With the massive spike in video content over the last few years, I thought it would be nice to create a post that focused on how you can better optimize videos for SEO and get more traffic from them. Make no mistake, video is everywhere these days. New video content is being created daily which means it’s become harder to make yourself stand out from the crowd at the top of search results. Considering doing the following types of video SEO to put yourself (and your videos) ahead of the competition.
Add Value – You’ve probably heard this again and again when reading about creating new content. That’s probably because it’s extremely important if you want your content to be successful and go viral. Content needs to be relevant to your audience, convincing them to dedicate the time required for watching your video. The higher in quality your videos are, the bigger the chances to serve as an authority in your industry and build trust with your audience to increase conversions.
Host videos on your own domain – If you are creating video content for the purpose of increasing your websites ranking, then you need to make sure and host the video(s) on your own domain. That will ensure that search engines don’t direct the traffic to another website. For example, if you put a video on YouTube and then add a link back to your site in the description, it won’t help much in terms of SEO. Search engines will end up crawling the YouTube video first, rather than your site. Along with that, it’s a good idea to create new individual pages for each video since that will make indexing them easier.
Create interactive content – Creating quality content is one thing, but making it interactive is another excellent way to activate the viewers. Whether it’s the actual content itself, an annotation, or the caption. There are several different ways you can “gamify” a video in order to make it more interactive and engaging. You can even split your video into smaller clips, allowing viewers to pick which one they prefer to watch. This type of strategy has been implemented by many successful video marketing campaigns in the past.
Create relevant metadata – It’s important that your video provides the necessary details for search engines to index it. That will always include the title, description, thumbnail, and tags. Metadata offers more details about the video, even including it’s length and file name. Video titles should be short and concise, while the description should provide more details and keywords to give it a boost. One other important factor most people forget about is the file name. Make sure the file name for your video is relevant as opposed to generic.
Perform keyword optimization – Keyword research is just as important for video SEO as any other type of webpage. It will help you discover the most relevant content for your target audience and will be a key factor to the amount of traffic your video receives from search engines. Do some keyword research before creating a video to decide which keywords you want to target. Try experimenting with different keywords and always remember to create descriptive, but also legible content, helping both your audience, but also the search engines.
Focus on the thumbnail – Video thumbnails are among the first things that a user will notice when going through different videos. It makes a huge impact on whether or not the user will decide to actually click on your video or not. Make sure you create a relevant thumbnail that stands out and also gives the user a quick glance at what they can expect to see or learn from your video. Great looking thumbnails are only part of the process because they’re a major reason for people clicking on a video, but not for watching the entire thing. That’s where good informative content will take over!
