Pest Control Marketing Tips for Video SEO

For pest control marketing, you benefit a lot from video SEO (search engine optimization). You can rank on YouTube itself when people search, your YouTube videos can show up for video results in the main body of Google search results, or pages on your site can actually rank in Google for video results.

Before getting started with a video SEO project there are a few things to consider.

Keyword Research

First, be sure to conduct keyword research, and check YouTube for your top keywords. There aren’t currently any great keyword research tools for YouTube but you can get some insights from Google Display Planner. This is similar to the Google keyword planner but is used for display ads. To use the Display Planner for Video research set the Ad Format to “Video”, enter your target keywords, and click “Get ad group ideas.”

By then selecting the “keyword” tab you can get a rough idea of the interest in a keyword for video. You won’t get absolute search volumes but it’s the best option, presently.

You can also simply search Google for all your top keywords and see if video results show for your terms. If they do, those are of course better opportunities, especially if you want to drive video views from Google and not just from users already on YouTube. Google by and large tend to favor How-to keywords, Reviews, and Tutorials for showing videos ( e.g. how to start a painting business)

Using Videos for Pest Control Marketing

Video can be a great tool for pest control marketing. To familiarize yourself with potential customers, explain a process, or offer tips on how homeowners can secure their home from unwanted intruders. We won’t go into detail on how to create a great video here but the better and more polished the video, the more chance you have of success as engagement metrics play a large part in YouTube rankings.

Length
Videos that are at least 5 minutes long tend to perform better and tend to rank more often in the main body of Google results.

Optimizing Your YouTube Video

Title tag

Titles of the videos play a large part in the rankings. Approach these similarly as you would the title tag on a page. Some basic tips are:

• Make them at least 5 words long
• Include the keyword you wish to rank for
• Make it compelling and interesting so people actually click on it

Description

Keywords in description tags are the single biggest impact you can have on your rankings. Create long descriptions with lots of keywords. Include a link back to your site at the top of the description to help encourage viewers to click through to your site.

Transcripts: The other thing you can include in your description is a transcript of the video. This is the one way Google/YouTube can actually crawl the words used in your video and give you search “credit” for them. You can include alternate language transcripts if that makes sense. Don’t use YouTube’s automated transcriptions though, the service is inaccurate. Hire a decent service or outsourced transcriber.

Tags

Include several relevant tags if possible, but it’s not a major ranking factor.

Engagement Metrics

Engagement is a major ranking factor for videos. While we won’t go into a long explanation of how to increase engagement here the major engagement metrics which contribute to ranking are:

• Video retention (what % of your video people watch)
• Number of subscribers after watching
• Comments
• Likes and dislikes
• Shares
• Audience retention

Onsite Video

Semantic Markup

If you want your organic listing in the Google web search results to show a video thumbnail (i.e. Google rich snippets), which by some studies increases clickthrough 30+%, you will need to add structured data markup to the HTML of the page. Acceptable formats for this include Schema.org, Facebook Share, and RDFa. This is assuming, of course, you have a video embed on your pages.

Sitemap

If you are going to host a lot of videos on your site (not just using a Wistia or YouTube embed) you should create a specific video XML sitemap.

Rank Tracking

You can track your YouTube search engine rankings using a tool like voot.net if videos are a major part of your marketing efforts.

Want more SEO tips for service companies like pest control? Check out these articles about displaying reviews, and how to use citations.

Want to go beyond pest control marketing and talk about how pest control software can help you book more jobs and make more profits? Book a demo of Vonigo, and we will show you how to grow your businesses with the right tools.