How to Optimize YouTube Videos?

Why should I optimize YouTube videos?

If you're interested in creating high-quality content for consumers, YouTube is a great way to go. The video platform has over two billion users worldwide and consumers are viewing videos more and more as of recent. If you're going to create videos, YouTube is where you need to publish your content.

Like Google, YouTube has its own internal algorithm that determines the rank that the video search results appear. Getting your video to rank highly on this algorithm can help increase your campaign’s success in a variety of ways. The next step following video creation is to optimize YouTube videos.

1. It will be easier for potential viewers to find your content and watch it
2. Greater traffic rates will mean larger brand reach and more conversions
3. You will increase the odds of having your videos rank in standard Google SERPs as well

Although YouTube’s exact algorithm remains a secret, like Google’s, there are a number of factors that marketers can use to build the rank of their videos so that they can reach their desired audience.

How are YouTube videos ranked?

There are a few criteria that brands should focus on when building the rank of their videos.

1. Keywords. YouTube uses keywords to understand the topics of videos as well as queries that users type when looking for a new video. Your keywords should be used in the title and description of the video as well as the video tags.
2. Description. Creating a thorough video description makes it easier for YouTube to know what your video is about and who will be the most interested in seeing it.
3. Watch time. YouTube measures how long people spend watching particular videos, assuming that the videos which are regularly watched all the way through are more engaging than those that are regularly clicked off after just a few seconds. By creating short videos, you're more likely to keep your audience engaged. It'll also be easier for you to post often as you'll have plenty of content to do so.
4. Number of subscribers. The more people you have subscribing to your channel, the more authoritative YouTube views your videos.
5. Reactions. YouTube also looks at how many people like, dislike and comment on your videos and factors these in as measurements of how well your video understands its target audience.

How do I get my YouTube video to come up first?

• Utilize your buyer's journey
• Create content that's easy to understand
• Promote your video
• Add new content often
• Repeat the process

1. Utilize your buyer's journey. By using the buyer's journey and buyer personas to uncover what people are looking to view through video content in the early stages of their journey. Use these topics and keywords to create videos that are either emotional or educational. Emotional videos would be funny videos, like the popular Old Spice videos, while educational videos might help people understand a new software. The more engaging your video is, the more you will increase your critical watch time factor.
2. Create content that's easy to understand. Make it easy for YouTube and Google to understand your content. Use keywords throughout your video markup, including the title, tags and description. Use a full description so that the algorithms understand as much as possible about your videos.
3. Promote your video. YouTube videos can be easily embedded on other social media platforms, so take advantage of that and let your entire audience know about your great video to drive up your traffic and customer responses.
4. Add new content often. Whether it's every day, a few times a week, or once a week, if you want your YouTube to both rank and gain traffic, you need to upload new content for your audience at least once a week.
5. Repeat the process. Continue to repeat these steps to build a strong channel. When you make the jump from developing just one awesome video and instead create several well-regarded videos, you will develop a strong channel with numerous subscribers, boosting your rankings and your authority.

YouTube is a fantastic tool for marketers because it lets you reach a wide audience of interested viewers. Get your voice heard above the crowd by optimizing the YouTube videos you create and let people know why your brand should be their trusted choice in the industry.

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How Do I Optimize a Landing Page CTA?

1. Determine the value of your offer for customers and use this as a basis for building your forms.
2. Remember that when unsure, it is always best to delete a form field. You want your customers to see completing the form as a small investment for their time and effort.
3. Create a CTA based on your offer.
4. Write your CTA in first person point of view to build a relationship.
5. Always run A/B tests to see the impact of your CTA form and to ensure that it is fully optimized for your specific audience.

The human brain is constantly evaluating offers in terms of cost versus reward. Everything to the mind "costs" something, whether that is money, time or even just your name and email on a form.

Landing pages require you to tap into human psychology by understanding how people view your content and calculate the cost of your offer. Optimizing these two elements will help you maximize your conversions.

