5 Highly Effective SEO Tips to Lead People to Your Videos

While you likely have search engine optimization (SEO) practices in place for your website, what about for your videos? Video SEO has the same benefits as website SEO, but it’s not exactly the same thing. If you’re spending time and money creating videos, you want to make sure they’re getting crawled and ranked by search engines to increase your reach.

Like optimizing a web page for search engines, you have to optimize video to be indexed and rank for relevant keywords and phrases on search engine results pages. Fortunately, there are ways to give your videos a higher chance of ranking, which this article will share. Don’t worry if you’re not an SEO expert, Pay Per Result SEO services can help you achieve first-page rankings, and you’ll only get charged when that happens!

1. Do Your Keyword Research

Just like you have to do keyword research for website SEO and online ads, you have to research the words and phrases that people use to search for video content. YouTube is the world’s second most popular search engine behind Google, so you can’t ignore your target audience who is searching for videos. Make sure they find your business.

When search engines index a video, the web page the video lives on is categorized as a “video page,” which enables different behavior in search results pages.

• First is the ability to rank in vertical search, a search engine focused on a specific segment of online content. For example, Google Videos only shows video content results.
• Second is the ability to rank in general search with a video-rich snippet. Rich snippets are Google search results that feature some extra details like reviews or events. A video-rich snippet (example below) is served when Google thinks a video is a strong match for a particular search query.

For your videos to show at the top of search results and potentially generate video-rich snippets, you need to optimize the title and description of your video around your target keywords. Just like a blog post, the title, meta title and meta description of a video impact its ranking in search results because it provides crawlable content for search engines.

Spend time crafting an engaging video title, meta title and meta description to ensure target keywords are used naturally. After all, the title of a video should highlight the content of the video and engage users to want to watch. An SEO agency can help you get started by providing the knowledge and tools to help you target the right keywords and phrases.

2. Choose the Right Video Streaming Platform

Choosing the right video streaming platform starts with determining your goals. For example, if the goal of your video content is to generate brand awareness and get views, YouTube may be the right option. Beyond being the second most popular search engine, YouTube is also the second most popular social media platform behind Facebook. (Plus, it’s free!)

If you want to focus on generating traffic to your website through your videos, Wistia might be a better option in some cases. This video streaming platform automatically inserts backend data to improve rankings and sends traffic to your website instead of a third-party site. But unlike YouTube, you need a paid subscription to get the most benefits.

Instead of spending money on a paid video streaming platform in an effort to improve your rankings, consider Pay Per Result SEO services. An agency offering these services can determine the best platform and help your videos achieve first-page rankings. And you only have to pay when you make it to page one.

3. Create a Video Transcript

While search engines are pretty intuitive, they can’t crawl the content of a video without a little help. A transcript allows search engines to crawl the content of your video through the transcript text, understand its subject matter and determine where it should rank for specific search terms. A transcript can also help your video rank for additional relevant terms instead of just the targeted terms in your video title, meta title and meta description.

You can easily access a transcript to a video on YouTube. Click the “Three Dot Menu” underneath the YouTube video. This will open an option you can click to “Open Transcript.” The transcript will appear to the right. Though you can copy the transcript, you will need to edit out the time markers and the line breaks.

From there, you add the transcript on your video page so that Google can crawl it. In addition to benefiting SEO efforts, the video transcript generated by YouTube (shown above) can create closed captions on the video, improving its overall accessibility.

4. Add Context to Your Landing Pages

Publishing a video on an otherwise blank website page won’t do much for search engines or users. Be sure to add your video on pages that make sense and surround it with relevant written and visual content. For example, a landing page that highlights a specific product would benefit from a tutorial video of someone using that product.

In addition to being strategic about where you add videos to your website, you want to avoid adding the same video across multiple pages. For example, suppose you want a specific page and video to get ranked. In that case, there’s no sense in embedding that video elsewhere on your website because you’d be competing against yourself for rankings.

5. Check Your Metrics

As with any marketing campaign, you have to review the data to ensure your efforts achieve the desired goal. When it comes to video data:

• Search rankings are a straightforward way to measure your video SEO efforts. There are free tools like vidIQ that can show you where your videos rank, as well as where your competitors rank. While Google Analytics can show you web page performance, vidIQ focuses solely on video performance.
• Total views will show how many people are viewing your video content. This is a good performance metric provided you are seeing good engagement.
• Total watch time is the amount of time a viewer spends watching your video. YouTube’s search algorithm favors video content with a longer watch time over a lot of views.

An SEO Agency Can Help

In today’s marketing landscape, video is everything. But just having great videos isn’t enough. You want to make sure you are taking steps to help people find them. Fortunately, you don’t have to do this alone.

Umbrella Local offers Pay Per Result SEO services to rank your business for search phrases you choose and only gets paid when you get on the first page of Google. Contact us today to learn how we can improve your video SEO and your audience find your video content!