Legal Search Marketing

Archive for the ‘Video Marketing’ Category

YouTube always seems to group their major announcements in little bunches. Hot on the heels of the brand new site-wide redesign, they’ve just announced another big change for YouTube creators. Today they announced a new YouTube Video Manager that has a new look, some new features, and an overall streamlined approach.

Highlights of the new Video Manager are:

• Simplified top and left navigation bars to help you get to the tools you need more quickly
• Icons to indicate privacy status, if monetization is enabled and scheduled publish status
• Badges to indicate whether videos are HD, Creative Commons and/or captioned
• A new look that’s consistent with our fresh coat of digital paint

If your a lawyer, its a good idea to have a YouTube video account where you can store all of your videos. Then you can easily embed the videos into any posts or pages you create on your website.  YouTube is a very popular site and another reason to have your videos setup at YouTube is that Google will at times use some YouTube video results in its universal search results.

YouTube, well technically the Google sites, topped 14.6 billion video streams in May according to comScore.

*Rankings based on video content sites; excludes video server networks. Online video includes both streaming and progressive download video.

read more at Reel SEO

Statistics show that video improves online visibility and drives more action online than plain images and text. For example, according to the BIA Kelsey Group, viewers engage more after watching a video, with clicks for more information increasing by 30-40% and phone inquiries by 16-20%.

Whether you choose to do-it-yourself or hire a pro, marketing your business with online video doesn’t end with the production. Remember, videos need to be seen. Here are a few tips to help you make the most out of your video marketing:

1. Aim for Authentic, Actionable Content

Don’t worry about stock photography, templates, or videographers who will make you look like all their other clients. Be authentic. Be personal. After all, this is your big chance to highlight your strengths and show what really makes you different. Keep the video short and the less scripted, the better
— since customers are jaded by typical sales pitches and marketing
buzzwords. Creating authentic video that captures the human element
behind any business allows customers to connect on a personal level.

This is TRUE and creating a video that is personal and shows who you are and what you do can be a big factor when a new client chooses your law firm.  Also creating a video of client testimonials can be another powerful tool.

And don’t forget to incorporate a call to action.
While your authentic video builds trust and drives action, viewers must
be given a reason and a way to call you, visit your website, or stop by
your store. Be sure to include some action path — for example, a
trackable URL, a coupon, discount code, or unique phone number to call.
This not only encourages viewers to engage with you, but also provides
a tangible way to measure the results of your video.

2. Optimize Video for Google Search

The advent of blended or universal search has changed the search
game. Search engines now display more and more videos, images, blogs,
maps, and books in their results. These new search algorithms weigh
video heavily, giving you a great opportunity to increase your
relevance in search results (and even achieve that coveted first page
ranking on Google). In fact, Forrester Research ran an experiment on
the top-searched keywords and discovered that videos have an
11,000-to-1 chance of appearing on the first page of Google’s results,
while text has a 500,000-to-1 chance of making it on the first page —
in short, video has a 50 times better chance than plain text for getting to the top of search rankings.

Even with this incredible opportunity, many marketers don’t yet
think about making their video Google-friendly. There are several
simple steps you can take to optimize your online video content.

3. Add Video to Your Facebook Page

Most likely, your Facebook fans are already customers — the social
network gives you the chance to strengthen existing relationships,
build your brand, present special offers, as well as find some new
customers as you reach into the extended networks of your current fan
base. On Facebook, use video to show the human side of your company.
Think fun and creative. Show a ‘behind the scenes’ peak at your office
or shop. Use video to announce a new contest or special. Post video
highlights of past events, customer testimonials, etc.

4. Put Video on YouTube and Other Video Sites

YouTube has quickly grown from a network of user-generated content
to become an invaluable repository of content. Next to Google, YouTube is the second largest search engine, with more than 3.5 billion queries a month according to comScore. YouTube and other video sites are great vehicles to reach an audience who might not find you otherwise. Best of all, you can create a branded YouTube channel and host your videos without incurring any bandwidth costs.
And don’t worry — you don’t necessarily have to create the next viral
sensation to find success on YouTube. Small businesses can create
valuable new relationships and build sales without generating a million
views.

