Beyond Viral: How to Attract Customers, Promote Your Brand, and Make Money with Online Video

Chapter 12. Video and Search Engine Optimization

With Mark Robertson, ReelSEO^[1]

Search engines will dramatically impact your success with online video, and this will become a highly competitive area in coming years. The search engine is a broker between you and your customer for a variety of reasons:

• Your customers are increasingly using specific terms in their searches, and including the word video into searches more than the word sex. In the past five years, the term how to has grown steadily as a search phrase (Google Trends).^[43]

• Approximately one-third of the views of a video were driven by search. It may surprise you that search engines overtook social media as a driver to videos back in early 2008.^[44] Still, the race is not over.

• Google, by far the leading search engine, incorporates many forms of media in its universal search results. Since it currently indexes far more text than video, you have a distinct advantage with video content.

I use the term search engine marketing (SEM) to refer broadly to two types of disciplines: (1) Paid search is when you bid on search terms, so your content appears as promotion on someone's search-results page (on Google, it's the yellow area labeled "sponsored links" that surrounds the organic or natural results; and (2) search engine optimization (SEO) refers to anything you do to make your content rank more highly in organic results. This is driven by the relevancy of your content, technical configuration of your web site and Web pages, and ...