Writing A Video Description That Will Boost Your Brand Image

It’s pretty much common knowledge that videos are one of the most effective content marketing mediums available, but what’s often overlooked is the role of the video description. Descriptions determine the SEO performance of your content, can be used to link back to your company pages, and are another way to engage with the viewer and your potential consumers.

With our explainer videos, descriptions are as important as the video itself. Making the most of those words is paramount for extending the reach of our content, and thankfully there’s not much to it. Here are six simple ways to take advantage of video descriptions to boost your brand.

 

Short and sweet

If you’re on YouTube to watch, you’re not likely to read. That means any video description that’s too long will just be skipped over by most watchers. In this scenario the character limit is not a goal to shoot for; keep your descriptions short and to the point, explaining what your video is about.

Use keywords

Although you should keep your description short, try to make some of those precious words extra useful. While one function of the video description is just that — to describe the video — another function is to determine its ranking in keyword searches. That means you can boost your SEO by including particular relevant keywords in the description. 

Do some research into popular keywords related to your video, and make sure you weave them into the description. Avoid overly technical language or single-word keywords, as these are less likely to boost your ratings. Try instead to use so-called longtail keywords, where single keywords form part of a longer key phrase. You can read more SEO tips for video production here.

Stamp times

If you have a long video and want an easy way to win over users, include

timestamps in your description so that watchers can skip around the video. I cannot tell you the n

umber of times I’ve wanted one song on a movie soundtrack and had to scroll through a two-hour long video looking for those particular notes — it is not fun. 

“You want watchers to come back to your channel again and again, and making their viewing experience as easy and streamlined as possible is a great way to do that,” says Joel Bates, a video blogger at Draft Beyond and Researchpapersuk. For explainer videos, time-stamp the steps to help users come back and navigate through the process. Timestamps are also a great way to work in keywords for longer, content-rich videos, helping you kill two birds with one stone.

 

Put in some backlinks

Another great SEO trick, including backlinks in your video descriptions, can get you some easy product promotion. Anything you can do to boost user conversion to your site is worthwhile. When including backlinks, focus on pages with a call-to-action or contact methods to generate user engagement beyond YouTube.

Share and cite

A great way to generate user engagement is by sharing user content, with permission of course. Bowie Jamman, a video marketer at Writinity and LastMinuteWriting, says that “content that involves the user is much more likely to engage the user and make a lasting impact. This is the kind of content viewers want to share, boosting your marketing reach.” 

For explainer videos, citing other users can demonstrate the educational capacity of your content by being open and honest with your sources. Of course, it’s important to ask permission of all content creators before sharing their content, and good practice to cite them in the video description. This has the added benefit of linking their SEO to your video, giving you the potential of search conversions.

 

 

 

Update and renew

Even if you’re not making new videos, updating the description can keep your content ranking highly on searches. By updating video descriptions and including a date stamp you can class your video as new content, pushing it up the search rankings even if it was published months or years ago.

The lesson of this last point is that your video descriptions can be an ever-changing part of your online marketing strategy. They have great potential for customer conversion, and can be just as valuable as the videos they describe!

 

About the author Ashley Halsey

Ashley Halsey is a professional writer at Luckyassignments.com and Gumessays.com who has been involved in many projects throughout the country. Mother of two children, she enjoys traveling, reading, and attending business training courses.