Seo Video Optimization: Best practices for search engine optimization
Why SEO video optimization matters?
Videos are an important part of internet marketing and search engine optimization. Not only do they increase the interest factor of your content, but they also improve rank as well. Hence optimizing videos helps bolster a website's search engine rankings and drive more traffic.
What is Video SEO?
Video SEO is simply optimizing your video to be indexed and rank on the search engine results pages for relevant keyword searches. There are many optimization strategies that give your videos a higher chance of ranking, which this article will outline.
Tips on Seo Video Optimization
How has video SEO changed?
For the last few years, businesses have used video marketing to increase sales. Once marketers began to get their hands on DSLR cameras in the late 2000s, it became easier to produce videos and get them online (thanks to YouTube) without having a degree in videography.
Now we can’t browse the internet without seeing a video, and we all walk around with cell phones in our pockets that have the ability to shoot decently high-quality videos anywhere. With the explosion of video, it’s become much harder to get ranked in the universal search results.
SEO video optimization
“All websites can rank in the video tab, but not all can rank in universal search with a video,” says Phil. “It’s become a lot harder to get whitelisted than it was about 3 years ago, but easier to get your video indexed on the video tab (pictured below).”
Gaining rank with your video on universal search has a lot to do with the authority of your website, how video-focused it is, and how it ranks for video-related queries. Phil recommends not placing such a huge emphasis on universal search, and rather reaching for higher ranks in video search.
Best practices for search engine optimization
How to Optimize Your Video for Search
#1: Choose the right video hosting platform
In order to choose the right video hosting platform, you’ll need to think about the goals you want your videos to rank. Do you want to gain site traffic and new leads? Or is your goal to increase your brand awareness?
If you’re more focused on general brand awareness, YouTube and Vimeo can be great options. However, once your video is indexed, most of the traffic goes to those platforms, not your own website. This can get your website visitors lost in a sea of competitive traffic
If you aim to get on-site traffic to push leads towards conversion, the best SEO video optimization is to choose alternative hosting platforms that support this capability.
#2: Insert a video transcript
Imagine: You are on a bus and watching videos with sound. In such case, videos with captions come in handy as you are able to view them without disturbing people around.
Best Seo Video Optimization
transcripts not only make your videos more accessible to a larger audience but also make your videos more searchable as there’s additional text on the page. Thus, it’s also advisable to optimize video for web in general and pay more attention to transcripts in particular.
#3: Create an engaging thumbnail image
People shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but a lot of viewers judge a video by its thumbnail. The searcher will see it when your video is indexed.
Hence, it plays an important role in whether they click your video or not. That’s why the thumbnail should compelling, relevant, to catch the viewer’s attention. According to Wistia’s report, their videos with custom human thumbnails get a 30% higher play rate than those without.
It’s safe to say that your video thumbnail is even more important than your title as it determines if people will click. So a good SEO video optimization is to Make sure your video’s thumbnail is relevant to what you’re trying to rank for.
#4: Don’t forget to make title and description for your video
The title and meta description are also responsible for the rank of videos. Spend your time crafting an engaging video title and description. Make sure to research keywords to ensure you’re targeting keywords that people are actually searching for.
#5: Ensure the rest of your page is optimized for SEO
You can’t rely solely on SEO to gain a position on the SERPs. Your website itself is also optimized for SEO, or the search engines wouldn't bother collecting that data in the first place.
Seo Video Optimization: Best practices for search
If your video is ranked low, it could be because your page is awful.
While getting your website ranked organically can be a challenge, the ranking may come thanks to high-quality content and the technical SEO components. Another important note is to ensure the video is relevant to the page you’re embedding it on.
If that page is only put up there for no general purposes, then the chance that the page will rank is low.
#6: Make the Video the Focus of the Page
I’ve seen many websites that “hide” the video, so users have to scroll long until they finally land on it. This results in low plays and plays rates as people don’t be patient to hunt for the video, not to mention a hidden video will have less chance to be indexed a hidden video.
Therefore, key SEO video optimization is making your video the focus of the page to increase your video’s crawlability factor.
#7: Avoid embedding the same video on many platforms
Well, embedding your video on multiple pages is just like you playing the match of tennis against yourself. If your video is relevant to your page, and you're hoping your page and video get ranked, then it makes no sense to embed a video elsewhere on your public website, it’s kind of competing against yourself.
