IT’S THE BEGINNING

I’m involved with an incredibly interesting case study using online video as website content for driving traffic and sales.  This is the single largest example I’ve personally witnessed to see just what the benefits are to using online video for SEO,  customer education and online marketing.

I’m helping build a website for a local plastic surgeon. We are filling it to the brim with all kinds of videos.  Instructional videos, educational videos, videos of patient testimonials, interviews with the doctor, surgery videos, animated anatomical videos, videos by local news crews.  In total, we are adding about one-hundred videos to this website and it wasn’t as expensive as that sounds.

Some of the  video was leased, some of it was re-edited from an old show and a small portion was shot new.

We found a great source to lease medical videos from, Understand.com. For just $1,500 bucks a year, we leased a library of pre-made video animations on all types of plastic surgery procedures.  Understand customized the player with the doctor’s logo with colors to match the website.  We were able to put one of these videos on virtually every page of the site to augment the optimized text content.

Granted, these videos are not unique to our website so I question how impressed google will be with them but human visitors will love them, which is just as important in my opinion.

The good doctor had produced a thirty minute show a few years back so we recycled it.  Bits of it were outdated so we tossed those parts.  I took what was still accurate and chopped it into 18 individual segments.  Short videos are better for the internet.  He will get lots more mileage out of it this way.  Luckily, the original show was very segmented so it was easy to chop.  I just had to come up with a new open that matched all the pre-exisiting graphics.

LET’S PARTY

To round out all this video content, we held an afternoon party with selected patients to videotape testimonials.   The atmosphere was warm and relaxed.  People always do better on camera when they are not nervous.     We set the camera up away from the festivities so there wouldn’t be any noise or distractions during the actual taping.

We took every segment of video we had produced and uploaded it to an AmazonS3 account as no traditional host would ever allow that kind of volume.    The video we leased was hosted by the Understand company.

We also created a You Tube channel for the doctor and uploaded everything we had produced.  We did NOT embed any of those videos on the actual website.  The website only has videos hosted at Amazon or with Understand.

We did that for lots of reasons.  Here is an entire post on why hosting on YouTube alone is a bad idea.

The You Tube channel is still valuable for several reasons.

One, YouTube carries weight with google.  As I watched his website perform in the SERPs, it was one of his You Tube videos that got to the top first.  The second reason for a You Tube channel is to generate traffic.  Since he is a local doctor, I doubt if any of that traffic will do him much good but there’s no doubt the backlinks helped.

Although we did not embed the You Tube videos on his site, we did embed them in the squidoo lenses and hub pages that we made to create backlinks.

In addition to adding all the video to his site, we also greatly enhanced his on site optimization and began building a series of backlinks through article marketing and a PR web release.

SO HOW DID IT ALL TURN OUT?

Marvelously!

I am updating this post three months later.  I am thrilled to say the good doctor is now number one for his main keyword phrase in google.   His site went from total obscurity to #1 in three months.  When I first started helping this site, I checked the top 100 positions and he was nowhere to be found.

How much of this is due to the video and how much to the backlinks and on-site optimization?  Well, as much as I love video, I bet it would be third out of those three in importance to google.  You can’t beat backlinks and the original site has virtually no optimization.  Even so, the video is now a huge component of the onsite content.  All evidence points to google loving video content probably because they know people love it.  Plus, I thought it was interesting that the very first notice google made was of the videos we posted at You Tube.

I am NOT a search engine optimization expert, although I have managed to get this blog ranked for hundreds of phrases.  I write this post to share the insight I gained from what I think was an incredibly interesting, and successful experiment.

Thanks for reading Video Production Tips.

Lorraine Grula

Internet Video Gal