Does my business need video?

June 1, 2012

Last week I presented at a networking luncheon in Montreal on the topic of online marketing for local businesses.

I had an interesting conversation with one owner who had produced three videos to date, placed them on YouTube and was less than impressed with the results his efforts were giving him.

From my experiences, most videos launched on YouTube by small businesses are not optimized properly and as a result, the number of views are low and little or no business has been generated from it.

If you are going to spend the resources to produce a video message about your products and services, I strongly suggest you give your video the title it deserves. Make sure your title has the main key word phrase in it. For added benefit, use a "pipe separator | " and add your contact phone number in the title as well.

Why is this important? If someone is searching for your products or services and enters keywords that are contained in your video title, your video has a good chance of ranking high in the search results. Having your contact number in the title is an added benefit since it makes it super easy to contact you after hearing the message.

Make sure you include your website URL in the description and also make sure to include the "http://" before your www.mycompany.com. This gives you a high quality link back to your website and the search engines like to see that.

Now if you are still wondering if video is right for your business, visit this interview with Chris Brogan on using video for local businesses.

Hang in there, this is going to be a journey.