What makes for a good landing page?

Once you optimize the content on your landing page, you might think it is ready for customers. In truth, even the details of your call-to-action and form can impact the number of conversions. Customers are sensitive to factors such as the number of fields included in forms and the language you use in your CTA.

How to make landing pages that convert?

It is important to keep your form proportional to your offer if you want to be taken seriously. In other words, if all you are offering is a basic ebook, then asking for much more beyond a name, email and company name will often require too much of customers and can lower conversion rates. If your offer is something more valuable, such as an in-depth case study that the customer cannot get anywhere else, then asking for more information, such as the person’s position at the company, might be appropriate.

When determining the length of your form, it is always best to err on the side of brevity. One study found that a decrease of just one form field led to an increase of conversions by about 50%. Only ask customers for information that you absolutely must have to serve them.

What do customers want to see from my CTA?

If you have already optimized your content, then you know about creating a strong value for the potential lead or customer. Your CTA is where you make the final push towards the conversion. This makes it essential to get these last few words right.

Studies have shown that landing pages see more conversions when the CTA is written in the first person. In other words, you should be creating CTAs and buttons that say things like, “Start my download” instead of “Start your download”. This helps people feel more connected to the product or service and feel a personal benefit from converting on your page.

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How To Optimize Mobile Apps?

What is the value of a mobile app?

We all know that customers are spending an increased amount of time on mobile, but what many do not realize is that the vast majority of that time is spent specifically on mobile apps. Customers spend an average of 85 percent of their time on smartphones on mobile apps. While mobile sites are crucial to interacting with people browsing the web, building an effective and popular mobile app is a very valuable way to build brand loyalty and engage with your mobile customers.

Why bother optimizing the app?

Although 85 percent of the time that people are on mobile phones is spent on apps, only an average of 5 apps per user see heavy use. People do not download and use numerous different apps, which means that the competition to be one of those popular, valuable apps for users is fierce.

The importance of optimizing also becomes important when you realize that an average of 60k new apps are uploaded to iTunes and 50k are uploaded to Google Play every month. You need to learn how to get your brand’s app to stand out and be found against this saturated market.

How do I optimize my mobile app?

1. Design an app that projects your brand. It needs to be consistent with the messaging that your customers receive elsewhere from your organization.
2. Your app needs to add value for customers. Your app needs to be useful so your customers will want to download it and engage with you further. 
3. Create your app using bright and inviting images. This is particularly important for the image that appears in the search results. Images can help invite customers to click on your app and give it a try.
4. Optimize your content for mobile. Content optimized for mobile adjusts to small phone screens so users can easily read the content. Videos should be compatible for mobile and emails should load quickly and be easily scannable.
5. Make sure your app has a thorough description with keywords. It is the description that will help tell the app store that your app matches the needs of the customer typing in a search query. Describe your app well to capture that attention.
6. Remain engaged with your app. Listen to feedback and use it to make your app more useful and efficient. If there are any complaints about problems, fix them immediately and update your description to let people know what issues have been addressed.

Mobile apps are a valuable part of the modern mobile experience. Taking the time to optimize your app will help you attract desired attention and maximize your potential for on-the-go consumers.

When Should I Optimize My Website?

Ideally, your website should be optimized when it is being built. This will result in the least amount of work for you and will maximize your visibility from your first launch. Postponing your optimization efforts will mean that you will have to go through the process at a later date, resulting in lost time and money. Since Google might also take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to ‘reread’ your site, it might also be a while before your changes are noticed, resulting in prolonged periods of lower ranks and less visibility. Optimizing your site from the beginning avoids this potential problem.

What should I think about as I build my website?

1. Load time. Google and your users want to see sites that have low load times. Pages that take too long to load are often just closed (link to project page on load times). Google knows that long load times result in a lower user-satisfaction rating, and so they also penalize the sites. To keep your load time low, you need to prioritize the items on your page and your plugins. Too many plugins or items that need to load will slow down the page.

