YouTube Annotations Drive Traffic to Your Website
For several years, I have been heralding the benefits of using YouTube in search engine optimization campaigns. YouTube is an easy way to compete for keywords. The channel is much less crowded and competitive for search terms that momma Google is. The production value users are willing to accept is lower than it was in the past. Five years ago when I encourage clients to establish a presence on YouTube, they would run out of fear of the production costs. Now vloggers can use their iPhones and DLSR cameras to shoot reasonable quality videos.
Posting to YouTube videos is great and fun too, but in the end, we want to get clicks and conversions on your websites. This is where YouTube Annotations comes in. An annotation is a way to make portions of a YouTube video clickable so users may subscribe to your channel, visit a website or take other action. Some of the best annotations I have seen use the bottom or right side of the screen as navigation! (blog post and video on that coming soon!)
The types of YouTube annotation are:
- Speech Bubble
- Note
- Title
- Spotlight
- Label
Check out my YouTube video on Pinterest pins. I have a few YouTube annotations on this video. The first is a “note” that appears in the upper right corner. It directs users to to to my website for more business tips. [Figure 1] and if a user clicks or taps it, it opens up a new window and leads back to my website
The second annotation I added is also a “note”, but a click here subscribes the viewer to my YouTube channel that covers social media tutorials. This image also shows where to add YouTube annotations using the YouTube video manager.[Figure 2]
Although it takes an extra step or more to add these annotations to your videos, it really worth it! Making the videos clickable makes it easy for your viewers to follow you and get to the conversion!
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