Video

Having a dealership YouTube channel is important for many reasons (as I touched on last year), but once your dealership has a channel, what do you do next?  Here are some tips and best practices to help your dealership’s YouTube channel get better search engine visibility:

Upload Regularly: Just like a blog, YouTube channels that are updated regularly will rank better than those that never are.  For this reason, if you have a lot of videos on your site or in your marketing collateral, upload a few per day to YouTube.

Encourage Interaction: If your videos have a voiceover or text, consider adding a call to action asking viewers to leave a comment, subscribe to your dealership’s channel, or like the video.  Interaction on your videos can help increase the likelihood they get ranked well.

Optimize Titles: The titles and tags on your videos should be treated like you do those on your car dealership website.  Tags help form the Related Videos shown, so keep that in mind when adding the 5-10 tags that give your video context.  Video titles should use keywords, but only when relevant.  Use it to describe your video.

These tips will help your dealership’s YouTube channel do better on the video portal’s internal search engine, as well as in Google’s blended search.

Having videos on your auto dealer website has been shown to increase website leads, and when done with video search engine optimization (VSEO), helping your site climb the search engine result pages.  If your dealership has videos on your website, you should have those videos uploaded to your own dealership YouTube channel.

Here’s why:

Popularity: YouTube is the world’s largest video search engine (and the second largest search engine) and growing every single day.  People all over the world use it to find videos, so if someone searches for a vehicle that your dealership sells, don’t you want a video from your dealership to show up?

Timing: Like most search engines, YouTube tends to give older entries a little extra edge when returning search results.  The sooner you create your channel and upload videos, the better.

Cost: YouTube is free.  Aside from the time cost of uploading (though it’s possible your auto dealer website or video provider will do this for you), YouTube has no financial cost.  This means you get all of this exposure without an additional marketing cost.

Blended Search: Google, Bing and Yahoo are integrating mixed media (images, news, videos, etc) into their search engine result pages, so having your VSEO dealership videos on a separate domain can provide an additional link on Google’s results page for any search relevant to your dealership brand or your inventory.

Everyone wants the videos they make to go viral, meaning they get spread around the Internet, sent from friend to friend.  Viral videos can give your auto dealership a huge increase in brand awareness and buzz, huge marketing benefits and an increase in car dealer website traffic with little cost.

One recent example that was ALL over Twitter and the news websites on Wednesday is the Old Spice Dude’s proposal video.  For the cost of making this viral video, Old Spice has been able to get their brand name in front of millions of people.

Viral videos can do great things for auto dealerships and their brand awareness–but the question always remains, how do you get your dealership’s videos to become viral?

There is no formula for what makes a video go viral, and I think that is really important to remember.  There are, however, guidelines to follow if you want to stand a chance:

You must capture attention within seconds.  No one is going to pass something on to their friends if it isn’t funny, shocking, surprising, or engaging within the first few seconds.  You’ll lose their attention, point blank.

It has to tie to your brand.  If you make a video that goes viral, yet has no tie or mention of your dealership or brand, all that marketing buzz and exposure will be lost.  Sure, everyone might be talking about the video, but if they don’t connect that video to your car dealership, you’ve lost a huge opportunity.

Finally, be honest.  Don’t try to make viewers think the video was made by a third party if it wasn’t.  Promote your hopefully viral video on your dealer blog, through email lists, and on your dealership’s Facebook page.  People want to be entertained, but they don’t want to feel cheated or lied to.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]