Video is becoming one of the most popular forms of content on the web and attaching the correct SEO to videos is now more important than ever. Take a look at this blog to find out more about video SEO.
What Is SEO And Why Make Use Of It?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is what search engines like Google use to index content and rank websites on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). So basically, if your landing page or media has great SEO, it should be ranking first on a Google results page when someone searches for a particular topic.
While SEO has become crucial for text and image-based content on a website, SEO in the video world is still relatively fresh and unknown. Another curveball with video SEO is that it does not necessarily play by the same rules that apply to text and images.
While an SEO journey should always start with adding the correct meta keywords, descriptions and titles for a landing page, adding individual SEO data for images and videos is incredibly important for a landing page to rank highly in SERPs or even for the media to be discovered on its own in search queries.
Where to Start
While you may be excited to jump straight into optimizing your video content, it is important to first make sure that if you plan on using your videos on your website, you first have your off-page SEO covered. Off-page SEO is a great way to improve your website’s searchability and set a foundation that allows you to work at reaching that top spot on the search results page.
Only once your website has great external linking and optimization in order to build domain authority and trust, should you worry about optimizing the content of your landing pages and media.
However, if you do not plan on embedding videos on your website, all you will need to worry about is optimizing the specific videos that you wish to rank higher.
Platforms Making Use Of Video SEO
Something to take note of for video SEO is that different platforms handle SEO differently and each have their own fields and set of rules that need to be fulfilled in order to maximize the SEO effectiveness of videos. Here are some of the most popular platforms making use of video SEO:
YouTube
Adding keywords in a video title or description is so important for YouTube as it makes it much easier for your video to appear first when a viewer is searching for a topic either in YouTube itself or on another search engine. Therefore, it is very important to use a tool like Google Ads Keyword Planner in order to find keywords that are relevant and popular to maximize the exposure of your YouTube video.
Something that is fairly unknown about YouTube SEO is that YouTube also uses keywords in the video file name to rank a video, and therefore it is important to include keywords there too before the video is uploaded to YouTube.
Hashtags are also a fairly new feature to YouTube that helps your video to be discovered on the platform, and these follow the same recipe as keywords. Tags will be visible under the video title and are particularly useful in driving higher traffic. Lastly, choosing a super engaging thumbnail and adding subtitles or a transcription of the video, is a great way to drive further engagement on the video which will result in better ranking of the video on YouTube.
Vimeo
Vimeo takes a more traditional approach to SEO in that it uses the more structured fields like a title, description and meta keywords in order to properly SEO a video.
While this may be a more simple way of doing SEO compared to the competition, Vimeo is still incredibly effective at ranking video content highly with these SEO fields and also works seamlessly in transferring SEO data when embedding a video onto a landing page.
Wistia
Wistia works as a combination of both YouTube and Vimeo in that it does have structured traditional SEO fields like video title, description and keywords, but also takes advantage of transcriptions and optimized thumbnails in order to rank highly on SERPs.
Wistia stands out from other tools by automatically optimizing videos that are hosted with them once the indexing process has been completed. This further boosts the chance that a video will rank well in SERPs and that it will aid in the overall search ranking of any landing page it is embedded in.
Website Builder
Sometimes it is easier to keep everything in one place when creating a website. Instead of using a 3rd party platform like YouTube, Wistia or Vimeo, it may just be easier to use your existing website builder such as WordPress, Squarespace or Shopify.
Most website builders will make use of the standard 3 field system for video SEO. Shopify for example requires you to add in alt tags (keywords), and a description and title that include keywords in order to effectively SEO media content, and contribute positively to a landing page’s on-page SEO.
How To SEO
As a foundation, most platforms will need videos to contain all tags (keywords), descriptions and titles in order to maximize video optimization. In order to do that, let’s take a look at how to populate these three fields the right way.
Keywords
This should always be your starting point as not only do you need to populate your alt tag field when uploading a video, but you also need to add keywords into your description and title. Keywords need to be relevant to the content they are attached to, and highly searchable in order to maximize the probability that the content will be delivered to a viewer in a search query.
The keyword is what tells a search engine what the content is about, and search engines will link those keywords to similar keywords used in the user search queries.
Title
A title is the first bit of metadata that a viewer will notice when searching a video. A title needs to be eye-catching in order to grab a viewer’s attention and get them to click on the video to view it.
The title also needs to be able to give a broad description of what the video is about without being too long.
Description
Creating a keyword-rich and relevant description is vital to your video’s SEO success as it once again gives search engines a little more information that they can use when indexing the video.
The description should provide a very brief outline of what is happening in the video, and can also be useful if a viewer is unable to watch or load the video, as the description will provide a short narrative of what the video contains.
All Kitted Out
With all the info you need to know about search engine optimization and video, there is nothing stopping you from reaching those number one ranked spots in search engine searches, and cashing in on that sweet, sweet traffic.
If you want to find out more about how effective SEO can improve your digital marketing, take a look at our SEO blog topic here: Oviond Blog.
