Google likes YouTube a lot- they paid about $1.6 billion for it a number of years back.
Google loves to put YouTube videos in its search results, often catapulting them ahead of otherwise well-ranked websites.
So let’s say your competitors are spending $2000-3000 each month building links to their website, keeping it at the top of Google. Unless you want to spend a lot of money and time, it’ll be hard to catch up.
Maybe you’re not ready to make the necessary investment to rank your own site, and you’re losing customers to your competitors every day as a result.
What to do? Try YouTube. Even if your video doesn’t have backlinks, it can rank. Backlinks help, but depending on the keyword you want to rank for, you might not need any. And even if you do need backlinks, you probably won’t need as many to rank a video as you would to rank a website.
Here’s how to do it:
– Make a video (this is the hard part… see below for more!)
– Upload the video to Youtube
– Put the search term you want to rank for in the title of your video
– Put the same search term and any others you are interested in the section that says “Tags” (I recommend no more than 5-7)
– In the “Description” section for your video, encourage viewers to visit your website with a quick blurb about your business or offering and a link to your site.
– Drive traffic to your video to get views. Google cares about how many viewers you get, and how long they watch your video for.
For local business searches, this simple formula can be enough to send your video to the top of the search results! And that can mean new customers.
Now let’s talk about how to make your video.
One option is to have a friend interview you, asking you questions that customers ask you about your business. Though it’s nice to have a fancy camera, you can try an inexpensive one if you need to. Many cell phones have built-in video cameras, of course.
You can practice the video ahead of time, and keep trying until you get it right.
A second option is to make a whiteboard video. A whiteboard video features an animated hand holding a pen that write and draws things on the screen as a narrator speaks. The basic process is to write a script, record yourself reading the script, and then design the video so that the hand writes out the words in sync with the recording.