In this video, I demonstrate the power of YouTube and how quickly you can use it to rank for long tail search terms in Google. Because YouTube is owned by Google, YouTube videos will appear in the search results. With just a little bit of work, you can use this to your advantage to rank for valuable keywords that your website otherwise might not rank for.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
I want to record a quick video here. I always talk to my clients about how important video is for SEO and I want to show you the real power and how video can really open up a lot of opportunities for you.
The Power of Video Marketing for Lawyers
We’re in Florida and one of my clients is in Orlando and they’re actually, they’re a personal injury attorney but they also do insurance claims, homeowners insurance and things like that. So we just recently had Hurricane Matthew go through here…I’m sure you heard about it all over the country…and on the east coast of Florida, there’s a lot of insurance claims. So the client came to me and told me that they wanted to somehow do a marketing campaign to try to get some of these insurance claims and so that they could represent some of these clients. So I told them to record a quick video, basically not something that’s, you know, that feels like an ambulance chaser or anything like that. I told him to record a video that actually provides value, so what they came up with was four tips basically to make sure that you’re in the best position when you submit a claim for coverage.
I want to show you this. If you Google “Hurricane Matthew insurance claim tips,” as you can see, “insurance claim tips” is already here. So it’s something that people search. This is my client’s video right here. As you can see, this was uploaded one hour ago and this is the video we created. And look at this: it’s outranking Fortune, it’s outranking a Yahoo article. You know, these are articles, “Five Tips on Dealing with Damage After Hurricane Matthew,” from Fortune, “Six Tips for Filing an Insurance Claim After Hurricane Matthew.” And we uploaded this video to YouTube. This is my client. They’re not as authoritative as Fortune or Yahoo. Here’s The Street, you know. I mean, here’s Legal Examiner. I mean, we’re outranking all of them just because of YouTube.
Using YouTube to Rank Your Law Firm For Competitive Keywords
I want to show you kind of how we did this as a really quick video that they filmed, but there was a few things behind the scenes that we actually did to make sure that this video actually ranked as highly as it does.
- Targeting the Right Keywords
So when optimizing the video, the first thing that we actually want to do is make sure that we’re actually targeting the right keywords. So if you remember, when I typed in “Hurricane Matthew insurance claim tips,” we see that there’s several suggestions here. “Insurance claim tips” is the first one and then there’s also:
- “Claims”
- “Claims denied”
- “Claims deadline”
You know, if you really wanted to knock this out of the park, I would probably…and I’ll probably suggest this to my client also…that we record a video for each one of these issues, “Claims deadline,” “Claims denied,” because these are all things that people are searching for. Google is telling you what people are searching for. You just have to kind of pay attention.
- Use Keywords in Your Title
So I want to show you some of the things that I actually did to the video to make it rank and the reality is that I really didn’t do much. There’s a few small pieces that are really effective and if you use them correctly then it’ll work. So here’s the video.
- Let’s go to the Video Manager and the first tip that I have is before you even upload the video, if you look at this right here, right here it says “Raw File” and the name of this video on my computer is “Hurricane Matthew Claims.MP4.” You can even see it down here, right here: “Hurricane Matthew Claims.MP4.”
- Before you upload the video, make sure to name it, you know, something around your keyword. I probably could have named it “Hurricane Matthew Insurance Claim Tips,” but you know, I just needed kind of something relevant. Google is smart enough to figure out that these two keywords are related.
- The other thing I did is I made sure to put the actual keyword that I was going for as the actual page title. I didn’t use the name of the law firm, I didn’t do anything like that. I just put the actual keyword that we’re going for.
- Add Subtitles and Closed Captions
This section down here is just a description. This is the exact same description that we used on the Facebook post that we created. But the biggest thing I think that really makes a big difference is the subtitles and closed captions.
So when you first upload this video, you’re not going to see any captions here. You’re only going to see “Add New Subtitles or CC.” If you uploaded the video a little while ago, you’ll likely see an auto-generated caption that YouTube has tried to do and I’ve found that, you know, for the most part, these are like 80% accurate. I think it’s still best to create your own closed captions and you can go on Fiverr and get closed captions made or what you can do is just take five minutes and do it yourself. So what you do is you:
- Go “Add New Subtitles or CCs.” You’re going to select your language, which is normally going to be English. And by the way, I’m doing this on a test video. This is not the actual video that’s live.
- So what I do is transcribe and auto-sync. So basically what happens is you watch the video…it’s not working. You watch the video…And I’m a horrible multi-tasker, so…typing and talking at the same time doesn’t really work for me very well. But basically what you do is as they’re, you know, the cool thing about this is that it’ll run through the video and it actually pauses when you type, which is really cool. So you can see I stopped typing and it started talking again, which is awesome.
- So once you get the entire video taken care of, all you do is click “Set Timings” and basically what it does is it automatically syncs the video. It’s awesome.
But basically this one thing makes a big difference because Google doesn’t really know exactly how to read your video and extract all the content, but basically what you’re doing with this is you’re getting all the keywords in there, you’re getting all the semantic keywords, all the stuff that Google uses to associate this video with Hurricane Matthew claims is all in that caption file and the reason is because you’re actually entering text that Google can read. So if you want to try to get a quick advertising campaign out there, if there’s an opportunity like a hurricane hits or let’s say there’s a train crash or a plane crash or something like that, you know, as unfortunate as these circumstances are, a lot of times these are the types of events that you want to try to generate clients from.
YouTube vs. Vlogging on Your Law Firm’s Website
So if you post a vlog on your website, that could take a couple days to show up and the reality is that your website is not going to compete with those websites that we saw before. It’s not going to outrank Yahoo, it’s not going to outrank Fortune. However, YouTube will outrank these as we’re obviously seeing. So YouTube is a very powerful way to quickly get a message out there and use it to generate some traffic for your business.
So I hope you enjoyed this video. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an email.