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The Utah DMC Blog

SLC|SEM Event Put Spotlight on Video SEO As Part Of Marketing Strategy

January was the start of a new year and a new chapter for the SLC|SEM meetings, complete with a new venue,
The Leonardo. The Leonardo is an art+science+technology museum nestled in the middle of Salt Lake City with a gorgeous view of the cityscape, creating a perfect backdrop for discussing cutting-edge SEO topics.

Even with the bad weather threatening, experts from all over Utah showed in force to learn what strategies to implement into their video SEO. With the announcement that the gurus from the Sundance Institute and Bing.com’s video search team would be there, the crowd was buzzing with anticipation. In a cruel twist of fate, Bing.com’s team was unable to make it to the event due to a snow storm. I have to give credit to local speakers Morgan Vidakovich (
@morganvi)and Ash Buckles (
@ashbuckles) and discussion leader Ryan Hutchings for stepping up in a tough situation and still making it a great event. First up was Morgan Vidakovich, who is the Marketing Manager for the
Sundance Institute.  She spoke in depth about some of the tactics, strategies, and challenges her team faces.

One interesting statistic she gave was that organic search traffic makes up about 60% of the traffic for the Sundance Film Festival; predictably, the traffic peaks during the festival and after drops off. The Sundance Film Festival is just a part of what the Sundance Institute is doing throughout the year. To manage this, Morgan has been heading up marketing on different initiatives to help secure consistent traffic throughout the year.  With a blend of YouTube, social, and organic SEO tactics, they are starting to see a difference. Next up was Ash Buckles from
SEO.com talking about actionable video SEO for marketers. He highlighted his case study using one of the saddest wheelie videos on YouTube to date. Even though Ash has thoroughly ticked off the dirt bike nation with his footage, the 60 thousand views can’t be denied. According to Ash, factors that helped this (and other videos) rank well include:

  • Keywords in title
  • Number of views
  • Number of comments
  • Category & Tags
  • +1/Shares/Tweets/Embeds
  • Favorites
  • Ratings
  • Sentiment (Likes/Dislikes Ratio)
  • Channel Views
  • Number of Subscribers
  • Links
  • Video Sitemap

A key indicator that the marketer needs to take into account is the dislikes. Ash said that if you have too many negative comments or dislikes, it can affect your rankings in a negative way.  So the old adage of any press is good press does not necessarily fit into video marketing. Ash went on to talk about how most video search results are coming from YouTube, even  the top results in Bing, so it is the best platform to get the furthest reach. For more information, you can get his slides on
slideshare and are embedded below:

January's meeting was a great event with some useful and interesting information – despite the snow. Make sure to catch the
next SLC|SEM event on February 22, where we will have the pleasure of hearing from Danny Sullivan, the Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land. I will see you there.
About the Author:  Devin Doxey is an entrepreneur at heart with wicked programming and SEO skills that have lead him to 
TechMedia Network where he is currently an SEO Marketer. At TMN, Devin monitors over 20 sites, selectively choosing keywords and strategies that bring in over 20 million unique viewers each month. He can be found on Twitter at 
@dhdoxey and/or on 
Google Plus.

Topics: News