Uploading promotional videos to YouTube boosts your online marketing campaign by bringing your property’s best features to life, capturing the attention and imagination of guests and getting them ready to make a booking. With a little time and effort, these videos can also help you climb the Local Search rankings.
Sound good? Here’s how to turn your YouTube videos into a powerful Local SEO tool.
Geotagging
Make sure your video is deemed relevant to people making local searches by geotagging it with the longitude and latitude coordinates of your resort’s location. You can do this within YouTube Video Manager, in the Advanced settings tab. Simply enter your property’s address into the search field, then drag the pinpoint marker to refine the location on the popup map.
Optimise the Description Field
Add a link to your resort’s website at the start of the video description. Not only will this direct impressed viewers to your site to find out more and book, it can also help enhance your local search ranking, perhaps because Google picks up valuable keyword signals from the link.
You should also use the generous space on offer in the description box to list your address and contact details and write a brief overview describing your great facilities and location.
Include Relevant Tags
Don’t forget to include several tags for each video you create, targeting keywords such as your location as well as relevant phrases such as ‘holiday’ or ‘Gold Coast beachfront resort.’ These simple pieces of metadata are one of the most important secret weapons when it comes to getting your video noticed both on YouTube and the local search results page.
Embed Your Video
Google uses the number of sites a video is embedded on to assess its popularity and determine its position on the search results page. By hosting your videos on YouTube – one of Google’s most important pieces of real estate - you get to take advantage of the ranking signals that influence the SERPs, while displaying the video on your website, blog and anywhere else you want via the embed code.
Use Social Media to Promote Your Video
Add your videos to every social platform you use to promote your resort, particularly Facebook, Twitter and Google+. By promoting the content in this way you can make sure as many of your guests as possible see what you have to say. All these views add up and signify ‘social value’ to Google, helping to improve your presence within local search results.
Videos are hugely popular online, which means Google gives them pretty heavy leverage on search results. These tips offer a simple but valuable way to enhance your local search rankings, while getting the video content itself seen by as many pairs of eyes as possible.