2. Folders and site map. It should be clear how your site is organized so that Google and your users know what to expect. Your sitemap should be uploaded to Google to help the search engine understand your pages.

3. Navigation. Navigation should be intuitive. This means pages should be appropriately named and organized in an understandable fashion. Customers should be able to clearly see where they are in your site and how to get where they want to go.

How do I optimize my website?

Here are some things to absolutely remember when optimizing your website:

1. Types of content. Your content should be developed with the end user in mind. This means understanding your buyer personas and their journeys and using data to pinpoint keywords and topics that appeal most to specific people. You should be producing a variety of types of content, such as videos, text and infographics, so that you can appeal to a broad range of potential customers.

2. Meta descriptions. Meta descriptions (link to project page on meta descriptions) are the bits of text that appear below your URL on SERPs, describing your page to users. This text can have a big impact on the sites that people choose to click on, so write descriptions that are engaging and inviting.

3. Keywords. Although various Google algorithm updates have shifted optimization efforts away from just matching keywords and towards matching concepts, keywords are still an important way to let Google know your topic. You should use data to determine a few desirable keywords and use them naturally in your content, while focusing on providing users with information they want about this particular subject.

As you build your site, focusing on optimization can help you create a successful web page that is ready to perform from the moment you launch it. Remember that SEO is an ongoing project, and will continue to require modifications and adjustments as algorithms, customers and best practices change (link to project page on site redesign). Keeping these ideas in mind, however, will get you started on the important path of ranking well and reaching customers.

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Social Media Metrics

What are social media metrics?

Social media metrics is the data used to assess the impact of social media activity on marketing campaigns and a company's revenue. These metrics help to assess how well you are accomplishing your goals in the social space and provide insight to where you can modify your campaign.

Why are social media metrics important?

Social media is an important part of any content marketing campaign. It is not just a soap box for you to broadcast your message to your followers, but a platform on which you can engage with those interested in your company and industry. Like any part of a content marketing strategy, it requires metrics so that you know how well you are accomplishing your goals.

Metrics in social media can tell you a considerable amount about your audience. You can learn the types of the content and the topics that they are most interested in, how well your efforts to build brand awareness are going and whether or not you are successful in encouraging these followers to enter your sales funnel. As you gain these insights, you will be able to modify your campaign as needed.

What are examples of social media metrics?

There are a number of different types of social media metrics you can use, depending upon the goals you want to accomplish on the platform. For example, shares, likes and followers are all good ways to see if you are successful with increasing brand awareness.

Comments on your social platforms or on the articles that you distribute through social media can help you understand how engaged your audience is with the types of material you are putting out.

How your backlink profile and traffic rates grow in response to social media distribution can also help you see how successful you are at engaging the search, social and content trifecta (link to search, social and content project piece).

1. Volume measures how many people are talking about your brand and the number of posts that mention your brand. Track this metric over time to see how customer engagement changes.
2. Reach measures the potential size of your audience. Use reach in comparison to other engagement metrics to discover how many people participated in your campaign in comparison to your audience.
3. Engagement measures how many people participate conversations involving your brand. This can include sharing content and commenting on posts.
4. Share of voice measures how you brand compares in conversions to your competitors.

How to build a data-centric social media campaign?

1. Look over your past activity on the platform and see the topics and content types to which your social media audience most frequently responded.
2. Develop a strategy that reflects a concrete goal for this campaign and ways to measure success.
3. Understand that most social media followers are at the early stages of the buyer’s journey, so they are most interested in awareness stage and consideration stage type content.
4. Create content that reflects understanding of why people share content.
5. Distribute content and measure reactions through the predefined metrics.
6. Make adjustments to improve your next campaign.

Social media is an excellent opportunity for you to engage with your audience personally and encourage them to enter your sales funnel. By using social media metrics during your campaigns, you will better understand people’s behavior and be able to create content more tailored to their needs.

