THE GUIDE
part 19b: help them find it
EVN's SEO Suggestions
#1 Word Placement
There are a few options of where to park your finished product. The easiest and cheapest way is on an established video platform like YouTube, Vimeo, or GodTube. These platforms offer 3 places to use words to increase your search-ability: •In the actual Title of your video. •In the description of your video. •In the Video's "Tags," which are a series of one to three word descriptions that flag your content.
#2 Tag Smart
Five types of Tags can help you get eyes on your video. Use as many as you can:
1) Specific: one word that describes your church video
2) Compound: Multiple words that describe the video itself (title of video, description of genre, style). Remove all articles and conjunctions.
3) Suggested: YouTube, Vimeo, GodTube, or whomever you are using suggests actual tags.
4) Generic: Very general single word tags
5) Misspelled: These are actually intentionally misspelled tags that potential users might errantly type in to find your church.
#3 Solve a Problem
When you encounter a general issue you need solving, the first words typed into your search key is either, “How do you…” or “Where can I find…” or “What is the…” You are in need of help and are seeking an answer. Your question to the internet leads hopefully leads to the right resource. Our goal now is to make sure that your video is laced with SEO strategy so it, too, can solve a church seeker’s problem. (Remember, your job is not to solve everyone’s problem.) Use Titles, Descriptions, and Tags to describe your video as a solution.
Instead of giving away all of your web presence to a third party like YouTube or Vimeo, you can also host a video on your own site. Your SEO value will not be given away to a third party, and you will lead viewers directly to your site, instead of to YouTube, increasing the SEO value of your church’s site. Your video can then lead viewers to other valuable pieces of content on your website. Allowing others to embed your video on their page will also raise your SEO value. Then, you can use a 3rd party host with a condensed version of your video to push people back to your site with annotations.
#4 Host on Your Site
#5 Stay Above the Fold
You want your video visible (whether embedded from YouTube or embedded directly to your site) in a place where the viewer does not have to scroll down to find it. Therefore, be cognizant of the amount of information before it on the site. Many users will skip it if they do have to scroll down to find it.
#6 One Video per Page
If you begin to create more than one welcome video or become inspired to create more, have them live on separate pages on your website. Too many videos, means more keywords, which leads to confusing those Google-bots. Less keywords mean more search-ability by Google.
This is SEO gold. It may seem laborious, but include every word that is spoken in the description section, whether you self-embed or use a third party like YouTube. By including the transcript, you allow a user to find the video based on the words spoken throughout the video.