Video SEO is one of the biggest, baddest sectors in the world of search engine optimization right now, and for damn good reason: it gets hits. YouTube is one of the most visited sites on the planet, and even piddly little videos without any relevance to anything can expect to get a hundred views within a few days. Stuff that’s actually interesting, personality-driven, and relevant can draw more hits in a day than a moderately successful blog will get in a month.
But what if you’re ugly?
It sounds like a silly question to those of us who are familiar with the game, but we actually get asked that question — honestly — by nervous clients about once a month. “I’m not ready for prime time,” one guy told me over the phone.
Don’t worry — one of the greatest secrets of video SEO is that you don’t actually need to be on-screen. There are lots of options in video — you don’t have to have anyone on-screen at all. A voiceover featuring a lot of slow-moving pans and zooms over relevant static images will get you plenty of attention of you do it right, and you don’t even actually need a video camera to pull it off.
On the more advanced end, you can hire an actor and get a script written by an expert. SEO-wise, the content of the video doesn’t matter a whit, only how many clickthroughs it generates. You want a professional voice-actor from Calgary to read your voiceover because his silky tones add the right amount of gravitas? Go for it. Rather go Xtra-Normal style and use cheesy computer animations and obviously digitally-created voices to make your point? No problem.
Just get the clickthroughs.
That said, there is definitively an art to that last part — getting backlinks out of your videos means more than just slapping them together and putting them up on YouTube. From placing videos with interlinking backlinks on multiple directories to filling a video with memorable material, every part of video SEO is something you invest in to improve the results — just another way in which SEO via video posting is such a strong play.