Related materials

• Full guide: Best Practices for Social SEO
• Execute an Integrated Campaign Successfully

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Measuring YouTube Success

How do I know if my YouTube efforts are successful?

YouTube offers marketers the opportunity to reach over a billion users. At the same time, however, since it is a 3rd party platform, it can be a challenge to know if your efforts are successful.

YouTube, since it reaches such a broad audience, typically is used for boosting brand engagement and awareness. Understanding how to monitor these factors will allow you to see how worthwhile your YouTube efforts have been and how you can produce better results in the future by using your data to streamline your efforts.

Metrics to watch for to monitor YouTube success

Branded Traffic and Your Share of Voice

YouTube is a valuable tool for increasing your brand awareness. As you create engaging videos that help people better understand or learn about topics of interest, you expose them to your brand and what you have to offer. Monitoring your Share of Voice and Branded Traffic can be a good way to know if you succeed in this endeavor. The BrightEdge Share of Voice tool can be valuable to help you accomplish this goal.

Referral Traffic from YouTube

Make it easy for people to click through from YouTube to your brand website by including a link to your page in the description of the video and on your brand’s YouTube page. It is important to note that YouTube is not known for large amounts of referral traffic, so just because this number is low does not mean your videos are failing. Rather than looking at the number, you want to look at the pattern-- if the number increases, then you know your videos are having a positive impact.

YouTube analytics

YouTube also offers you a few different options for monitoring your video success right on the platform. You can measure engagement by tracking watch time insights. You can also monitor factors such as Likes and Dislikes, Audience Retention and Sharing, which all add valuable insights into what people think of your videos. Here is a complete list of the currently available analytics.

YouTube is a valuable resource for your organization to increase brand awareness and improve your reputation, but it can be a challenge to measure your success. Using these three main categories of metrics, however, will help you gain the insights you need to improve your YouTube strategy and integrate it into the rest of your campaign.

How Does PR relate to Content Marketing?

How does PR relate to content marketing?

With the Internet and content marketing, customers have changed how they look for information. Rather than wait for brands to come to them, they actively go online and research the products and services that they desire. These customers also help to spread publications and articles about topics that interest them through social media. This has changed how PR professionals promote their brands.

Publications have also changed. Now, it is not just major newspapers and magazines that PR professionals can look to for coverage. Now there are also a host of online blogs that are actually highly respected publications. Even the brand’s own blog can be a useful way to spread information to the company’s audience.

It is also common for major publications to be most interested in thought-leadership pieces that are written by authors with large followings that will come to read the piece. These publications want to increase their own exposure.

What is content creations in public relations?

Both content marketers and PR professionals want to present their business to the general public as an authoritative, useful resource. They want to form a relationship with their potential customers.

Many PR professionals are already beginning to notice the relationship between their sector and the broader digital marketing industry. According a report published by Vocus State of PR:

• 78 percent of PR professionals use social media to share and promote content
• 50 percent use social media to share coverage
• 44 percent cultivate relationships through social tools
• 29 percent make pitches to reporters through social platforms.

As more professionals notice the link between PR and content marketing, those who fail to adopt the latest techniques will find themselves falling further behind.

How do PR and marketing work together?

1. Have your PR team and content development team discuss common goals, such as brand awareness, to help them see how their efforts can complement each other.
2.  Educate your employees about the unique roles of PR and content so that the end goals of each are understood. Content marketers want to tell the brand story to connect with people, PR wants to reach the right people. They want to get the brand image in front of customers build a positive reputation.
3. Know when to use major PR outlets for announcements or news. This will vary depending upon the company and the extent of their social presence. News you want to come from an authoritative source might be better received if it was published in an established publication if you only have a small social audience.
4. Regularly publish high-quality content that provides value to the users. This is the type of content people share, which can then spread brand awareness.
5. Measure your customers’ reaction to your content and PR strategies and adjust when necessary.

PR and content marketing are quickly colliding as professionals realize the value of content in promoting brands. PR professionals who want to remain relevant in the digital marketing world should keep these principles in mind as they move forward.