5. Add Video to Your Google Local Business Listing

By adding video to your business listing on Google Local,
you’ll be able to tell your story and connect with those people who are
looking for your products or services, at the very point in time when
they’re actively researching or ready to buy. This ultra-targeted form of marketing is highly effective
for driving clicks and calls. And amid a list of company names,
addresses, and phone numbers, an engaging video brings your listing to
life and sets you apart from the crowd.

Most Importantly – Get Started

There’s no time like the present to get started with video. While
spare time is always in short supply for the small business owner,
online video can be less time intensive and is relatively low cost
compared with other marketing initiatives. Most importantly, video will reap dividends in both the short and long term.

This is all great video advise.  Putting a video on your lawyer website is a great move for many reasons, just do it!

Read full post at Reel SEO

Nearly 178 million U.S. Internet users watched 33.2 billion online
videos during December 2009, according to the latest data from comScore Vedio Metrix.

This means Americans watched an average of 187 videos per viewer during the month.

Here are some other related stats from comScore's announcement:

• 86.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in December.
• 134.4 million viewers watched more than 13 billion videos on YouTube.com — 97.1 videos per viewer.
• 44.9 million viewers watched 423.3 million videos on MySpace Sites — 9.4 videos per viewer.
• The average Hulu viewer watched 22.9 videos, totaling 2.2 hours of videos per viewer.
• The duration of the average online video was 4.1 minutes.

It's no mystery any more, you should create videos for your law firms practice!

A little over a year ago, comScore’s US Search Rankings Report for
Dec. 2008 showed that YouTube for the first time, could be thought of
as the second largest search engine next to Google with 2,905,000,000
total search queries that month. According to comScore’s December 2009 US Search Rankings Report published last week, YouTube searches grew 35% year over year to more than 3.9 billion search queries. 

In fact, YouTube not only had 50% more searches than Yahoo web search (3.918B vs 2.629B) and 180% more searches than Bing (3.918B vs 1.399B), but the number of searches at the online video giant made up almost 28% (27.95) of the total searches on Google sites for Dec. 2009.

Searching as a Means for Video Discovery

Is there any question that people are accustomed to search as a
means for video discovery?  I hope not.  When you combined the above
information with the notion that 23% of YouTube’s total visits for
December (130.3Million according to compete.com) originated from Google search , it is clear that video search is here to stay.

comScore Search Statistics for December 2009

Here is the data as released from comScore for December 2009:

• 22.3 billion expanded search queries in the U.S.
• Google Sites (including YouTube) accounted for 65.7% of all searches.
• Microsoft Sites grabbed 10.7% market share.

Other notable findings:

• Bing experienced large growth during the month with a 6-percent increase
• eBay and Amazon had a great month which can be attributed to retail search activity for the holiday season.
• YouTube searches were only up 1% month over month.  Still, 1% is equal to an increase of 45 million searches.

This is just another reason that lawyers should be creating videos to help market their legal practices.

Source: Reel SEO

Good article from Reel SEO about legal issues related to video marketing.

Mark Rosenberg was recently published in Affiliate Summit’s FeedFront magazine
with his article titled “Video Marketing and the Law.” We have the
article for you to read here and Mark shares with us the basic
proactive measures that all video marketers should be aware to to avoid
common legal pitfalls, including: right of publicity issues,
copyrights, licensing, contracts, and receiving proper consent.

Videos can be a very effective Internet marketing tool. Yet, this
tool comes with several hidden legal issues. These pitfalls can be
avoided if the video marketer is aware of them and takes proactive
measures.

Right of Publicity issues with online video

The most overlooked issue in video marketing is the right of
publicity. This right relates to a person’s ability to control whether
and how his or her name, likeness and voice are used. In order to avoid
right of publicity disputes, affiliate marketers should have all
persons appearing in their videos sign a release granting the marketer
the right to use that person’s name, likeness, image, etc. in
connection with the recording, display and distribution of the video.

