So you want to boost your search visibility by utilizing video marketing, right? Let’s discuss.
If you are reading this, you most likely already have a robust SEO plan that is supported by in-depth buyer persona profiles, solid keyword research, and a well-developed content strategy.
A video marketing strategy may perhaps already be in place for your business. You’ve put in a lot of effort, and now you want to understand how to make the most of it in order to take your video search engine optimization (VSEO) to the next level.
If you follow the advice that’s been given in this post, you’ll be well on your way to enhancing your search rankings with the use of video in no time.
Why Video SEO Is Important?
To start, it’s vital to clarify why you should structure your video marketing plan in SEO best practices. This is because video marketing is becoming increasingly popular.
The age-old saying that we are all familiar with may easily be superseded by “If you record it, they will come.” It is not a secret how pervasive video is becoming, but the stock of video is not even close to hitting its ceiling.
Since companies continue to experience a return on investment (ROI), video marketing is going an upward trend, particularly in the B2B area, where many people are still hesitant to adopt the strategy.
Now, view video marketing and SEO in the same way that you think about textual content and SEO: They are two sides of the same coin. Video marketing and SEO are complementary strategies.
You should optimize video content for search in a manner that is analogous to how you optimize blog content for search. If you disregard VSEO, less people will watch your videos, which will have a negative impact on your return on investment (ROI).
Taking Search Engine Optimization for Your Videos to the Next Level (with Real-World Examples)
Now, without any further ado, let’s dive headfirst into some of the most effective strategies for constructing a reliable video SEO strategy.
1. First determine search intent you will be targeting, and then incorporate the relevant terms within your video.
While you create videos, you should do it with the interests of your audience in mind, just like you would when writing a blog.
Although there are SEO specialists who prefer to organise their material around keywords, I believe that it is more effective to create a strategy around the search intent that lies behind keywords. It may seem the same because it is, but concentrating on search intent provides you with a more elevated viewpoint from which to plan.
The way you approach the curation of content is what it comes down to in the end: Are you developing content that caters to the requirements of your target audience?
Search engines are now advanced enough to comprehend the context of your video and take that into consideration when deciding whether or not it is pertinent to the users’ goals when they conduct a search.
However, this does not mean that consideration shouldn’t be given to keywords. It is still very necessary to have target keywords and to track where those keywords rank, but before you can do either of those things, you need to understand the purpose of the search queries in order to know which keywords you should be using.
After you have determined what you want to accomplish with the video, undertake keyword research to determine related search phrases, and then use those terms throughout the movie.
A short example: You are the proud owner of an ice cream store, and one of your objectives is to boost the number of customers that purchase your homemade pancake product. You already produce textual content, and you want to expand your efforts by including video marketing into your strategy.
You decide to undertake some market research and find that a significant number of individuals are thinking about the possibility of manufacturing their own ice cream for their family. This final part is the focus of their attention. After that, you navigate to the Google Keyword Research tool to find associated search terms (also known as keywords), such as the following:
- How to cook pancakes.
- Homemade pancake
- Pancake recipe
You take this information and use it to inform your decision to produce a lesson video describing how to make pancakes at home using your product. Throughout the film, you use your associated search terms.
The lesson you should take away is to identify the purpose of your video. You should select one major keyword, a few long-tail keywords, and a few semantic (synonymous) keywords based on the intent of your search.
Include them in a natural manner all throughout the video transcript, and don’t forget to include the title and the meta description, which we will discuss in the following section.
2. Make sure that the preview image, title, and description for your movies are all top-notch.
How often have you chosen not to read a book or watch a movie simply because the cover didn’t appeal to you?
The same can be said for your video.
The title, the description, and the thumbnail are the three basic components that make up the “book cover” for each given video that appears in search results.
Spend the extra time necessary to carefully consider each component while placing yourself in the position of your target audience. What exactly are their concerns? Why do you think they act the way they do?
Interactions with search results and engagement with pages are two indicators that Google and other search engines use to determine the worth of content: Are folks clicking on the link that you provided? Are they going to stay on your page or are they going to leave immediately? How long do they stay on your page before leaving?