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Learn About The Best Mobile SEO Strategies

Why is having the best mobile SEO strategy important?

Customers today spend increasing amounts of time on mobile and they are exploring all types of content. According to Google, more searches are now performed on mobile than on desktop. It's an SEO must that you learn to optimize content for mobile. 

Emailmonday found that between 15 and 70 percent of your email opens are going to be done on mobile devices depending upon your target audience. There was an increase from customers spending 30 minutes a day watching videos on mobile devices in 2014 to 39 minutes in 2015. At least 78 percent of smartphone users and 70 percent of tablet users also report performing at least one search per day. Regardless of the type of content you produce, you need to make sure that it is optimized for mobile.

What does it mean to optimize content for mobile?

Mobile devices have small screens and users are often on-the-go. They might be on a train or bus commuting, in a coffee shop or in a store. Optimized content understands the mobile user. It easily adjusts to fit on smaller screens and does not use a font that is so small it cannot be read, only one of the major reasons to optimize content. Videos that are not compatible with mobile devices should not appear on mobile sites. Email messages should load quickly and not have too many images that make it difficult for the user to scan the message. When you optimize content, it flows easily between desktop and mobile devices to provide the user with an outstanding experience.

What are the best mobile optimization techniques?

1. Recognize that nearly any type of content you develop may be viewed on mobile, and that creating a strong user experience requires you to make sure it is ready for this possibility.
2. Make sure any videos on your pages are compatible with smart devices.
3. If possible, make your content scrollable, rather than forcing people to click through multiple pages, which can be challenging on mobile.
4. Make sure your images are high-quality and closely cropped to maximize detail, even when shrunk to fit a smaller screen.
5. Any buttons on the screen should be easy for mobile customers to use.
6. Use a responsive template for everything, including emails.
7. Do not use long paragraphs, which can be cumbersome on devices. Remember that people are moving when on mobile -- long paragraphs will often lose them.
8. Keep the motivations of your on-the-go customers in mind. If most people come to your site looking for certain types of content, such as directions, optimize content and make it easy to find.

Mobile devices now dominate a significant portion of the online space. To be effective marketers, you need to make sure that your content is ready for these users and easy to engage with regardless of the device. Optimize content and become successful in SEO.

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Landing Page Best Practices For Better SEO

How do I do landing page optimization?

Your landing page is one of the most important parts of your site. It is the page where all of your hard work to nurture visitors and encourage them to get closer to you is put to the test. Here customers have the opportunity to convert and either become an official lead, supplying you with valuable information about who they are and the motivations they have for visiting you, or they become paying customers.

As humans, we like to think that our decisions are driven by facts and objective reasoning. Research has shown, however, that an impressive amount of our decisions are driven by emotion. In other words, whether or not your customer converts on your landing page is not just determined by objective reasons that you are the best in the industry. Rather, your page needs to be optimized to make sure that your visitors feel good about the decision to convert on your site.

What elements impact landing page SEO?

There are two key content elements that you need to consider when determining whether or not a user will convert on your site.

• Your offer
• Your images

What offer should I have on my landing page?

A quality landing page will make a compelling value proposition. You will show your visitors a clear advantage to converting on the page. This offer will be described using engaging language. You might have testimonials from past customers or logos of customer brands indicating that reputable organizations that have found this offer worthwhile. Your description should leave your visitor feeling as though a failure to convert will leave them seriously missing out on something.

Do images matter for landing page optimization?

Your landing page should not be crowded, but there generally should be at least one image that helps people visualize your offer. Some brands find that images which describe their offer, such as a picture of a book for an ebook, work well. Otherwise, images of customers using your product and looking satisfied are also good choices. The rule is to find images that complement your offer and make it look more intriguing.

How can I improve my landing page SEO performance?

