Video marketing for financial advisors, in particular YouTube, is proving to be a successful way for advisors to reach their desired audience. Once you create YouTube videos for your financial advisor firm’s channel on the popular platform, it is time to get them to rank as high as possible on Google.
However, this challenge is not as easy as many financial advisors may assume. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of similar videos pertaining to investing, wealth management, and financial services competing for high rankings on the Google search engine.
Implement the right strategies as detailed below and your videos stand a good chance of ranking higher than your main competitors.
You have to sweat the small stuff or hire someone to take the heat for you.
The content of your financial advisor firm’s videos is certainly important yet the quality of your messaging will not matter much unless the videos are actually seen by your target audiences. The best way to maximize the viewership of your YouTube videos is to get them to rank high on Google.
High rank on Google means page one. That’s because 91.5% of Google users do not scroll to page two. Only 4.8% of users scroll to page two, 1.1% to page three, and so on.
The subtleties of your videos play a large part in boosting their search ranking. The name of the file plays an important part in your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) success. YouTube considers the video name when determining its ranking. In short, your financial advisor firm’s videos must be properly named. The title should be short with plain wording yet descriptive enough to communicate what the video is actually about.
Ideally, the title will contain several keywords that your target audience is most likely to use in their searches. These keywords boost the videos’ SEO and also make it easier for YouTube to categorize the content properly.
The video title is just as important as the file name. The best video titles consist of a couple of short words, maxing out at 60 characters. The video title should summarize the content of the video and describe the information presented in the clip. Similar to the file name, the video title should also contain keywords that your financial advisor firm is attempting to rank for when prospective clients sleuth Google.
A text version of your financial advisor company’s videos makes it easier for YouTube to accurately identify the information presented in the video. Accompany your video with a transcript and you will maximize the chances of your video showing up toward the top of the search rankings when people conduct relevant queries, ultimately helping your financial advisors connect with that many more new investors.
Creating a video transcript is easier than most assume. You merely have to type the dialogue discussed in the video into a plain text file with the “.txt” extension. The use of a double arrow (>>) within the transcript indicates a new speaker is talking. Once finished, the video transcript is uploaded through the Video Manager.
Tags make it easy for YouTube to pair your video to text and create a bridge to searchers. Resist the temptation to add dozens of tags in an attempt to zoom up the Google rankings. About half a dozen relevant tags will suffice. When selecting tags for your financial advisor company’s videos, consider the videos currently trending on YouTube. Incorporate one or several of the tags used in these popular videos and that many more searchers will find your video content.
Video descriptions also play an important role in YouTube’s ranking system. It is in your interest to max out the 5,000 characters available for your video description. Add keywords, key phrases, and even some local identifiers your target audience is most likely to search for. However, it is important to keep in mind that merely the initial 100 characters of the description are visible to viewers when they arrive on your page. Viewers will have to click “read more” to read text beyond the initial 100 characters.
YouTube playlists are not strictly for teenyboppers who spend hour-after-hour on the platform listening to music. Your financial advisor firm can also benefit from a video playlist. There are several reasons to invest the little bit of time and effort necessary to create a playlist. For one, a continuous, uninterrupted stream of your videos will present information about your financial advisor firm to viewers in a truly comprehensive manner.
Perhaps more important is the fact that a playlist presents a second group of signals that communicate to YouTube what, exactly, your financial advisor business’s videos are really all about. Each time you add a new video to your YouTube channel, create a new playlist named with a synonym of one of your targeted keywords. Switch up the order of the videos on each playlist for your audience’s sake. This way, when people search for the keyword or key phrase in question, they will stand a much better chance of finding your videos and playlists toward the top of the rankings.
Google’s tab for “Videos'' shows two distinct results: those for pages found in organic searches featuring relevant embedded videos and relevant videos on the YouTube platform. In other words, if your financial advisor firm’s web pages rank high on Google, it is that much easier for those pages to appear in the search engine’s tab for videos with the embedding of a video. Once a searcher clicks one of these results, Google will redirect them to your firm’s website as opposed to the YouTube platform.
You can pinpoint the optimal pages for video embedding by checking out the Google Search Console’s Search Results. Once there, click the tab for “pages” and sort through the results by the number of clicks in order from high to low to find those that had the most traffic from the popular search engine across the previous months.
Putting forth the effort to boost your financial advisor videos’ “findability” on the web has the potential to be in vain unless you present prospective viewers with an aesthetically pleasing thumbnail. The thumbnail is the diminutive square that shows a “still shot” of your video. The thumbnail should feature attractive imagery and an alluring description. It will prove difficult to find just the right still shot from your video so go ahead and upload a customized thumbnail with the proper 16:9 aspect ratio to entice clicks.