Naked videos? What? Are we talking about cyber indecency here? No, but this is almost as big a crime in online and social media marketing: Posting video without any accompanying text that neither search engines nor us mere mortals can see and use to decide if your video is what we’re looking for and want to watch.
It’s coming up more and more lately, on YouTube, Vimeo, websites, everywhere. Video – a lot of it great stuff that you should probably be watching – that is posted with a headline, maybe, but nothing more. Ragan Communications raised the issue today, high on a list of video mistakes to avoid.
This is true too in the fitness world, where an abundance of fitness marketing videos promise to show you the latest personal training exercise, CrossFit WOD or fitness product. All good, but how are people supposed to find your stuff if you don’t guide them there?
Search engines – and that is still where most people begin their online experience (sorry Facebook) can’t hear or see your videos. You have to give them search-optimized text to help them help you. The Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool is a good place to start for this, pick some terms that are general to your industry (“fitness,” “best exercise”) and zero in on those that are highly targeted to what you do (“rowing machine workouts,” “2k training plan”).
Fitness professionals with businesses to promote are smart to use video as a central part of their package – YouTube is the #2 search engine behind Google and gets 4 billion views per day, after all. Just never forget that to be really effective on the Web you need to optimize ALL of your content for search, not just your latest blog or website post.
What do you think? What’s your favorite video to post to promote your fitness business, and what terms do you use to optimize it?