Creating strong landing page optimization requires regular testing. You will need to run numerous A/B tests to optimize your content. Test the way you phrase your offer, the position and size of the image, different colors and nearly any other content feature you can imagine. Modifying even the slightest details can result in an increase in conversions, which will then provide you with more leads and more revenue.

Landing pages are a critical part of the site building process. As you create your page, you will need to pay close attention to the content elements you use. Continually test your selections to make sure that your audience is responding to the choices you have made.

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What is Content Marketing?

What is Content Marketing, exactly?

Content marketing is the creation and dissemination of branded digital content (online material). It differs from public relations and sales in that it does not overtly promote the brand or its products. Yet, content plays an increasingly expanded role in courting the digital consumer. Content marketing aims to identify, speak to, and stimulate the interests of target audiences. Rather than focus on products, it focuses content around consumer desires and identity. Branded content is created around clear guidelines that communicate a company’s character. Companies with clear and consistent brand mission, values, and identity are better trusted by consumers. Content-rich websites increase traffic. They provide material customized to online searches and targeted audiences.  Content marketing best practices include evaluating keywords, trending searches, and user behavior. This increases the customer base and generates marketing leads. Ultimately, this contributes to brand recognition and trust. That, in turn, leads to increased sales and a bevy of other benefits.

Why is content marketing important?

Content marketing has grown incredibly over the past few years, and this growth has been largely driven by customers themselves. An estimated 81 percent of shoppers will research things online before making a purchase. Another 94 percent of B2B customers will conduct research before buying. Other statistics reveal that 67 percent of the buyer journey now takes place digitally.

Customers today are changing. They do not depend on brands anymore to reach out to them and interest them in a product. Instead, they discover they have a problem and go out to see what solutions might exist.

As modern consumers rely increasingly on the Internet to shop and learn about products and services available, brands that do not make the jump to content marketing will be lost in the shuffle.

Who is my target audience?

To successfully run a content marketing campaign, you must first be able to clearly articulate with whom exactly you are speaking. It does not do any good to write what you find interesting, it only matters what your customer wants to read. To know what interests your customers, you must know who they are.

Develop target personas for your audience. This should be basic classifications of your buyers. Use information from past buyers as well as market research to identify three to five types of buyers that are most likely to make a purchase from your brand. Focus on answering questions such as:

• their role in their organization
• their budget
• their reason for needing this item
• the size of their company

This will give you insight into their pain points and what drove them to convert and use your company.

If you do not know the answer to these types of questions, interview your past customers and gain the information you need.

Once you know who you are speaking with, you then need to use this information for keyword research and to find topics most likely to resonate with each persona at each stage of the buyer journey.

How do I create a distribution network?

Now that your content has been developed, you need to focus on getting it in front of the intended audience. Use the information from your buyer personas and determine the platforms they are most likely to employ.

You want to use your content as a means of engaging with your audience. Since the culture and audience generally differs slightly between platforms, it is important to know where the intended audience for a particular piece likes to socialize, and use that platform as your main distribution point and the others as supplements. This will increase your odds of engaging with the right audience.

The Benefits of Content Marketing

Content marketing is distinct from advertising campaigns in that it plays a long game. Its goal is not a specific revenue boost for a product. Your SEO tools provides invaluable insight into what users want. From those keywords and searches, providing quality content will capture the ongoing attention of increased traffic. Content marketing:

• Increases brand visibility and positions brand as a dependable authority.
• Generates more inbound traffic by catering to target audience interests and improves lead generation.
• Content rich websites make visitors more likely to purchase products by keeping them within site. Strategically create links that continue or augment the visitor’s journey.
• Audience-oriented content increases engagement, sharing, and return visits and opens communication with audience and proxy audiences
• Improves brand recognition and deepens familiarity with brand identity (values, mission, and purpose) for a lasting consumer base consumer trust and identification
• Ensures brand and content consistency across platforms, products, departments, and campaigns
• Soft touch points avoid expensive and off-putting hard pitches
• Grows exponentially, providing the framework for organic growth

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