YouTube for business: videos worth making and getting found

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the US by query volume, behind only Google itself. More than 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute and the site serves around three billion views a day. More important for a business: Google's universal search places video thumbnails in the regular results for many how-to and product queries, and a well-titled YouTube video from a small company can appear on page one for a phrase its website would never rank for. Videos also travel on Facebook and Twitter in a way that text pages do not.

The cost of entry has collapsed. A pocket camcorder is under $150, the iPhone 4 shoots 720p, and YouTube is free to host unlimited video. The scarce resource is a plan.

Rank these by search demand, not by what the company wants to say about itself.

1. How-to videos. The most searched category by far. A hardware store films "how to fix a running toilet." A CPA explains "how to file a 1099 for a contractor." You give away the easy part and become the obvious choice for the hard part.
2. Product demonstrations. Thirty to ninety seconds of the product in use. Answer the question a shopper has in the aisle: how big is it, how does it open, what does it sound like. Online stores see higher conversion on product pages with a demo video.
3. Service walkthroughs. What happens when you call a plumber, visit an orthodontist, hire a landscaper. Reduces fear, filters out poor-fit leads, and shortens sales calls.
4. Customer testimonials. Short, specific, unscripted. One customer, one problem, one result, under a minute. Get written permission and keep it on file.
5. Answers to frequently asked questions. Each question is its own video with the question as the title. Ten FAQs become ten searchable assets.
6. Behind-the-scenes and team introductions. Lower search value, high trust value. Useful on the About page and in email.

Skip the three-minute corporate overview with stock music, the commercial that aired on local cable, and the conference keynote. They get a handful of views and tell the algorithm your channel is dull.

Audio is the item people get wrong. Viewers forgive a slightly soft picture; they leave within seconds if they cannot hear clearly or there is echo. A $25 lavalier clipped to a shirt fixes most of it.

Keep a consistent, simple opening: a two-second title card with your logo, then straight into the content. No thirty-second intro animation. Close with a spoken call to action and a card showing your web address and phone number, and keep it on screen long enough to read.

Length: two to three minutes for how-to content, under ninety seconds for demos and testimonials. YouTube Insight, the analytics built into every channel, will show you exactly where viewers drop off; most business videos lose half their audience in the first sixty seconds, which tells you to get to the point faster.

Batch your shoots. One afternoon with a list of ten questions produces ten videos. Publishing one a week for ten weeks does far more for the channel than ten in one day and then nothing.

YouTube cannot watch your video. It reads the text around it. This is where most business channels fail.

Title. The exact phrase someone would search, first. "How to Clean a Dryer Vent" beats "Smith Heating Safety Tip #4." Use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and YouTube's own search suggestions (type the start of a phrase in the YouTube search box) to see real wording. Keep titles under about 60 characters so they are not cut off.

Description. Start with your website link on the first line, with http://, so it is clickable and visible above the fold. Then two or three paragraphs describing what the video covers, using the search phrase naturally and related terms. Add your business name, city and phone number at the end. This text is indexed by both YouTube and Google.

Tags. Ten to fifteen, including the main phrase, variations, your brand name, your city and the general category. Put multi-word tags in quotes.

Thumbnail. YouTube offers three frames to choose from; pick the one with a clear face or the product in view. Partner channels can upload custom thumbnails.

Playlists. Group videos by topic. A playlist has its own page and its own search presence, and it auto-plays the next video, which lifts total watch time.

Annotations. Use YouTube's annotation tool to add a clickable "watch next" link to a related video and a subscribe prompt. Keep them to the last ten seconds and do not cover the picture.

Captions. Upload a transcript file; YouTube will sync it. Captions help deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and give the index the full text of what was said.

Embed each video on the most relevant page of your website, not in a buried "Videos" section. Write a paragraph of real text around it. Submit a video sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools so Google can show a video thumbnail next to your page in results; the thumbnail alone lifts click-through noticeably. Share each video on your Facebook page and Twitter account the day it goes up, and include it in your email newsletter. Send how-to videos directly to the customers who asked the question.

YouTube Insight shows views, demographics, discovery sources (YouTube search, Google search, embedded players, Facebook) and the audience attention graph. Check monthly. For business value, look at referral traffic from youtube.com in Google Analytics, and tag the link in your description with campaign parameters so you can see which videos send visitors who convert. A video that gets 300 views and five quote requests is a success; one that gets 30,000 views from a joke in the title and nothing else is not.

Set modest expectations. A new business channel might see a few hundred views per video in the first months. The point is the compounding library: twenty useful videos that each bring a few searchers a week add up to a steady source of warm inquiries.

• Uploading the TV commercial and stopping.
• Titles that are clever instead of searchable.
• A fifteen-second logo animation before any content.
• Poor audio in a room with echo.
• No link in the first line of the description.
• Disabling comments and never responding to the ones you get.
• Buying views from services that promise thousands overnight; YouTube removes them and may penalize the channel.

We start with discovery: the questions your customers ask, the phrases they search, and the videos competitors have or have not made. We plan a content calendar of short, searchable videos tied to pages on your site. We build them efficiently with batched shoots, clean audio and consistent branding, and set up the channel, metadata, embeds and tracking so each video is found and measured. Then we improve based on attention graphs, search placement and the inquiries each video produces. Video sits inside the brand, web and growth work rather than as a one-off project.

A representative engagement in our content work: a specialty retailer with a dozen frequently asked questions and no video. We shot a series of short demonstrations in a single day, optimized each for the phrases shoppers used, embedded them on the matching product pages and tracked the referral and conversion lift. The videos continued to bring in search traffic long after the shoot.