When we talk about opti­miz­ing brand pres­ence, it has his­tor­i­cal­ly been lim­it­ed to search engines like Google and Bing. How­ev­er, con­sumers search – and dis­cov­er – on many oth­er plat­forms, includ­ing Ama­zon, Pin­ter­est, YouTube and Insta­gram. And that means there are plen­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ties for brands and mar­keters there­in.

Some of the SEO basics remain despite the plat­form, like find­ing the best key­words and cre­at­ing good con­tent to estab­lish rel­e­vance.

“The on-page SEO is fun­da­men­tal­ly the same for each plat­form: Under­stand­ing the types of queries peo­ple are using with­in a par­tic­u­lar plat­form and using those key­words strate­gi­cal­ly with­in and around the con­tent,” said David Erick­son, vice pres­i­dent of online mar­ket­ing at Kar­wos­ki & Courage Pub­lic Rela­tions.

And, for his part, Michael Lan, dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant at edtech lan­guage learn­ing com­pa­ny Glos­si­ka, said key­word research tool Key­word Tool allows users to do key­word research for a num­ber of these non-tra­di­tion­al search plat­forms like YouTube, Ama­zon, eBay and even the App Store.

What’s more, Lau­ra Simis of inbound mar­ket­ing and web­site design agency Coal­march Pro­duc­tions, said most of her firm’s clients are small busi­ness­es and she has found non-tra­di­tion­al search engines some­times pro­vide an oppor­tu­ni­ty to gain an edge over com­peti­tors.

“Even with­in [the] ser­vice-based indus­try, these plat­forms can be help­ful in brand build­ing and help­ing move cus­tomers one step clos­er to pur­chas­ing a ser­vice,” she added.

At the same time, con­sumers come to these plat­forms for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, which means there are opti­miza­tion dis­tinc­tions, too. Here’s a clos­er look at how to opti­mize for intent on spe­cif­ic plat­forms:

AMAZON

Many con­sumers come to Ama­zon first when they are look­ing for prod­ucts online. This is how brands can cap­i­tal­ize:

Listings

Ryder Mee­han of acqui­si­tion mar­ket­ing con­sult­ing group Mee­han Dig­i­tal said to opti­mize every avail­able ele­ment of an Ama­zon list­ing, includ­ing com­plet­ing all descrip­tion fields using tar­get key­words and adding pho­tos and videos.

Dig­i­tal con­sul­tant Rob Weath­er­head agreed Ama­zon is look­ing for rel­e­van­cy of prod­uct names and descrip­tions, fol­lowed by prices, reviews and sales to deter­mine prod­uct pop­u­lar­i­ty.

In par­tic­u­lar, RaShea Drake, com­mu­ni­ca­tions spe­cial­ist at ISP Fron­tier Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, said long­tail key­words are more impor­tant on Ama­zon because con­sumers use longer phras­es to find specif­i­cal­ly what they want there.

“From a tech­ni­cal per­spec­tive, you real­ly need to under­stand [Amazon’s] mer­chant data­base for­mat and how each piece of data for a giv­en prod­uct is dis­played where on a prod­uct list­ing and where that data shows up on SERPs,” Erick­son added.

Reviews

Erick­son also not­ed mer­chant rep­u­ta­tion is huge­ly impor­tant for Ama­zon, so ensur­ing cus­tomers have a fan­tas­tic expe­ri­ence with your prod­ucts and pro­vid­ing superb cus­tomer ser­vice are cru­cial.

“Ama­zon mer­chants need to have a well-thought-out sys­tem for solic­it­ing feed­back from cus­tomers and prompt­ing them for rat­ings and reviews,” he added.

Amazon’s own ad products

When tap­ping into Ama­zon spon­sored list­ings, mar­keters should go broad­er and high­er fun­nel with key­words than they would with AdWords because the vol­ume is low­er and the user is more like­ly a buy­er.

That’s accord­ing to Mee­han, who added, “ For exam­ple, a small watch retail­er who could­n’t afford to bid on some­thing as broad as ‘men’s watch­es’ on AdWords would prob­a­bly want to bid on this term on Ama­zon.

PINTEREST

Like Ama­zon, Pin­ter­est also leans more toward shop­ping than Google. At the same time, Mee­han not­ed most of Pinterest’s traf­fic comes from Google, so basic opti­miza­tion tips work here, too. How­ev­er, in addi­tion, brands should focus on:

Engagement

For the large­ly social chan­nels like Pin­ter­est, as well as Face­book and Twit­ter, Erick­son said engage­ment sig­nals such as shares, retweets and pins play a large fac­tor.

“The author­i­ty of the orig­i­nal poster of con­tent is a sig­nif­i­cant fac­tor as well, as you might imag­ine,” he added. “Peo­ple with larg­er audi­ences have more oppor­tu­ni­ties to have their con­tent shared. Peo­ple who are top­i­cal experts will get engage­ment from peo­ple who demon­strate an inter­est in that top­ic. Those sig­nals will help such con­tent earn vis­i­bil­i­ty with­in search.”

Imagery

Focus on dis­tinc­tive images – includ­ing info­graph­ics – in order to make an impres­sion, Mee­han said.

