Tips to Optimize Your Videos For SEO

Videos are becoming an increasingly important part of internet marketing. Companies with dedicated video marketing strategies are proven to generate more leads, earn more money, and enjoy better brand awareness than those who don’t – even if you engage in all other forms of marketing.

Always Create High-Quality Videos

This should go without saying, but it’s important to create high-quality videos. Anything less is a waste of your time. You need your visitors to watch more than a few seconds of your video or your engagement and SEO scores will fall. When this happens, Google will determine that your video is irrelevant to the query or low-quality. You don’t need to spend a lot of money on this, but you do need to make sure that your videos are in focus, the audio is clear, and that you edit out any unnecessary pieces.

Transcribe Your Video Content With the Right Keywords

It’s beneficial to offer a video and its transcription with the right keywords on the same page. Not only does this make the page more appealing to different readers, but it also makes the content more likely to appear in general Google searches. You can optimize these keywords in the way you’d optimize any other text without breaking any duplicate content rules.

There are two approaches you can take here:

• Offer a full, word-for-word transcription: These offer more SEO engagement opportunities.
• Provide text highlights: These are best for long videos, acting like a tease that compels readers to watch the video for a more in-depth understanding of the content.

Make sure you do some research to find targeted keywords for your videos. You want to see how to get your video to the first page of the SERPs.

Optimize Video File Metadata

Titles and descriptions appear in video searches the same way they appear in general search results. Google will find something to display if you don’t include this data, but you’ll receive more views and rank higher if you optimize your metadata. You should make sure that your video titles and descriptions are:

• Compelling enough to encourage click-throughs
• Relevant
• Composed with keywords that match your user’s intent
• Created with a title that’s 55 characters or less and meta descriptions that are 155 characters or less

You also need to create a thumbnail of your video for Google to display. Most video processing programs choose a thumbnail for you, but you’ll want to make sure that you’re using one that illustrates the video’s content, attracts attention, and inspires interest.

Implement Schema Markup

Although Google has a video search function, most people just use the general search tool instead. You need to make sure your video stands out here. The best way to do this is with schema markup, so your video appears with a video thumbnail and length. At the very least you’ll want to include this information for the video’s title, description, and thumbnail. You’ll also want to include the video’s length, upload date, height and width dimensions.

Submit a Video Sitemap

Although Google’s crawlers will discover your website’s videos, you can enhance their discovery by creating a video sitemap and submitting it to Google Search Console. You can either create a separate video sitemap or add video entries to your already existing sitemap. Make sure you include the video’s title, description, play page URL, thumbnail, and raw video file URL. This must match the information that’s already on your website. You can also include the video’s duration, rating, view count, category, and live status if you want. This optional information provides additional information that Google can use to properly index your video files.

Video marketing isn’t something you should overlook nowadays. If you don’t feel you have the skills to handle it yourself, contact us and we’ll help you create high-quality videos that outrank your competitors based on your keywords of choice. This is something we’ve been doing for quite some time now and we look forward to helping you optimize your videos for SEO.