PracticalDermatology

Video marketing has emerged as an effective way to promote a business in recent years, particularly with increasing Internet download speeds and mobile connectivity. According to a Cisco study, nearly 70 percent of all consumer online traffic by 2017 will be video-based, with about five million years of video viewing occurring on the Internet every month.

This offers a strong opportunity for dermatology practices to improve their online visibility and achieve higher search rankings with an effective online video marketing strategy. Here are a few important suggestions to optimize your online video marketing strategy:

CREATE VIDEO CONTENT THAT OFFERS SOLUTIONS

Online viewers are spoiled for choice, and you need to provide them with content that actually addresses their concerns and solves their problems. If you can provide any new information based on your own everyday dermatology practice experience, research, or conferences, such information deserves to be disseminated using videos for greater impact. It is worth making an effort on presenting information that is original, authentic, and unique, and maximizing the potential gain from it.

CATEGORIZE YOUR VIDEO CONTENT FOR VIEWER CONVENIENCE

Once your video account on YouTube or the video section on your website or blog has multiple assets, you can make your resource center more viewer-friendly to let them search the relevant videos easily. Make sure that your video gallery has the correct categories and tags, which will allow for better search by the readers and will improve search engine rankings.

Instead of putting together a bunch of videos on a single page, it is better to have an individual landing page for each online video. This allows the search engine crawlers to locate and index each video asset separately, and ensures a better experience for the users, too.

ENGAGE THE AUDIENCE

Your videos should engage the audience and prompt them into some kind of interactive behavior. For instance, the video may include a quiz, a survey, fill-in forms, in-video links, or such other elements that call the viewer to action or guide them towards the next steps after watching the video. A video that involves the audience is more likely to produce the desired action or response from the target viewers.

USE APPROPRIATE VIDEO SEO TAGS, KEYWORDS

The title and description of the video should include localized keywords and tags to allow the search engines to identify the video in targeted search results. Hidden tags in the HTML code of your video landing pages should be created. When the tags are created within the SEO tag guidelines provided by Google, it will increase the chances of Google choosing your video in higher search rankings.

GO THE EXTRA MILE TO CREATE TRANSCRIPTIONS

When you create a transcription of your video content, you are not only providing an alternative source of information, but also giving a boost to your search rankings. Most SEO experts agree that transcriptions help improve the search results of videos and garner more views over time.

You can add keyword-rich transcriptions directly to the HTML of each landing page where the video is hosted. Transcriptions may also be used later to repurpose your content into a blog post or article that links back to the original online video source.

HOST THE VIDEO ON MULTIPLE DOMAINS

To maximize visibility as well as to promote search rankings of your video, try to host your video on multiple domains. These will typically include your website, blog, social media networks, and YouTube. The most important host is your own website domain, which will help drive the relevant traffic traffic of viewers to your site. The chances of your video getting shared widely on the Internet will increase if you post it across multiple domains.

CREATE AN EXCLUSIVE SITEMAP FOR VIDEOS

To optimize your online videos for search engines, one of the effective and proven strategies is to create a sitemap that is appropriately configured for videos. Sitemaps will not only help viewers looking for a specific video, but also allow the search engine crawlers to identify the videos more easily.

Every entry in the video sitemap should have a link to a landing page where the video is hosted. You may consider an online video platform that facilitates the automation of the video sitemap. This will ensure that the videos are updated on the sitemap automatically once they are hosted on your site.

LEVERAGE YOUTUBE TO BOOST YOUR WEB TRAFFIC

YouTube is the largest video hosting site by far, and it also achieves very high search results. However, your real goal is to drive targeted traffic back to your website. So you may leverage the popularity of YouTube to create awareness about your videos. Just provide “preview content” for your best quality videos on YouTube initially.

This will prompt many seriously interested viewers to visit your website video gallery to watch the full video. In the preview videos, you can provide in-video annotations to let viewers visit your website for the full video. When the video becomes old or exhausts its exclusivity, you may host the complete video on YouTube.

COMMIT TO THE EFFORT

Make a committed effort to create useful, interesting, and shareable video content to build a strong online video portfolio over time. Keep your videos free for public viewing as far as possible, and take care of the viewer sensitivities and copyright issues in your content. Allow people to embed your videos on their blogs and sites, or share it over social media. You only stand to gain with such activities in terms of organic inbound links and higher search rankings for your practice website.

Naren Arulrajah is President and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, a complete Internet marketing company which focuses on SEO, social media, marketing education and the online reputations of Dermatologists. With a team of 130+ full time marketers, www.ekwa.com helps doctors who know where they want to go, get there by dominating their market and growing their business significantly year after year. If you have questions about marketing your practice online, call Naren direct at 877-249-9666.