Many internet marketers now realize that video marketing is one of the most lucrative internet marketing strategies. Once a video is created, optimized and distributed to the top video sharing sites it will continue to send FREE targeted traffic on autopilot forever more.
Ever since Google introduced universal search, video results have been blended into the top of the search engine results for lucrative keyword phrases. Now this was not a case of upload the video and you get page one ranking. There is a very specific process that one would have to follow.
What many video marketers overlook however is the need to get video from both their own sites as well as video sharing sites, to the top of Google. It is important to get video results from sites such as YouTube to page one of Google, because YouTube is now considered the world’s second largest search engine. YouTube is also owned by Google, thus Google tends to give preferential ranking to YouTube videos as it comes within the remit of a ‘trusted website’.
The only downside of focusing exclusively on getting your YouTube videos to page one of Google is the actual architecture of the YouTube website. YouTube is designed to retain a viewer on its website for as long as possible. It does this through a tuned graphical user interface that presents viewers with ‘related videos’.
So if your video from YouTube ranks on page one of Google, you are sending traffic to the YouTube site. Once they finish viewing your video a percentage of them will click on your link and visit your website. A much larger percentage will click on one of the ‘Related Videos’ presented to them by YouTube. This effectively ‘pops’ that viewer out of your sales funnel, as they get distracted by competitor videos.
Conversely if you optimized your video marketing strategy such that you achieved multiple simultaneous results on page one of Google with one of the videos going to YouTube and the other video going to your website, you will maximize your traffic and sales.
Video Marketing expert Mao Flynn from http://www.videomarketingdevastation.com describes the process as follows; “Getting front page placement on Google with video marketing is an 8 step process. A key element within that process is the need to discover keyword phrases pertaining to your niche that trigger video retainers, and optimize your videos creation and submission process to satisfy Google bots specific search criteria. He indicated that “a critical factor for getting videos from your own HTML site and blogs to appear on page one of Google, is to submit a video sitemap for that video”.
He goes on to state that “although search engine spiders have begun to use new technology that listens to videos and converts the audio into text for indexing purposes, they still rely heavily on the text submitted with the video for indexing. A video sitemap provides this essential text in a format that makes it easy for Google bot, to determine precisely the relevancy of your video to the search phrase. A well optimized video site map will thus make it possible for videos from your site, to appear alongside videos from YouTube in the SERPs. This sends traffic directly to your website, and thus facilitates a more fluid progression through your sales funnel, which translates into accelerated sales” according to Mao.
Principle engineer and head of Google’s Web Spam team, Matt Cutts – fully agrees with Mao Flynn, he states “If you produce videos and you haven’t done a video site map, that is something that I would definitely recommend.”
So the message is clear you need to be engaged in a form of video marketing that sends traffic both to your YouTube videos, and to videos on your website. A key factor in sending videos to your website is ‘video site maps’.