How To Start Driving Website Exchange Traffic From YouTube with An Hour of Effort

Lately, I have noticed that the traffic from YouTube is one of the highest engaging traffic after organic traffic. So, I thought why not to leverage YouTube in driving quality traffic to my blog. Some of the experimentations were successful. So, I am sharing those tips and tricks so that you can also leverage YouTube in driving traffic to your blog.

YouTube Part 1: Drive Video Views

Yes, this is true. Your first focus should be on driving video views to a YouTube video. Why? Because it is a lot easier to rank on Youtube than on Blog. Also, once you rank on Youtube, your video views continue growing and so is your blog views.

Why YouTube First?

The Blog niche is saturated but not YouTube yet. For Example, if you want to travel to Vancouver, you can already find a lot of blogs ranking on page one for the keywords around Vancouver travel. On top of that, Google shows its own rich results which further pushes down your organic result as shown in the screenshot below:

Rich Results in Google SERP

However, if you do the same search on Youtube for traveling around Vancouver, you will hardly see any paid videos showing up that means there is still a room to rank on YouTube. Moreover, YouTube is more visual, unlike SERP. Different people will click on different videos according to their tastes.

For example, just from the four videos shown in the YouTube SERP below, we define four audience persona easily:

  • A Budget traveler is more likely to click on the second video
  • A Traveler looking to have varied experience might click on the fourth video
  • And the same applies for the first and third video

However, this is not the case with the Google SERP result. Mostly, people click on the top results. So, chances are higher that you might rank easily on YouTube.

YouTube SERP

Type of Video

Here comes the second part. What type of video should you make? Since YouTube is still not Saturated, there are a lot of opportunities here.

Time Sensitive Videos

Try to focus on making some time-sensitive videos. For example, last year I covered the Vancouver Pride Parade. There was nothing much I did. I just went ahead of time. I captured people getting ready for the pride parade event. When the parade started, I chose a corner and filmed the entire event.

As soon as I returned home, I uploaded the entire video on Youtube after doing some minor edits. I knew that people will start searching for the parade footage and clips. It worked and my video generated around 5000 views in the first week itself. And, from the video, I got around 200 pageviews on that blog in a week and counting on. I did the same for the new year’s eve fireworks in Ottawa parliament hill building.

The advantage of time-sensitive videos are:

  • You get instant views and chances are higher that your video will rank higher with 24 hours while a blog takes months to rank
  • You might also get instant engagement on your video which further pushes up your video organically.
  • If the video is the longer the better. YouTube prefers videos longer in length. The advantage is that YouTube gets a signal that people are watching the video for long. Thus, YouTube prefers that video.
  • I have also noticed that unlike website SEO, YouTube does not have much time to rank a video because YouTube searches happen within hours of news, event, etc. Thus YouTube only has a time-frame of around a few minutes to a few hours before it has to start showing and ranking some videos based on people’s search terms. Like it happened to my video on Vancouver pride parade.

Videos that cannot be written

Yes, the second type of video will be a video that cannot be written through a blog. For example,

  • Current Situation of-
    • Hike
    • An event
    • Protest
    • Flood
  • Complex how to’s on
    • Solving Rubik’s Cube
    • Apple Fake Eyelashes
    •  doing backflip
    • play piano
    • whistle with fingers

There are thousands of such topics writing a blog around will be tough. Similarly, there are multiple video ideas that you can think of and make a video about. The main goal here is to make a video and get ranked for the video.

YouTube Part 2: Optimize Video Metadata (30 Minutes)

Updating the video metadata does not take much time. YouTube prefers videos with metadata in order to gain more insights into the video before it decides to start ranking the video. Here are some quick wins on optimizing the YouTube video metadata:

  • Try to include the most important factors in the video title such as event name, year/ date, version, location, organizers, etc.
  • Write a description of a minimum of 300 words describing the event, year, participants, location, organizers, timings, entry, etc.
  • Fill in the shooting date, location, categories, etc. when you upload the video on YouTube under the advanced settings and you are done.
  • Probably, you will also start seeing some comments pouring in on your video. Try to engage positively with the comments. Comments give a strong signal to YouTube about user engagement.
  • Give a link to your blog in the description and also at the end of the video. Forget not to mention the link in the video so that people get to know about it. Often, people just watch the video and get engaged in other videos. Thus, it is important to let people that there is a link which covers more things in details.

Reoptimize Metadata (10 Minutes)

After 24 hours, open youtube in incognito mode and start typing in some keywords about the event. Use YouTube Autocomplete feature to find the search terms people are using and include those search terms in your video description as well. It will make sure that you are not missing any important search terms.

YouTube Sample Video Meta Data

YouTube Traffic Exchange To Blog:

There is nothing much to do within your blog now. You should write your blog as soon as possible because the first week generates the most number of video views. Also, it is the right time to capture the users who are highly interested in the fresh event.

Often, I will have the skeleton of the blog ready and before publishing, I will fill in the skeleton with the meat part. It becomes quicker and easier for me. Here are some more tips on

Drive Traffic from YouTube to Your Website (20 minutes)

  • Embed the YouTube video in your blog as high as possible. This lets the search engine know that there is also an associated & related video that exists for that blog and same applies to the Video
  • Write the content similar to what you have used in the YouTube Video metadata. For example, from the metadata below:
    • Try to have a title similar to the YouTube video title of your blog
    • Use Youtube Tag as Headings in the blog such as H2 tag
  • Your blog should not be focussed around the keyword from the YouTube content only. You should also cover other related content to make the blog more relevant.
  • Drop a link of your blog in the YouTube Description at the beginning.
  • Also, pin the related blog link as the top comment on the particular video as shown below (From my Travel blog)

Pinned Comment

If you have any other ideas, please share in the comments below.

Have a Question? Get in Touch!



One Reply to “How To Start Driving Website Exchange Traffic From YouTube with An Hour of Effort”

  1. Kabeer singh

    This blog is very helpful and appropriate as nowadays every business is coming online so, DIgital marketing is one of the best ways to increase your business. In the era of the digital world.
    A great blog really appreciable.

    Reply

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