Moreover, videos are an undeniably powerful marketing tool, especially for the hotel and travel industry.
Videos can capture the attention of your potential audience and generate extremely high traffic to your hotel website.
If you want to rank well on YouTube in 2021, you need to optimise your channel for both Google and YouTube.
What is YouTube video optimisation for hotels?
Like Google, YouTube has its own algorithm that systematically ranks videos based on many factors.
It’s not enough to simply create high quality videos of your hotel - you’ve got to stick to a range of best practices to ensure your content gets seen by the right people and clicked on.
Hotel video optimisation for YouTube has become more and more essential.
How to improve the ranking of your hotel videos on YouTube?
1. Increase your click-through-rate (CTR)
The more people click on your video, the higher it will rank on YouTube.
How to increase your video CTR?
The title of your video is the first thing browsers and prospective guests will notice - it should also act just like a blog headline.
The 4 best title practices are:
- Make it search friendly by incorporating keywords which describe the video – titles have great SEO value.
- Keep it short (<60 chars) with the most important information front-loaded
- Include a hook. Questions and lists are great for grabbing attention
- Measure its effectiveness using YouTube Analytics
2. Optimize your video description
Along with your title and tags, YouTube uses your description to understand your video’s content.
When you write an optimized description you are more likely to find yourself with higher rankings and more views.
Follow these guidelines for the video description:
- Make your description at least 250 words. Short descriptions don't give YouTube enough information about your video. Craft a paragraph on the content of your video and use a call to action.
- Include your target keywords in the first three sentences of your description. YouTube advice is to put the most important keywords toward the beginning of your description. Check out this video for The Twelve - one of Aró’s clients.
- Add in your target keyword and related keywords several times. Emphasise to YouTube and Google that your video is about that keyword.
- Include a link to your hotel’s website in the first part of your description. This boosts rankings as well as driving more people to your website to find out more and book.
3. Boost engagement
The more engagement signals your video gets, the higher it will rank.
You Tube state that:
“Videos are ranked based on a variety of factors, including how well the title, description, and video content match a viewer’s query. Beyond that, we'll look at which videos have driven the most engagement.”
How to get more people to engage with your video?
- Add simple multiple choice questions to the video.
- Give people a value-add reason to subscribe to your channel.
4. Use the right tags
Keywords make you rank on Google, but tags help your videos rank on YouTube.
But remember!
YouTube uses your tags to figure out what your video covers.
So, if you have unrelated tags it's going to have a really hard time understanding what your video is actually about.
How should you use the right tags for your video?
- Make your first three tags a variation of your target keywords.
- Use synonyms of your target keyword.
- Use two to three category tags. These tags describe your video’s overall topic.
5. Add key moments to your video
Viewers tend to leave longer videos or as their interest starts to wane.
But what if there is a section later in the video which they would be interested in?
Creating chapters in the timeline of the video will help visitors move quickly to the parts which interest them
How to add chapters to YouTube videos?
You can either do this while uploading your video on YouTube or later – a great tool is the handy video editor on the Tubics app.
For example if you have:
00:00 – Intro
00:35 – Hotel interior
01:10 – Rooms
02:00 – Meeting rooms
02:55 – Spa
browsers who are interested only in meetings or spa can jump to the exact spot in the video.
Video not only enables you to show your guests what they can expect (instead of telling them), when they are uploaded to your YouTube channel it acts as a secondary source of SEO.
Over 70% of browsers prefer to learn through video so harness this incredibly rich medium and drive more traffic to all your acquisition channels.
Check Out Glenlo Abbey Hotel Example: