Digital Dealer - March 2019 - 26

M A R K E T ING & ADVERT ISING: SEO

By Tim James
COO,
Flick Fusion

Boost Website
Rankings
If you're familiar with
video marketing, you
know that having videos on
your dealership's website
improves SEO value.
Google and other search
engines are always trying to
provide users with helpful
video content, but search
engines don't always return
the most relevant search
results. In reality, they return
search results that are
easily found because the
website is following the
search engine's rules.
Let's take an example
of a car shopper looking
for a 2018 Ford Edge. The
shopper enters that term
along with their location into
a search field and a number
of results are returned. The
results include a list of payper-click ads as well as local
dealerships displayed under
a map with locations.
WHERE'S THE VIDEO?

If no videos are displayed,
that means the dealerships
either don't have videos on
their websites, or they don't
have a video sitemap that
tells the search engines how
to find those videos.
There's nothing more
boring than a list of text-only
search results. How does
the car shopper choose
which link to click on?
They'll either click on the
website at the top of the list,
or they'll click on the dealer26

MARCH 2019

ship that's closest to them.
However, if you have
inventory videos or testdrive videos of a Ford Edge,
this is a great opportunity to
differentiate yourself from
the competition. Google displays video results next to a
thumbnail image and gives
them higher priority than a
simple text link. According to
ReelSEO, videos in search
results have a 41% higher
click-through rate than their
plain text counterparts.
Not only are video results
more compelling than
text-only results, but there
are far fewer dealerships
with videos, which allows
your dealership to capitalize
on search-engine preference and dominate search
results.
Another advantage of
having a video sitemap is
that even if your videos are
hosted on another platform,
the video URL links will lead
consumers directly to your
website, increasing website
traffic which can further help
boost rankings.
VIDEO SITEMAP IS
KEY TO IMPROVING
RANKINGS. If you have

videos on your website, you
want to ensure that your
website provider has created a video sitemap. A video
sitemap is an XML file that
tells search engines where
videos can be found and

D I G I TA L D E A L E R . C O M

what the video content is.
When creating a video
sitemap, you must follow
a sitemap protocol. Basic
requirements are outlined
at Sitemaps.org. Once the
sitemap is created in a
document, you can save it
as an XML file and upload it
to your server.
Google only accepts video sitemaps that are hosted
on the same sub-domain
as the rest of your website.
So, if your website is www.
yourwebsite.com, you need
to host your sitemap on the
same domain; for example,
www.yourwebsite.com/
videositemap.xml.
The easiest way to tell
search engines where to
find your video sitemap is
to add the location of your
video sitemap to the robots.
txt file in the root of your
web server.
Alternatively, you can use
Google Webmaster Tools to
submit your video sitemap
directly to Google (Google
Webmaster Tools will also
validate your video sitemap).
Note that you first need to
register your site with Google Webmaster Tools. After
doing so, within the "site
details" you will find a link to
"Submit a Sitemap."
Tip: Do both methods so
that other search engines
such as Yahoo or Bing can
also find and index your

videos using robots.txt.

OPTIMIZING VIDEOS
FOR SEARCH RESULTS.

As search engine bots crawl
the Internet looking for video
results to a search query,
they look for four things in
every video: Title, description,
thumbnail image, and video
page URL.
Your video sitemap
includes all of this information, as well as other details
such as run time and who
the intended audience is.
These details influence how
and when your videos get
indexed. It's important to
include the city, state, and zip
code of your location in the
video sitemap file.
Additionally, the video URL
links in your sitemap should
open on a landing page.
Landing pages with text in
addition to videos are ranked
higher than pages with videos only.
Before submitting the
sitemap URL, be sure that
the landing page has been
set up. The landing pages
will appear on Google and
other search engines, so
make sure they best reflect
your product and include your
dealership's logo.
If you're investing the time
and money into creating
video content, having a video
sitemap is essential so that
car shoppers click through
to your videos-and your
website-first.
TIM JAMES is a dynamic sales
and marketing strategist with
20+ years of success in driving
revenue growth for auto dealers.
He is one of the auto industry's
leading authorities on the use of
video marketing strategies.
http://www.Sitemaps.org http://www.yourwebsite.com http://www.yourwebsite.com http://www.yourwebsite.com/videositemap.xml http://www.yourwebsite.com/videositemap.xml http://www.DIGITALDEALER.COM
Digital Dealer - March 2019

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