For a brand or business, each video is a creative child born out of hours of hard work, thousands of dollars of investment, and an amalgamation of different ideas.
That said, despite careful planning and execution of the marketing campaign, many videos fail to make it to the top of the search page, reach the intended audience, and attract attention.
Can a single element change the fortune of your video content? Yes, it’s possible.
A pinch of salt can turn a dish from ‘Yuck’ to ‘Yum’. Similarly, focusing on video SEO can make your videos more palatable to Google and video platform search algorithms.
So, how to convince the search engines that your video content is what the audience wants? How to rank higher, attract more eyeballs, and earn more clicks?
You can achieve all these results by optimizing your videos for search. Read on to learn the tips and tricks to optimize your videos for search.
What Is Video SEO?
Video SEO is the art of dressing up a video in such a way and with certain accessories that the whole package becomes appealing to search engine algorithms.
The result of proper optimization is an improvement in rank on SERP for relevant search terms and keywords.
Search engine algorithms can’t understand video content as humans do. So, marketers use various SEO strategies to help search engine crawlers understand the video content.
Google, YouTube, or other search engines use the information gained from video SEO to provide the best possible results for what the users are searching.
Video SEO is as important as high-quality content and masterful editing by top-rated video post production services. So, here are 7 SEO techniques to make the search engines and users happy.
7 Ideas to Optimize Your Videos for Search
1. Perform Keyword Research
A keyword is nothing but the word or phrase we use in a search engine to find a blog article or video we want. So, marketers need to look for keywords even before creating the video.
The task is simple enough. Scout for a powerful keyword research tool. A good keyword research tool should be part of your video marketing tools list.
The web has many; both free and paid tools. Use the keyword research tool to find the terms most searched by the users.
After generating the keyword list, you can club the related terms together and produce highly relevant videos.
Half of your job is done. Next, use the keywords in the title, description, metadata, and other places to optimize the video (we’ll talk more on this later).
Performing keyword research should be your first step in your marketing plan and video SEO even if you have already created a bunch of videos.
That’s because you’re sure to find ‘closely related’ terms that you can use to optimize the existing video content.
Search engines factor in the title and description of the video content. Since, crawlers can’t understand the video content they read the title and description to learn the context, message, and gist of the video.
Optimize the title and description for relevant keywords. But, beware not to stuff the keywords, which will do more harm than good.
How do you optimize the title?
- Make the title of the video at least 5 words long. Slightly longer video titles also help prevent keyword stuffing.
- You may get a slight boost in ranking by starting the video title with the keyword.
How do you optimize the description?
The description conveys the context of the content to Google, YouTube, and other search engines. Hence, pay special attention to the description.
- The video description should be 250 words or more.
- The main keyword should appear once in the first 25 words.
- Add the main keyword 2-4 times in the body of the video description.
How do you optimize the tags?
Tags play a minor but useful role in improving the rank. Moreover, they can help videos appear in the ‘related video or suggested video’ section of YouTube.
- Use the exact keyword term as your first tag.
- Add variations of the main keyword as tags.
- Include related keywords or closely related topics in your video tags.
3. Use Engaging Thumbnails
Let’s forget the search engines for a second and think of the audience. It’s not enough to rank higher in the search page results alone.
The users must click and watch the videos. Only then does the popularity of the video content grow which is then reflected in the ranking.
Using a highly relevant and compelling thumbnail will induce the audience to play the video. Bear in mind a video thumbnail is quite similar to the homepage of a website or cove of a book. The thumbnail should convey the gist of the video.
The quality of the thumbnail is directly proportional to the click-through rate of the video. Here are two tips that’ll have an immediate impact on the thumbnail’s performance:
- The thumbnail should be highly relevant to the video content. For example, if the video is about ice fishing, then don’t use images of a frozen lake, ice shanty, or a fish. Instead, show an image where a person has a fishing line through the hole on the surface of the frozen lake.