Get consents in writing

These consents must be in writing. That is because some states do
not recognize oral consents even if the consent is recorded on video.
Everyone appearing in the video should sign a release, regardless of
whether the person is an employee, family or a friend. That way, if an
actor has a change of heart after the video is taped or after it begins
to be displayed, the marketer is protected. Otherwise, the actor could
potentially bring a lawsuit for a monetary award and an injunction
prohibiting the use of the video.

Copyright issues with online video

Copyright law also plays a major role in video marketing.
Preliminarily, in almost all cases, using video images copied from
YouTube or from a television network’s or a show’s Web site without
consent is a copyright violation. While the basics of copyright
infringement are usually obvious, the concept of copyright ownership is
not. As a result, affiliate marketers are often not aware that just
because they pay someone to create a video, they do not necessarily own
the copyright in that work.

In many cases, the person who actually creates the video is
considered the work’s author and the owner of its copyright. In fact,
everyone involved in the creation of the video, including the script
writer, the director and the production crew may own a portion of the
copyright in the finished video and possess the legal right to
determine whether and how the video can be used.

This issue can be avoided by having all persons involved in the
creation of the video sign a work-for-hire agreement before production
commences. These agreements are written contracts which specify that
entity which commissions the video owns the entire copyright in it.

Background music is an additional copyright issue in video
marketing. This issue is often overlooked. Unless the video uses only
original music created by the affiliate marketer, the marketer must
obtain consent to use the music. Otherwise, there is a potential
infringement issue.

By employing these basic measures, you can avoid many of the legal issues raised by video marketing.

Read More

These 5 basic tips for video SEO are a good starting point for marketers looking to improve the “searchability” of their videos.

1. Optimize with keywords.
Just like any type of text-based content, video SEO involves optimizing with target relevant keywords — both for search engines and for user experience. Use keywords in:

• File name
• Title
• Tags
• URL
• Link text

Beyond that, include a paragraph of optimized text that provides a
brief description of the video. Again, the benefits are twofold: You’ll
improve the user experience and your search rankings.

2. Distribute videos on video-sharing sites.
In addition to posting videos on your own site, video-sharing
sites are effective tools for gaining visibility and additional links.
Remember these few points to maximize results:

• Don’t forget that videos hosted on YouTube and other video-sharing sites should be optimized for keywords
• YouTube channel pages — and those of other video-sharing sites — should be optimized, as well
• Use a video distribution service like TubeMogul to deploy your videos to the top sharing sites

3. Implement a linking strategy.
Video is judged by the same linking standards as all other
forms of digital content. So building both internal and external links
is crucial for video SEO. Ideas for a linking strategy include:

• Cross-linking to other videos
• Linking to videos from relevant web pages
• Linking to videos in blog posts
• Tweeting the video
• Linking to videos from social media pages
• Bookmarking the video

4. Encourage viewers to share your videos.
First thing is first — if you want users to share your videos, you must
create content worth sharing. If your video isn’t interesting,
relevant, entertaining or informative, users aren’t likely to share it,
let alone view it. From there:

• Allow and encourage users to comment on the video
• Make it easy for users to share your video on You Tube, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace
• Offer video content in multiple formats so users can choose the one that best suited to their platform and connectivity speed

5. Re-purpose your videos.
As with text content, the more optimized video, the better. Get creative in order to re-purpose videos across the web:

• Embed videos in blog posts
• Break up long videos and create multiple shorter ones
• Use transcriptions of videos to create blog posts or content for web pages
• Take screen shots from videos and post them to Flickr and other image-sharing sites
• Turn offline content, such as training videos or videos of a
  conference keynote speech, into optimized digital assets for your
  website

source

All of these are good tips to get your video more exposure in the video search engines.

comScore Video Metrix
announced that more than 168 million U.S. Internet users watched nearly
26 billion videos online during September 2009 — an average of 154
videos per viewer.

YouTube accounted for close to 40 percent of the 26 billiion videos
viewed during September, to remain the market leader by a wide margin.

According to comScore,
– 84.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in September.
– The average online video viewer watched 9.8 hours of video that month.
– The duration of the average online video was 3.8 minutes.
– 125.5 million viewers watched nearly 10.3 billion videos on YouTube.com — which is 82.4 videos per viewer.
– 45.6 million viewers watched 424 million videos on MySpace.com — which is 9.3 videos per viewer.

