How to Improve the Visibility of Your Marketing Videos

Marketing videos are slowly becoming an integral part of every business' online marketing strategy. With text starting to become out of style, and rich content very much in, it's a smart way to engage your audience and be found online. While YouTube star Dollar Shave Club received over 7 million views with their first video, yours may be a bit slower to gain popularity ' but not if you do it right.

Search engines don't read your videos like they read your text. Sure, including keywords in the title and description is a good start, but there is a bit more to consider. So, if you want to improve the visibility of your B2B marketing videos ' whether you're hosting them on your site, or YouTube and Vimeo ' consider sitemap build, search engine availability and a taking a slow, but steady start.

Proper Sitemap Build

When Google bots crawl your website, they hit all the sweet spots, just as you planned. Internal linking, keyword use, quality content ' it's all there. However, Google doesn't quite see your videos as clearly. ReelSEO.com explains, 'The Video Sitemap tells Google exactly where and what the video content is on your site. This will help it get picked up by the Google bots and be fully searchable on Google Video.'

There are few key information bits that should be included in your sitemap.

• Embed code: If placing videos on your website or blog, be sure to include the original location of your video, aka the YouTube or Vimeo URL. This helps Google see where it originated.
• Locations: In your sitemap, be sure to include where the video can be played. If it's only built for one or two countries, that information should be included.
• Tags: There are a number of important tags you want to have filled in with the right keywords. Don't miss: title tag, description tag, thumbnail_loc, video tag.

Give it to The Search Engines

Currently the main search engines ' Google and Bing ' are working on their ability to locate, crawl and judge video content for search. So for now, you'll want to submit your video sitemap to the search engines instead of hoping they'll find it themselves.

• Bing: Currently, they only accept video sitemap submissions via email. However, those who have emailed their sitemaps had trouble deciphering whether it was even received, so don't plan your video SEO around them just yet.
• Google: You can submit your sitemap to Google just as you would for your website. Be sure to remember you can't have more than 50,000 entries on it and you can put multiple videos into the one sitemap.

Power in Numbers

If video marketing is new to your business, you don't want to jump in head first with a 10 minute video from the CEO. As with anything in your business, you want to start slow, test it out and make adjustments as needed.

• Start with a few short videos, ranging from tutorial, to interview with employees, etc. This will give you an idea of the video-making timeframe; from shooting, to quick edits, sitemap build and uploading.
• Share it with your fans on social media and see which ones gain more popularity. As an important aspect of your marketing efforts, you want to be sure you're placing the bulk of your time on videos that will be successful.
• Be sure to create a sitemap for all of them, so search engines will begin to recognize your tags and locations.

Videos can be a valuable asset to your overall marketing efforts, but you have to do it right. Unfortunately, search engines are still learning how to find and bring them to those seeking out your valuable content. But, if you do the extra work, you have a much greater chance of being the next viral video.