Answering questions

Drake rec­om­mend­ed tap­ping into con­sumer ques­tions about how to do things and using those ques­tions in titles and descrip­tions as well.

Ad products

And, like on Ama­zon, adver­tis­ers can go broad­er with their ad terms when using paid Pin­ter­est key­word ads, Mee­han added.

YOUTUBE

Accord­ing to Erick­son, YouTube is more like a tra­di­tion­al search engine than oth­er social chan­nels.
In addi­tion, Julie How­ell, mar­ket data orga­niz­er at mar­ket­ing agency Postali, not­ed Google some­times dis­plays YouTube videos direct­ly in search results, so there’s great poten­tial for expo­sure for videos that rank high­ly on the plat­form.

Here’s what mat­ters most to make that hap­pen:

Keyword research

Tap into a tool like Google Trends to see what is trend­ing in YouTube search­es when look­ing for chan­nel key­words, How­ell said.

Titles and descriptions

Kevin Dro­let, founder of media agency cThru Media, said video titles should be at least five words long and include key­words at the begin­ning.

“Since Google and YouTube can’t lis­ten to videos, they rely on a text descrip­tion to fig­ure out the video’s con­tent,” Dro­let said.

That means brands should put web­site links at the top to max­i­mize click-through rates to their sites and include the key­word in the first 25 words.

How­ell rec­om­mend­ed try­ing to write at least 200 words in descrip­tions, as well as link­ing to your brand web­site and oth­er social media pro­files.

Content strategy

How­ell also said brands should keep YouTube view­ers specif­i­cal­ly in mind when craft­ing a con­tent strat­e­gy for the video plat­form rather than, say, sim­ply cre­at­ing video con­tent as they would for a blog.

“On YouTube, tuto­ri­als and tes­ti­mo­ni­als tend to have more search inter­est,” she added.

Keeping viewers watching

How­ell not­ed watch time is anoth­er big sig­nal on YouTube.

“So if you’re look­ing to rank high on YouTube, you need to make sure that you keep your view­ers watch­ing,” she added.

Lan agreed YouTube is sim­i­lar to Google in that the more traffic/views that are gen­er­at­ed, the high­er a page/video will rank.

“View count is also high­ly cor­re­lat­ed with high rank­ings, so the more you focus on mar­ket­ing your videos and increas­ing their view count, the more like­ly you are to boost their rank­ing,” How­ell said. “At the end of the day, YouTube is try­ing to rank the best videos, so any efforts to cre­ate engag­ing and inter­est­ing videos will be reward­ed.”

In order to keep view­ers watch­ing, Dro­let said to pro­vide a quick sum­ma­ry of the video in the begin­ning and then jump right to the con­tent the view­er wants to see. In addi­tion, mar­keters should add open loops to pre­view what’s com­ing and encour­age view­ers to keep watch­ing.

How­ell also rec­om­mend­ed select­ing an entic­ing video thumb­nail and ensur­ing the title and descrip­tion are not mis­lead­ing.

“[One thou­sand] peo­ple click­ing your video and watch­ing it all the way through will lead to much bet­ter rank­ings (and views in the long term) than 10,000 view­ers who only watch one sec­ond,” she said.

Likes

Bran­don Schroth, own­er of SEO firm Click First SEO, also not­ed a big sig­nal is whether view­ers sub­scribe to your chan­nel after watch­ing your video.

“Shares and favorites are also sig­nals, as well as Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down,” he added.

Length

For his part, Dro­let said longer videos rank high­er in YouTube and Google and so mar­keters should try to make videos at least five min­utes long.

How­ell, how­ev­er, advo­cat­ed for mar­keters to be as con­cise as pos­si­ble.

“Every sec­ond should serve a pur­pose, every sec­ond should be work­ing to keep your view­er engaged,” she said. “Once you start see­ing your watch time (and per­cent­age of video time watched) increase, you’ll see a boost, not only to the video itself, but to all videos you pub­lish on that chan­nel.”

INSTAGRAM

Accord­ing to Samya France, direc­tor of pub­lic rela­tions and social media at dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing firm Ignite Vis­i­bil­i­ty, being found on Insta­gram depends on the qual­i­ty of images and video uploaded, as well as fre­quen­cy and con­sis­ten­cy. Her oth­er tips include:

Hashtags and location

In addi­tion, brands should tap into these fea­tures to increase the odds they will be found by near­by users, France said.

Instagram Stories

What’s more, France not­ed Insta­gram Sto­ries allow for brands to tap into users who have not yet fol­lowed them – and these sto­ries can be fur­ther opti­mized by adding hash­tags so they show up in sto­ries show­cased by Insta­gram.

EBAY

And, final­ly, to opti­mize rank­ings on eBay, Lan said to look no fur­ther than your own sell­er rat­ing.

“This acts sim­i­lar­ly to domain author­i­ty and how sites with high­er DAs will typ­i­cal­ly rank high­er than sites with low­er DAs,” he said. “Sim­i­lar­ly, prod­ucts from sell­ers with high­er rat­ings will typ­i­cal­ly rank high­er in the prod­uct list­ings than prod­ucts from sell­ers with low­er rat­ings.”