A three-part look at video strategy, search engine optimization and blended search, Part 1: The Bad. Until recently, that branded video you posted to YouTube didn’t do much for your site’s SEO. Brand awareness? Sure. Website traffic to your brand.com? Not so much.

You may be operating under the assumption that there is enough traffic on YouTube to get your brand the exposure it needs. If your only objective is to create brand awareness, then YouTube can be helpful, as long as your video content and quality is good. After all, it’s no secret that YouTube sees more than 100 million unique visitors each month (comScore). If your video is worth watching, it will undoubtedly see some action.

However, don’t confuse brand awareness with website traffic and conversions. Someone who watches your brand video on YouTube may never actually make it to your brand.com site. To make the jump from YouTube to your site, a customer would have to:

• Find your branded video on YouTube without getting distracted by other videos
• Watch your video
• Be compelled enough by the content to leave YouTube and seek out your brand
• Google your brand or company to find your website
• And, finally, click to your site

That’s a lot to expect from the average consumer, especially since locating your video amidst the avalanche of material on YouTube can be daunting. YouTube estimates that every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded. That’s some stiff competition.

It would seem that the obvious next step would be to post your video to YouTube, and then embed it on your brand.com. While that strategy can certainly save your company a little money and a lot of bandwidth, it comes at a cost to your website’s SEO.

YouTube estimates that every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded.

All too frequently, consumers looking for information about a product or service browse their Search Engine Results Page (SERP), see a thumbnail for your product or brand video, click on it, and end up at – you guessed it – YouTube. The worst part of that scenario is that search engines take a similar route, showering YouTube with all that good SEO juju that really belongs to you, as a reward for your investment in video.

The optimal situation, of course, is one in which consumers view your brand or company video at your brand.com, where it is nestled in dynamic, contextual content with a clear, clickable, call to action.

Next in Part 2, Google’s video sitemaps change the game