SEO In Video Titles and Tags to Drive Traffic
Guest Post from Becca & Dennis Walker of Untethered Together
When we first took off to New Zealand on a one-way ticket in 2014, my wife Becca and I decided to start a blog with a clear target audience: our family and close friends.
As our year-long adventure exploring New Zealand under a Working Holiday Visa grew into a full-blown round the world trip with a safari in Tanzania, SCUBA certification in Thailand, Himalayan trekking in Nepal, and reconnection with childhood friends in Dubai, our blog started to unexpectedly attract interest from people we’d never met and friends of friends.
Starting A Youtube Channel
At the half-way point in our trip, we bought a GoPro Hero 3 Black camera and a monthly subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud; the result of much tinkering and frustration with these new tools was a 3-minute 55-second video that compressed much of our trip into a highlight reel which we then posted to our brand new YouTube channel.
This video led to an outpouring of interest across numerous social channels that we never could have expected; the video racked up over 1,200 views on YouTube and another 1,000 + on Facebook, which led us to expand our video offerings and experiment with different methods of attracting viewership and driving traffic to our channel and our website.
Creating Video About a Niche Subject
We have repeatedly found that creating a video about a niche subject and titling it accordingly helps drive visibility to our website and to our YouTube channel; for example, one of our early videos we added to our channel is titled “Train From Sofia To Istanbul” — If you Google this phrase, which many people apparently do, our video is immediately visible and comes up as the first video search result and third overall result. This video, while significantly less time-intensive to produce and overall less quality than some of our other work, currently has over 13,000 views and still regularly attracts viewers from outside our current network.
We used the same approach for our video titled “How To Use The Cross Border Xpress” — this video also comes up as one of the top search results for anyone querying “Cross Border Xpress” and it currently has over 14,900 views — it still regularly receives views and comments and drives traffic to our channel and website. In fact, we eventually diagnosed that the titles, tagging (which we’ll get to in a moment), and related visibility of the video accounted more for viewership and engagement than the actual content of the video — though we never compromise on the latter.
How Search Rankings Prioritize Video Content
The key here is that Search Rankings prioritize video content to help return an array of media offerings for search queries. Finding niche subjects and creating both a blog post and a video with clear and specifically targeted titles helps to boost search rankings for your content. Our channel currently averages over 3,300 views per month — 100+ views per day, despite the fact that we have not been actively contributing to it for some months.
In fact, a large part of the reason for our lack of active contribution is that we have converted several leads generated by our videos and web content design into full-time clients that keep us extremely busy on a number of location independent content strategy and video production projects.
A great example of us finding success with a niche audience is the unexpected popularity of our videos about trains; “Train From Sofia to Istanbul” and “New Delhi to Jodhpur Train” have a combined 20,000 views. In following this logic of highly targeted video titles, we made more videos intended to attract niche audiences. “Stand Up Comics From Saudi Arabia???’ has reached 6,100 unique views and driven considerable traffic to us.
When visiting Armenia, we learned that the Karabakh Region is heavily disputed between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and thus made a short video explaining the situation and titled it “The Nagorno-Karabakh April War” — this video has received over 2,500 views and continues to attract new visitors to our channel and site.
The most viewed video on our channel is titled simply “Tijuana Migrant Camp” and was immediately posted after visiting the camp with a local newspaper reporter while it was heavily featured on the international press circuit. The video reached 15,000 views within 48 hours.
How to Use Tags in Video
To complement the specific and targeted titles, it’s important to use “tags” in your videos. Tags drive traffic to your videos as a form of SEO; for example, if we’re making a video about the Tijuana Xolos soccer team, we would include tags such as “Xolos”, “Xolos Soccer” , “Tijuana Soccer” , “Soccer In Mexico” , etc.
Anyone searching for one of these terms will likely be directed to your video, and the more specific the tags are relevant to a search query, the higher the ranking of your video. We use the free version of Tube Buddy, which suggests tags for you to use based on the content of your video and other tags you’ve added. Our two videos about the Tijuana Xolos have over 5,000 combined views currently, with considerably more comments and engagements than other videos on our channel made & titled before we found this fast track to recognition.
Our Journey from Amateur Bloggers to Full-Time Location-Independent Content Creators
Our journey from amateur bloggers with a Blogspot account to full-time location-independent content creators and strategists has also landed us press trips and comps that we never expected when we first started out; we’ve been hosted on a luxury overnight cruise in Halong Bay, a hotel under the Northern Lights in Iceland, a trip to pet gray whales in Mexico, several trips to the Guadalupe Valley in Baja California, premium food tours in Taipei and Kyoto, a cabin in the Irish countryside and more since we set about this journey of creating and sharing content.
We are still very much in a growth phase for our boutique content strategy agency, and already have our 2020 calendar mostly filled up with trips throughout Mexico, The U.S., Middle East, and two trips to Europe on the horizon for us. While not all of these trips are comped, the client work that we’re doing via leads driven by our blog and YouTube channel are directly responsible for these travel opportunities and remote full-time work. — and strategic video titles & tags are responsible for continuing to grow our visibility and presence online!
Learn More about Becca & Dennis Walker of Untethered Together
Untethered Together launched in January 2014
Bio: We’d been dating for 6 months when we quit our jobs and decided to spend a year in New Zealand with a ‘Working Holiday Visa’. We started Untethered Together as a travel blog and YouTube channel, and we never looked back. Today, Untethered Together is a full-blown boutique video production and design business with major clients and on-going campaigns in several countries — This remote digital media production business enables us to support our travel lifestyle full-time, and we are currently in Bordeaux, France.
Connect on Social: Instagram | Youtube
Check out a recent Video!
Do you consider yourself a travel blogger, travel writer or travel photographer or? Travel Videographer & Writer
Blogging niche: Couple’s Travel Hacks for “Balling On a Budget”
How long have you been a writer/ videographer? 5 years
Favorite Travel Vlogger: Kara & Nate ( YouTubers )
Favorite Travel Blogs: A Gringo In Mexico www.agringoinmexico.com & www.vagabrothers.com
Organizations We belong to: San Diego Travel Massive
#1 Resource I recommend for new bloggers: Adobe Creative Suite
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