We all know how powerful video is for telling a story, educating others as well as entertainment purposes. It can also be a powerful tool for marketing your food truck.
We can capture more emotion and deliver better messages with video than we can with written posts or descriptions. These days with tech advancements video is a huge part of internet engagement.
That’s why it is important to create and maintain a YouTube channel for your food truck.
Why YouTube?
YouTube is the second most used search engine behind Google, and Google owns YouTube so they complement each other in many ways. It’s one of the reasons you see YouTube videos showing up in Google searches all the time.
Starting your channel is easy and free, but there are few things you need to know before you start uploading and posting videos.
Creating Your Food Truck’s YouTube Channel
Follow these instructions to create a channel that can have multiple managers or owners.
You can use a Brand Account to create a channel that has a different name but that’s still managed from your Google Account:
- Sign in to YouTube on a computer or using the mobile site.
- Go to your channel list.
- Choose to create a new channel or use an existing Brand Account:
- Create a new channel by clicking Create a new channel.
- Create a YouTube channel for a Brand Account that you already manage by choosing the Brand Account from the list. If this Brand Account already has a channel, you can’t create a new one—you’ll just be switched over to that channel if you select the Brand Account from the list.
- Fill out the details to name your new channel and verify your account. Then, click Done. This creates a new Brand Account.
What To Do After You Upload Your Video
Uploading your video is pretty easy, just click the upload button and it will take you to a screen where you can drag your video into the upload area or you can choose your video by selecting your file.
As I mentioned earlier YouTube is one of the largest search engines (second only to Google) so the Search Engine benefits of posting your video content are huge.
To take advantage of those benefits it is important to use some SEO best practices when uploading and setting up the written content that goes with your video.
Creating Your Title
Because search engines crawlers can’t see what’s in your video, they depend on the text in your title to tell what the video is about. So this makes the title very important.
The titles you use should include relevant keywords, and be compelling and create interest for someone who is searching or browsing.
Some suggestions for your title are to keep your keyword phrases as close to the front of your title as you can. Front loading titles tend to rank better.
Keep your titles within 70 characters (including spaces). Though YouTube has a 100-character limit for titles, anything longer than 70 will be truncated in most search results.
Creating Your Description
The Description field in YouTube is another place to let search engines know what your video is about and provide more text to be crawled. These descriptions can also appear as rich snippets in search results (those are the few lines of text that appear under the title) which can help encourage more clicks to your content.
Here are some suggestions:
- Include the same keyword(s) you used in your title in your description at least one time.
- Remember to keep the first line kind of brief, even though you have up to 5,000 characters to tell your story, the snippet search that appears under the title is only 157 characters, and most search engines will cut what they display down to the first 100 characters.
After your first sentence is a perfect place to include your website url. That way it doesn’t show up in the rich snippet and it doesn’t get lost in the Show More section of the description.
How To Use Tags To Your Advantage
Tags are located below the description box, there are few different types of Tags you should think about using. We will go through and I will give examples as if I were promoting Jimmy’s Taco Truck.
The first type is the Specific Tag, in the Food Truck world these would be words like: Food Truck, Mexican Food, Tacos, Burritos, Miami… You get the idea.
The second type is a Compound Tag, these would consist of words like: Your Video Title (without prepositions and conjunctions), Jimmy’s Food Truck, Miami Food Truck…
The third type of tag is the Generic Tag, words like eat, lunch, near me…
The forth type of tag is the Misspelled Tag, words like: Fod Truck, Jims Taco, Maimi Food Truck…
Conclusion
The last thing I want to touch upon is that you need to be as on point with your Title, Description and Tags as you can. Make sure whatever your video is about is what you use to create the words that describe it.
If you are misleading you will only be hurting yourself because what happens is people search for keywords they are interested in and your video comes up in the search results. They click on your video and when the video content doesn’t match the Title & Description they immediately check out and go back to their original search. This triggers an algorithm in YouTube that hurts your ranking.
So be as user friendly and informative as you can in your video and you will set yourself up for success in all your YouTube efforts.