Are you thinking about ways to use YouTube to draw traffic to your website? If utilized correctly, YouTube is indeed a powerful platform for lead generation. With this in mind, we’ll showcase some of the most well-known methods of increasing your number of website visitors via YouTube!
Why Use YouTube?
As a video streaming and sharing platform, YouTube basically needs no introduction. It has over three billion unique views per day, and its search box takes second place among the most widely used search engines on the planet. Ironically, the first place is taken by its parent company — Google.
For digital marketers, YouTube is a place with almost limitless potential. If you succeed in building a strong YouTube channel, you can direct your viewership to other websites, online stores, and other platforms. Monetizing your content is easier than ever — with the right strategy, you can use YouTube to draw traffic to your website.
Know that it’s important for people to find your content within YouTube properly. Once you are passably recognizable on YouTube, the content you post there may be indexed by Google and other search engines; especially if people — and yourself — embed it in blog posts or share it on social media.
YouTube Traffic Generation and Call to Action
If you want to use YouTube to draw traffic to your website, you need to realize something. Although channels with a “celebrity status” who have managed to build up sizable brand awareness can be incredibly useful, there is no guaranteed traffic generation without the proper strategy.
First of all — it’s not all about your YouTube videos and channels. The website that you’re directing viewers to also needs to be speedy, high-quality, and visually on-brand. Using professionals like WP Full Care to help with your website design and maintenance is always the safest route to go.
Also, your videos need to be designed in a way that promotes traffic generation. It’s not just about having incredibly viral content. Sure, the more people see your video, the more traffic you’ll generate — but with expertly focused niche content, you can achieve similar results with fewer viewers.
Call to Action
As you’ll see below, there are a couple of different methods of converting YouTube viewers into website visitors. Still, all of these methods employ the same basic tool — a call to action.
If you want your videos to achieve a specific goal in terms of visitor behavior — such as visiting your website — you need to explicitly tell them to do so. Also, you need to outline why, giving them some sort of incentive, as well as how — by providing them with a link in the video description.
What does this mean in practice? It means that you need to give your subscribers on YouTube a reason to leave YouTube and head on over to your website. How compelling this incentive is will directly correspond to how much traffic you generate.
Depending on your niche, provide your viewers with some free content — another video, report, or some sort of useful software. Once you’ve decided on the details of your call to action, you can start learning the actual methods of using YouTube to draw traffic to your website.
Explicit Request
The first strategy for traffic generation is the most obvious, but also the most overlooked one. Use the outro section of your videos, once you’re finished with the main content, to explicitly communicate what you want your users to do. Just stare at the camera and specifically tell the people what your website is, and why they should visit it.
This doesn’t take too much time, and can be achieved with nothing more than a few dialog lines. Just thank people for watching the video all the way through, and then showcase the link in the video. Also, tell them what they can learn if they visit it.
Video Description
Every YouTube upload gives you the opportunity to describe the basics of your video content through text. This is the famous “video description down below” that most YouTube marketers point towards.
You can use this description box to generate traffic for your website. Make sure you also mention it, at least in passing, in your video — and then link to your website in the video description. If you add the URL there, it will become a clickable hyperlink towards your website.
If you want to, you can use the description box to provide further clarification or additional links related to the content of your video; the link towards your website can be found among them.
CTA Overlay
The third way you can use YouTube to draw traffic to your website is to use a specific YouTube feature called the call to action overlay. This isn’t anything too fancy — we’re talking about a simple banner that will be found in your video at some point.
You can customize it as much as you want — from the written copy to the image you’ll use as a thumbnail. It won’t take you more than a minute or two to successfully set up, but not doing so means you’ll be missing valuable traffic. You can manage all of this via the accompanying YouTube Ads platform.
Conclusion
When it comes to traffic generation for your website, YouTube is one of the best platforms if you’re adept at creating video content. Unlike some other avenues for traffic generation, YouTube won’t take too much time to set up and your videos can easily be adjusted to bring as many people as possible to your website.
