When Google pushed “universal search results” to the world in 2007, our search results suddenly went beyond simple links to websites. Overnight, we were greeted with images, maps, social content—and videos. We learned that humans have an insatiable appetite for video watching.
Ever since then, videos have ranked among the most prominent types of content on any web page. Videos are also the most clicked-on content on the Internet. According to the latest data on the relative prominence of different content types, video leads all other forms of content by a large margin. And YouTube dominates the search results, with 80 percent of the total video views.
Videos engage patients and keep them on your website
Video deserves a significant place in all online healthcare marketing and SEO strategies. Since Google is giving such heavy weight to videos in search results, it’s important for medical and dental healthcare practices to have videos on their sites. Adding video provides you with a proven-effective patient engagement tool. It gives visitors a reason to stick around for 30 to 90 seconds (longer is not usually better).
More important is hosting your videos where they will give you the greatest SEO and healthcare marketing bang for your buck. That place is YouTube.
Make the most of the Google/YouTube connection
Currently, 80% of video search results on Google point to YouTube. YouTube dominates universal search results. Most Internet users search with Google. So if you want to appear on Google search results, you need to host your videos on YouTube, customize your YouTube channel to match your brand and use YouTube as the hub for your video content.
The best practice is to upload your video to YouTube on your own customized and branded channel. Once you fully describe, tag and optimize the videos there, you can use the YouTube embed codes to embed the same videos on the appropriate page of your website. This leverages the fact that Google will index the video on YouTube and connect the same video in context on your website (strengthening the connection between your content and the video). As an added bonus, you can then easily share your video and embed the code on other websites from both YouTube and your website.
Your feedback is always welcome
If you have questions or comments about this healthcare marketing tip, please email them to: hedgar@practicebuilders.com.