One part of the broad spectrum of online reputation management is ensuring that your company has an extensive search footprint. This footprint will be the way that your customers can find and research your brand.
Videos can be a handy tool for managing your online reputation. As we have mentioned in multiple posts about negative online reviews, video testimonials can be a fantastic way to showcase your company. The only problem is that we need to find a way that we can use these videos to optimize their benefit.
YouTube vs. Self-Hosted
After hours of splicing together several video components, you will be left with yet another decision to make. The question will then become if it is better to host your website yourself or upload it to YouTube. Below we will breakdown the pros and cons of each.
No one would shame you for wanting to upload your video to YouTube. It is a massively successful social media platform. It became so valuable that Google purchased it in 2006. Having acquired this media giant, they want to make sure it remains successful and profitable. Hence the reason that videos posted on YouTube gets priority search results on a Google search engine results page (SERP). That alone could be enough to make you want to publish your video on YouTube. However, there is a downside to this move.
While YouTube can be a great way to show off your shiny new video, it does come with a significant drawback – competitors. It may not seem like a big deal since you were already aware that your competitors have their videos on the platform. However, Google, being the advertising company that they are, sell ads to anyone that has the money to do so. Since Google likes to post relevant ads to videos, this means your competitors might place ads in addition to the videos they post. What this means is that when customers are watching your video, they could quickly come across an advertisement for your competitor. You can combat this by turning off ads on your videos, but there is still a suggestion list that you will have no control over.
The other option you have is that you can host the video on your site. Doing this will give you greater control of what your customers see. When your customers arrive on your website, they will see nothing but what you want them to see. As with YouTube, there is a drawback to this method.
The number of views will be strictly limited to the people that click through to your landing page. This will severely impact the searchability of the video. You will have to do a large amount of SEO to ensure that your page stays on the first page of Google. By doing this, you will all but guarantee that someone is going to see that video that you spent hours to generate.
Best Place to Place Your Testimonial Videos
At the start, we implied there were only two options. However, there is a third option that is a hidden gem. It is for this reason that we are suggesting that you use this third option when uploading your videos. It is a spinoff of hosting your videos. While you will still be hosting the videos on your page, it will be much more searchable than just embedding it on your front page.
The goal here is to make multiple testimonial videos. You will then create a page on your website that will be dedicated to these videos. Cleverly using a combination of optimized Title Tags and Meta Descriptions, you will increase their searchability. The process is described below.
Start by writing an introductory paragraph that introduces the video’s content. Then find yourself a professional video host that is optimized for SEO. Allow them to host the video that you are placing on your site. The reason for this is that when you host your video, you may run into speed issues. Professional video hosting companies have much more extensive equipment and will allow the videos to stream seamlessly. The result will be your site gets credit for the video, as opposed to YouTube. Additionally, the page that you created it on will show in an SERP on Google.
Help Search Engines to Understand Your Video Content
Since asking people to conduct searches mindlessly, read pages, and watch videos is nearly impossible to do. Even if they employed trillions of people, this would be a monumental task for Google. As a result, they have created crawlers to do this job in a fraction of the time it would take humans. The drawback of having machines do this work is that they don’t understand videos. They only see them as a string of 1s and 0s. To assist them in understanding your video, you will need to take the following steps.
To start, you are going to want to write an engaging title for your video. This is going to allow the crawlers to pass this information on to the cataloging system Google has created.
Next, you will need a description of your video. Depending on the length of your video, this can be anywhere from a couple of sentences to a couple of paragraphs. Since you are doing testimonial videos, they tend to be rather short. This means that you will not need more than a paragraph describing what the content is being conveyed.
Finally, you will want to transcribe the video. Google has been placing more and more value on accessibility, and this is just one of the many things that provide you with better ranks on your video. In addition to helping those with hearing disabilities, it also provides a way for the crawlers to “watch” your video and better understand what your video is about.
Conclusion
Online reputation management can be difficult. However, when you know what you are doing, it can be much easier. Taking the suggestions we have provided you above will aid you in managing your reputation through the use of testimonial videos. As a pro tip, you will want to consider having someone transcribe your videos for you. They are time-intensive, and some people do this for a living. They will spend less time and therefore be cheaper than you doing it for yourself.