Video SEO Tips You Need To Know

With all of this talk of search engine optimization, what actually works for SEO when it comes to video?

The numbers don't lie.  Video consumption is massive and it's grower bigger and bigger every day.  So why are so many marketers blowing it?

One big reason?  They don't understand a damn thing about video search engine optimization.

You don't want to blow the opportunities generated by video.  Did you know, for example, that 65% of people who watch business videos click through to visit their website after?

 To be one of those businesses you need to optimize your search engine results as much as possible. Here are a few tips on how to do that.

1. Make Relevant and Interesting Content

Studies have found that videos increase people’s understanding of your product or service by 74%.  That's why you need to make your videos interesting enough to keep their attention. You also want to keep it relevant to what your audience is searching for. It needs to be unique and provide new information that your viewer hasn’t already seen with all the other content out there.

Your videos don’t need to be extravagant. They could be a simple white board session or a short interview with an expert. As long as the information is relevant and presented in a new light, your viewers will watch it.

2. Make Your Videos Easy To Find

Create a user-friendly page on your site, which makes it easy for viewers to find what they are looking for.  Creating playlists by topic or product category keeps your videos organized in a way that is appealing to audiences. People rather browse through their Google results than through an individual webpage so the faster they could find something on your page the more likely they will stay there and watch your video. 

3. Make Your Videos Interactive

People learn and remember things better when they are asked to perform a task after learning something. This is exactly why you should make your videos interactive. By adding in-video links, quizzes, surveys, and forms aids your viewer to remember key concepts about your business.

4. Take Advantage of Transcriptions

Add video transcriptions directly to the HTML where each individual video is hosted. Transcriptions give your viewers the ability to "read" the video script if they can't listen to it. This also provides a variety of the keywords to the search engine to better find your video.

It is also important for you to add hidden tags in the HTML code of your video landing pages. This adds to the amount of keywords connected to your video. Facebook's OpenGraph tags, Schema.org's microdata tags, and Twitter Card tags are great for this.

5. Have Your Videos on Your Own Site

Google displays video results with a thumbnail image, which draws eyes much more than simple text. Hosting your videos on sites like YouTube will lead people to those links as opposed to your site directly. You want people to be drawn automatically to your website to watch your video so that they have easy access to all further information after watching the video, without having to change websites.  Certain hosting platforms such as Vimeo can help you to keep the speed of your website where it should be, if you embed the video to your website and put the description and transcription of the video on your site.

You should however, put up preview videos on YouTube and Facebook. This type of video should be something that will get the audience’s attention so that they’ll watch the full-length video, which is located on your site. This preview should have different, yet relevant keywords attached to it for a better chance for someone will find your content. 

6. Have a Video Sitemap

A sitemap is a text file that has useful data about your video. It generally includes the video’s title, subject matter, run time, who the intended audience is, and a lot of other information. By submitting a sitemap to a search engine such as Google, it makes it a lot easier to target your video to those who would want to see it. You can also find online video platforms that automate the video sitemap for you.

7.  Track and Measure

It is important that you track where your video and website viewers are coming from, what their demographics are, and how long they stayed on your page. Much of the time, tracking is built into your video platform, but other times you’ll need to either use an outside analytics tool and build it into your site.

If you plan on creating video content use these tips to make sure it gets seen!

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Kyle Reyes is the President and Creative Director of The Silent Partner Marketing, New England's #1 Marketing Agency. We're a boutique marketing firm focused on helping businesses grow in an age of exploding technology. You can find him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and SnapChat.  And he wants to connect with you on LinkedIn, so send him a request!