Many businesses today rely on the power of the Internet to build and develop their brand. Digital marketing is now taking over traditional marketing because digital marketing can connect to audiences in many ways like never before, wherever they are.
It is not hard to understand why business owners take advantage of the limitless opportunities found on the Internet. A research done by the Pew Research Center shows that only 10% of Americans do not use the Internet. This just means that there is a very vast market for businesses to be discovered through the use of digital marketing.
This shift from traditional to digital platforms also carries over to the medical and dental industries. More medical and dental practices are now slowly ditching traditional methods of providing services such as offline bookings in favor of digital and automated methods like online scheduling and downloadable patient forms.
Perhaps the most impactful effect that the Internet has on businesses is that they can now build their brand and develop authority in their respective fields using online tools. Social media platforms, for example, are a great way to build your brand by increasing your online presence and engaging with your audiences.
When it comes to social media platforms, the most commonly used are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. However, there is another social media platform that you should be looking at if you want to develop and improve your dental practice’s brand authority and increase your online search ranking – YouTube.
Why Should You Put Effort into YouTube?
YouTube is unlike any other social media platform because it is the 2nd largest search engine behind Google. It means that your dental practice will benefit greatly if you are able to connect to millions of users and viewers on this platform.
To give you an idea of how immense YouTube is, the social media platform is bigger than AOL, Yahoo, Bing and Ask combined. It currently processes more than 3 billion searches in a month and there are about 1 billion unique visitors monthly.
YouTube is the most popular video-sharing platform in the world and approximately 100 hours of videos are uploaded on the website every minute.
There are also over 6 billion hours of videos viewed every month, so just imagine the impact that YouTube can make in your own brand if you can utilize it for your dental practice.
How to Boost Your Online Search Rankings with YouTube?
Now before you get excited knowing the impact that YouTube can make on your brand, you should know that just like any other social media platform and search engine, it takes a combination of good strategies and execution to become successful in promoting your brand in YouTube. Improving the online search ranking of your dental practice requires SEO knowledge as well.
It is an undeniable fact that YouTube is a great source of traffic. However, if you want to use video to promote your dental practice on YouTube, there are some important steps that you need to do to ensure that your videos are optimized for the YouTube search engine so that people can find your content easily in the local search results.
SEO elements come into play when optimizing your content for YouTube search. Just like webpages, your videos on YouTube should have appropriate titles, descriptions and meta tags. Good SEO practices suggest that your main keyword or the keyword that you are trying to rank for should be included in the title and description. You should also consider adding the keywords to your tags so YouTube can easily crawl your content. Tags will also help your audience to easily see what the content is all about and to find similar content across your channel.
Another good SEO practice that you should consider is to put your keywords on the beginning of your titles and descriptions as YouTube has a 100-character limit for the titles and it trims down titles with more than 66 words.
Optimizing the videos on your page for SEO will allow the YouTube search engine to understand what your content is all about. With proper keywords, it will be easier for YouTube’s algorithm to rank your video in the search results.
Localizing your content with the use of localized keywords will also help you get more local traffic to your videos. By adding locations to your keywords, you can get higher rankings for specific search terms from those locations.
Check out this optimized YouTube video from one of our awesome clients.
In addition, you can also go to the advanced settings and add a location, such as a city and a state to localize your video (i.e. Charlotte, NC).
YouTube also has advanced settings that you can configure. Adding keywords on your channel’s settings will tell YouTube what the whole channel is all about. You can also add your website in YouTube’s advanced settings so that you can direct them to your website for more traffic.
Optimizing your videos also allows them to increase the chances of appearing more in Google search results. YouTube videos usually appear in Google search results for informational keywords.
Another way of increasing traffic is by transcribing your videos and making blog articles out of them. You can then embed your videos on your dental blogs so that your visitors can have two types of content that they can watch and read to convey your message effectively.
What Kind of YouTube Dental Videos Should You Make?
When you look at the most popular dental YouTube channels, they all share one thing in common – niche content. Every successful YouTube brand knows that to build authority, you should focus on your niche and not let your content to contain unrelated things. That is why if you want to increase the online search ranking and boost the authority of your dental practice, you should focus more on content that is all about dentistry.
Resist the temptation of uploading videos of your last vacation or the videos of your pet because it will make your YouTube channel unprofessional and unappealing to prospective patients.
Here are some video ideas that you can use for your dental brand:
- Benefits of starting your own dental practice
- Dental insurance
- Popular dental cosmetic procedures
- Common dental problems
- Special services that you offer
- Qualifications of your dentists
- Trending dental issues
- Payment options
- The proper way of brushing
- Dental maintenance and more
When you create your YouTube account, the length of the videos that you can upload is limited to 15 minutes until your account is verified.
However, when your account becomes verified, you will be able to upload videos of up to 20gb in size. Generally, you should stick to creating shorter videos. Aim to create informational videos with less than 5 minutes of duration to keep your content engaging and interesting.
YouTube Optimization Solutions
If you need help in promoting your dental practice on the Internet, YouTube included, contact Med Rank Interactive. We have a proven track record of helping independent and multi-location dental practices to build and develop their brands through effective digital marketing solutions, such as YouTube optimization.
Our of our clients, Dr. Haynes of Modern Family Dental Care, records simple videos to educate his customers.
Our role is to help his content to become YouTube friendly by optimizing it from an SEO standpoint such as optimizing titles, descriptions and tags, creating a custom thumbnail and localizing the content. Contact us today!