#8: Don’t count solely on SEO
It’s worth noting that SEO isn’t reliable. Google’s algorithms constantly change, video is also evolving at a fast pace. Therefore, ranking your videos based on search bots is not a consistent strategy to draw attention to your videos.
#9. Generate backlinks with catchy content
Generating high-quality backlinks is the goal of any potential top-ranking video. This can be achieved by viewers sharing your content over multiple platforms. Nobody wants to share uninteresting clips with their friends and not all videos have this shareability factor. Do SEO video optimization to make your video more compelling.
Seo video optimization for more search
Below are some reasons that viewers might share a video:
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Humorous Content: Needless to say, funny content has a greater chance to be shared with others. You can use memes that creep into social media combined with franking sounds to add the effects for the video.
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Emotional Content: Videos that can evoke an emotional response from viewers will be shared more. Viewers want to show their thoughts about the video they watch and will send your link via social media. Your content doesn’t need to be sad, but to be touching. By telling a personal story or sharing a true customer experience, you will be successful in sending an emotion-based message to your audience.
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Educational Content: Another type of content that sells is educational content. Videos with educational messages are shareworthy. Viewers may share informative pieces or something that expresses their strong opinion related to their own.
#10. Host from your website
A lot of businesses choose to host the video on platforms like YouTube or other third-party streaming sites to cut costs and increase page loading time. However, this also links viewers to a domain other than your own.
The ultimate goal of SEO video optimization is to increase website traffic. If you host on your own domain, that means your video and your website are also shared.
Seo video optimization to increase web traffic
When hosting on your own site, you should separate video by page to improve indexing. If you choose to host on a third-party site, make sure to include your site link in the description, which increases the chances for viewers to find you.
#11. Use well-researched keywords
Keyw2000scanpayre the backbone of SEO. Firstly, you need to research keyword dominance in your industry to pick the most popular ones.
As you’ve published a few videos, keep track of keywords to determine which ones are making a difference in your campaign.
Keywords affect not only terminology but also length. Studies suggest that 4-word-keywords consist of 50% of searches. Long-tail keywords are paid more attention as they are more specific to your brand and product.
#12. Keep it short
You should not expect someone to watch a video that is longer than 10 minutes, no matter how amazing you think it is. Personally, I think 10 minutes is a little much, as I'm prone to tuning out after 3 minutes unless the content I'm watching is truly amazing. One of the best SEO video optimization is to reduce the length of the video.
Seo video optimization you should follow
If you have long content, then make it into a series of smaller videos. This will keep users more engaged. it also allows you to multiply the number of videos that you can optimize, tag, drive traffic to, and rank highly.
#13. Go social
You’ve created an interesting video, share, tag it, and submit and upload it, to the world. Videos are capable of attracting a large number of inbound links, which boosts your SEO rankings.
Post your video link on social media platforms and encourage commenting on your video, which makes it easy for users to spread your video.
How Video Content Improves Your SEO
Google cares about video
Google appreciates the quality of your content and how relevant it is to someone’s original search terms. The text on your page is not the only factor that Google looks at. It also scans for images and videos to see precisely what you’re offering.
If your sites have a combination of text and quality visuals like videos, your pages are considered informative, thus boosting your SEO efforts. Note that SEO video optimization should be done to get the best result.
Video is a traffic-generating machine
Your incoming traffic also affects your search rankings. People tend to visit your website via a video on YouTube or other platforms than any type of content. This is why many B2B and B2C businesses are investing heavily in video content.
Video makes people stay longer on your site
Search engines pay special attention to how long visitors stay on your site. If you have a massive number of visitors to your website, but they all leave after just a few seconds, that means your content isn’t very informative or engaging enough.
Guide to Seo video optimization
Videos are powerful as they will more consistently keep people stay longer on your page. By adding videos to your page and do SEO video optimization, you can significantly improve your bounce rate and increase the ranking.
People are more likely to link to your videos
The more people link to your content and to your domain, the higher your pages rank in the search results.
High volumes of social shares are correlated with search engine results pages. Publishing video content on platforms like YouTube allows you to earn referral traffic that can boost your rankings.
Final thoughts
Videos are an amazing medium to engage your customers, drive traffic to your site, and increase sales. With best practices for SEO video optimization, you can tap into this exciting and dynamic opportunity.
