyword planning tool like wordtracker.com or http://keywordtool.io/, but use your discretion when combing through the results. If you still need more keywords, watch your video and write down any words that come to mind during your viewing. Watch videos that are similar to yours but have tons of views and draw inspiration from their titles and descriptions.

Step 3: Tag Your Promotional Video

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Here are some of the tags we used for our travel video.

Next, it’s important to come up with tags for your video to increase your SEO. Be as creative and as broad as possible when coming up with these terms. Start with the keywords you came up with in step 2. Note that YouTube currently lets you use 500 characters in the tags area, and the more tags you have, the more chances you’ll get of people finding your video, so don’t by shy when using them!

For our Thailand video, we would add tags like monkey, coconut, beach, sand, locals, and temple so that in addition to attracting viewers interested in Thailand travel videos, we attract viewers searching for things like monkeys and coconuts on the beach as well.

Here’s a sneaky tip: look up similar videos with a lot of views and write down the username as well as the title of the videos as part of your tags. This will increase the chances that your video will appear in the ”suggestions” of that video.

Step 4: Write a Description for Your Video Production

Screen Shot 2016-04-20 at 1.11.21 PMThe next step is to come up with an accurate and SEO-friendly description for your video. This step is often overlooked but should be taken seriously to increase views. Google and YouTube heavily consider the text surrounding a video to understand the video’s topic and to rank it for your target keywords, so make sure you write a precise and long description! The description shows up below the title and should first include a more in-depth description of what the viewer should expect from the video. We also recommend that you add a brief description of yourself and your company. You should add links to your website and any social media accounts to attract traffic and to encourage viewers to stay connected with you on all platforms.

Step 5: Add a Custom Thumbnail to Your Promotional Video

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As you can see, our thumbnail has a title that describes what our video is about as well as a snapshot of the beautiful scenery you would expect to see if you were to watch our video.

A thumbnail lets people see a quick snapshot of your video and is critical for enticing clicks on your video. Whenever you upload a video to YouTube, a thumbnail will automatically be selected for you from your video.  This is usually never a good image to use as it doesn’t describe what the video is about. If your YouTube account is in good standing, you may have the ability to add a custom thumbnail to your video so don’t miss that opportunity to design an image that you think represents your video best.

 

Step 6: Use Annotations on Your YouTube Video

Screen Shot 2016-04-20 at 1.18.00 PMFinally, you should use annotations, which are text boxes that appear on your video as it’s playing. You can use annotations to remind your viewers to like, comment or subscribe. You can also use them to link directly to other videos or playlists on your channel to keep viewers watching your content for as long as possible.

 

Next Steps

Once you’ve optimized your video for YouTube, share it across all of your social channels! Want to learn how to do that? Stay tuned for our next blog post, which will cover how to promote your video content on your other social platforms.

Good luck with your SEO!