It’s likely that you’ll already have your title by the time you get around to optimizing your video for click-through rate (also known as CTR), but just because you don’t have it yet doesn’t mean you can’t improve it. Take a look at the videos you already have and see which ones have the highest click-through rates. Why? Create a hypothesis, put it through the appropriate tests, and then put it into action.
A simple illustration: to continue with the pancake scenario we were discussing previously…
You’ve given the video the title “How to Make the Perfect Homemade Pancake with Your Family.”
A succinct and practical meta description such as “Watch this three-minute video to discover how to cook excellent handmade pancakes that the whole family will love this summer” is provided by you.
You decide to add a thumbnail of a delicious-looking pancake that is sitting on a kitchen counter.
The lesson here is that you should set aside a few additional minutes to create a video title, meta description, and thumbnail image that are worthy of capturing both the important aspects of the video and the attention of your viewers.
3. Make sure that your website includes a video sitemap.
Your videos should each have their own sitemap, much in the same way that you would have a standard sitemap or a blog sitemap. This makes it easier for search engines like Google to crawl and index all of the video material that is hosted on your website in a timely manner.
Through the use of information, sitemaps also assist search engines in gaining a better understanding of the context of your website, post, or, in this example, video.
A video sitemap can be produced in one of two ways: manually or with the assistance of a sitemap generator (or a video sitemap plugin if you use WordPress). Both choices are somewhat inconvenient, but the process is relatively straightforward once you have the hang of it and can “rinse and repeat” it. I would recommend using a sitemap generator if you are unfamiliar with sitemaps or if you are having difficulty creating one manually.
This may not be the advice in this piece that you can implement with the least amount of difficulty, but if you are serious about your video SEO approach, it is well worth the effort.
The key takeaway here is to develop a video sitemap and ensure that it is kept up to date whenever a video is modified or added. After making any changes to your website, you must remember to tell search engines to recrawl it. Recrawl requests sent to Google can be submitted using an account you have with the Google Search Console.
4. Add video transcripts on your website.
I indicated before that search engines now have the level of sophistication necessary to process and comprehend the speech that is there in a video. Having said that, it is nevertheless considered a good idea to produce a video transcript and post it on the page where your video is hosted, even though it isn’t required. When search engine crawlers crawl your video, there will be no space for error thanks to this.
While other websites choose to convert the video into a text-based tutorial, some websites choose to save the transcript within a module that can be collapsed. Depending on the circumstances and the purpose of the film, either choice is acceptable.
Before you begin watching the video at 0.25 times the normal speed and manually transcribing it, the vast majority of video recording platforms (such as Zoom and GoToWebinar) already transcribe the video for you automatically.
A brief illustration: if the video platform you’re using doesn’t transcribe automatically, you can take advantage of the power of the free captioning option on YouTube by following the steps below:
- You should upload your video to the YouTube website.
- Launch the video found on YouTube.
- Choose “Open Transcript” from the menu that appears after the ellipsis.
- Make sure you copy the transcript.
- Just to be on the safe side, proofread that transcript!
Now that you have your complete transcript, you should post a copy of it to the website where your video is hosted.
The key lesson here is to produce a video transcript utilizing either the original video platform that you are using or the free captioning function that YouTube offers.
You can embed the complete transcript on the very same page as your video by making use of either a text module that can be collapsed or by transforming the transcript into a text-based tour.
5. In addition to the video transcript, you should provide some content to the website.
It’s possible that you’ve picked up on a common thread throughout this piece, which is that video SEO is extremely similar to traditional SEO.
This indicates that Google and its competitors are continually looking for content of the greatest possible quality to display to their users who have performed a search. And one of the finest ways to enhance the quality is to improve the user experience by providing material that is not only unique but also instructional, useful, and interesting.
Be sure to add material that is useful to your video page, which includes going beyond the transcript (assuming you aren’t intending to repurpose it as a guide for the page itself). Think about including some text that summarize the most important takeaways, the most commonly asked questions, and what the user can anticipate learning from the video.
The lesson to be learned here is not to stop at just including the transcript. To improve the likelihood that both your page and your video will have a high rank, you should include more content that is both relevant and of high quality.