Now, let's compare these numbers to ones that search marketers should know by heart.

According to comScore qSearch, Americans conducted 13.8 billion core
searches in September 2009. They watched nearly 26 billion videos
online that month. This means Americans are watching almost twice as
many videos as they conducting searches at the five major search
engines.

So, is your video marketing budget twice as large as your search
marketing budget? Hmmm. Maybe that's why the news was buried on a
Friday afternoon.

Let's drill down a little deeper.

There were almost 9 billion core searches conducted on Google in
September. There were 10.3 billion videos viewed on YouTube that month.
That's right, Americans are watching more videos on YouTube than then
are conducting searches on Google.

According to comScore qSearch, there were 21.3 billion expanded
search queries conducted in September. This counts searches for
mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites as well as
searches at the major search engines.

Who were the leaders in expanded search?

Google was #1 with 9.4 billion expanded search queries.
YouTube was #2 with 3.5 billion.
Yahoo! as #3 with 2.7 billion.
Bing was #4 with 1.2 billion.

This shows the importance of having videos and every lawyer should have at least one video about the firms practice and then promote that video with the video search engines for starters.

The new iPhone 3GS means you’ve got a whole new slew of options in
regards to video. Without Flash capabilities on the iPhone our options
were extremely limited, but now Akamai is working to fix that problem.

Akamai is working to optimize live and recorded video for direct
delivery to iPhones. With the new iPhone 3.0 software and phones
everyone now has the ability to watch video on the mobile phone. Akamai
customers, as of last week, are now able to take advantage of variable
bit-rate streaming via its Media Delivery service. Among clients
already using it are NASA, NPR, Fox News, USA Today, and the Discovery
Channel.

Akamai’s service is working for both pre-recorded and live video
streams at sites like Fox Business News and NASA TV. With the variable
bit-rate streaming users no longer need to pick hi/low bandwidth
streams as it is done automatically via the service when necessary.
This eliminates the wait for videos to have to re-buffer.

Akamai and Inlet also offer up video encoding which helps companies
quickly create libraries of video for streaming. Akamai’s service then
takes the Inlet-encoded video and pushes it out via its network to the
closest AT&T media server to the client requesting content. They’re
also working to expand their partnerships and get that content
accessible to even more iPhone users globally.

Source

What all of this video news means is that its a good idea to have a video promoting your business because more people can view videos easily these days. The Iphone is getting better and better and watching videos these days is a real joy!

Good Post from Reel SEO about what online video viewing trends.

Metacafe recently commissioned a study to find out who in America is
watching online video, how much and what kinds. The results were just
released and might be surprising.

Metacafe asked Frank N. Magid Associates to do a new study on what
kind of video people are watching online. A surprising 77% of U.S.
Internet users are watching online video and 43% viewing something
weekly. This was claimed to be ‘critical mass’ by the researchers
though I can’t really see why.

I think online video has already been sustaining itself for sometime
so calling these numbers critical mass seems a mistake. Plus there’s
still more room for growth as far as I’m concerned. There’s no reason
to believe that no less than 100% of internet users will in the future
watch some sort of video online and I’m sure the weekly viewers will
top 50%. Of course that’s me being the optimistic one.

Some numbers that brought a smile to my face in the study included
the fact that 37% of users who watched video of a professional quality
online (TV clips, movie trailers, sports highlights, music videos,
short films, etc) found them as or more enjoyable than watching full
length stuff on TV.

Of all respondents 41% found them to be ’somewhat’ as entertaining
which is a vague way to go about things if you as me. Does somewhat as
entertaining mean more or less? I’m somewhat confused by the meaning of
that. I guess just having more/less or the same amount as options would
have been too easy.

The research was done in survey form and polled 1,927 people from
age 12-64 this past April. The strongest demographic was males 18-24
where 70% said they watched something weekly. But that’s not to say
they are the only people out there watching it.

Read Full Story

Video SEO for lawyers is becoming a bigger thing these days. Having a video on your website can be beneficial for multiple reasons.  Get ahead of the competition and contact us today.