- The thumbnail should contain a person or an object which is the main theme of the video. Add a few words to explain the presence of the human or object in the image. For example, the whiteboard videos in online courses must contain a human. Similarly, for a recipe video, include the image of the dish on the thumbnail.
4. Include Timestamps
Educational and explainer videos that are long don’t attract many viewers. Furthermore, most people may not have the patience to watch a video series or to jump from one video of the series to the next.
These are minor inconveniences that can put off viewers from enjoying your videos.
Even if you create a compelling, educational video, your audience might not return again and again because they’ll have trouble searching for the ‘key moments’ in the long video.
Suppose your video contains several key moments then it makes sense to add timestamps. Keep in mind not to allow YouTube to automatically add timestamps. It’s best to do it manually.
There are two reasons why every marketer should add timestamps to their videos.
- Google and YouTube reward the use of timestamps.
- The inclusion of timestamps improves the viewer experience.
5. Pair Video with a Blog Post or Transcript
We listen to every word said in a video, but search engine crawlers can’t unless we present the content in the form of text.
Creating a transcript of the video will greatly improve your ranking because it makes the video more indexable.
Plus, it also helps in conversion. For example, you can send video and transcript to leads using email marketing software, so that the transcript enables the audience to understand the content without the sound.
You can take this strategy one step further and use the transcript to create a blog post. The whole structural construct of a blog post helps improve SEO.
The use of the title, byline, subheadings, and links helps the page and the video in it find a better place in the Google ranking.
Most of the time videos are uploaded to YouTube or made part of the landing page. It would be difficult to include a transcript on both these occasions.
We recommend the use of closed captions to receive the same benefits as adding a transcript.
Do search engine crawlers read closed captions? Yes, that’s what some experts say and their claim was validated by an experiment done by Discovery Digital Network (DDN).
In the experiment, videos with closed captions showed up more often and in a higher ranking position than the ones without closed captions.
The closed caption is a metadata that is attached to the video as a text file. Closed captions boost video SEO because they can be easily crawled and indexed by the search engines.
6. Construct the Page around the Video
It’s important to note that every new or repeat view increases the video’s popularity among various search engines.
YouTube, Google, and others factor various engagement metrics to determine the rank of a video. That’s why marketers need to focus on improving social shares, comments, click-through rates, and the number of views.
One way to improve video SEO and boost engagement is by making the video the focus of the page. In other words, pay special attention to web design and placement of various elements on the page.
Don’t hide the video at some corner of the page where it takes the visitors ages to find. Keep the video above the fold.
Avoid using the same video in multiple places. If the content on the page demands using a video that’s already published on YouTube, then you can embed the YouTube video on the page.
This strategy prevents the division of views, comments, and shares that will negatively impact your engagement rate and search engine ranking.
7. Add Strong Call-to-Actions (CTAs)
You’re making a huge mistake if you just present the video and leave it at that. You need to openly tell the viewers what to do after watching the video. This can be done by adding call-to-actions (CTAs).
The use of video CTAs comes with several benefits:
- CTAs can eliminate audience confusion by directing them to the steps they need to take.
- CTAs help video marketers collect all kinds of useful data.
- CTAs create great opportunities to improve engagement with the audience.
Using call-to-actions in a video to boost engagement and SEO is a little more complex than simply placing a link at the end of the video.
The following are points to consider while creating video CTAs.
- Decide on the best place or places to put the CTAs. The marketers have three options: pre-, mid-, and post-roll.
- Determine the best CTA type to use. Again, you have three choices: HTML, image, and text CTAs.
- The wording of the call-to-actions greatly impacts the performance. Use power and action words such as free, new, now, you, sign up, download, click, register, etc.
Final Thoughts
These ideas are not mere preliminaries to find a place in the good books of search engines. The points you find here cater to the needs of the search engines and your target audience.
It goes without saying that one or two of these points won’t make much of a difference. The more video SEO ideas you implement the better will the result be.
We understand that implementing these ideas is not a one-time task. Video marketers need to spend time and effort, and we guarantee, they’ll be richly rewarded for their efforts.
