In last few years, the popularity of video content has skyrocketed and video marketing has even become an indispensable part of a robust online marketing strategy. A video with unique and informative content is highly appealing and brings more engagement easily.
However, it is crucial to follow SEO (Search Engine Optimization) best practices to improve search rankings and drive more organic traffic to a video content.
Let’s talk about 5 most effective SEO practices that can help you get the most out of your video marketing efforts:
1. Keyword Research Is The First Step
No matter whether you are trying to market your video or planning the overall promotion of your website, keyword research is essential for leveraging all your SEO opportunities. This will always help you find out the most powerful keywords for optimizing your video while giving you a clear idea about the most relevant content for your target audience.
Pick right keywords that can best describe your video and help it rank higher in general search results. Create unique, descriptive, and high-value content that would cater to both search engines and your audience, and optimize it by inserting keywords naturally.
Researching keywords can encourage your search optimization practice for your video content in many other ways. We will be revealing those in subsequent points.
2. Create And Optimize Relevant Metadata
When it comes to exploring SEO opportunities for video marketing, metadata plays a key role. Without the creation and optimization of relevant metadata, your video will never be able to display critical information like title, description, thumbnail, file name, etc. to major search engines. Providing these details not only makes a video show up in search results but also helps it get indexed properly. Thus, the views increase rapidly and the video ranks higher in search results.
Keep the title of your video short, precise, and catchy so that it can stand out from the crowd easily. It should also contain appropriate keyword, which need to appear natural for enjoying maximum SEO benefits. Use a thorough description for the video and include relevant keywords, which can help you rank high in search results. It also must be compelling enough to draw the attention of audience, thereby increasing click-through rates considerably.
A thumbnail can impact the viewing decision of your audience strongly. Hence, make sure that you go for a clear, relevant, and customized one that can illustrate your content perfectly. Likewise, the file name of your video should also be relevant and well-configured to describe your video content to various search engines in an efficient way.
3. Develop And Submit The Sitemap
Sitemap is considered as the most convenient tool for providing all details of your video to search engines so that it gets crawled as well as indexed properly. If you have a site-hosted video, developing a sitemap for it and submitting it to search engines will enhance its discovery to a great extent.
Typically, a video sitemap works as the extension to the general sitemap of the website and presents all essential data (title, description, thumbnail, raw file URL, play page URL, etc.) as well as some optional data (category, duration, view count, rating, live stream, country restriction, platform restriction, expiration date, etc.) for better indexing.
This enables search engines to get a clearer picture of the context of your video, which eventually gives a significant boost to its ranking.
4. A Well-Optimized Transcription Is A Must
Transcribing a video may sound quite a tedious task to perform, but adding the written version of content to a video actually comes with its own sets of marketing benefits. In fact, a well-optimized transcript containing the right keywords can help a video more likely to appear in search results while making it more user-friendly.
While practicing video marketing, you can either opt for a complete word-for-word transcription or highlight certain texts based on their importance. The first one is perfect to create better user experience for short videos whereas the second one offers compelling content in long videos, thereby encouraging more views. Figure out the best approach based on the preference of your target audience, which can improve your SEO rankings in terms of user engagement.
There are again two ways to add a transcript to a video. It can simply be included in the audio section, or you can insert it in the description box alongside the HTML codes to put both the video content and its transcript on a single page. The later one not only allows search engines to discover the video content quite easily but also makes it a breeze for users to get its synopsis.
5. Focus On Adding Schema Markup
Although major search engines like Google comes up with exclusive ‘video search’ feature, most users still prefer using the general search tool over it for searching videos. If you want to take your video marketing initiative to the next level, make an effort to offer exactly similar experience to users for both general search results and video search results.
Schema.org markup is known to be the most effective solution for this purpose. The HTML markup is basically a semantic vocabulary that provides all required information regarding a video to search engine bots. It essentially describes a video in detail and helps it get optimized without affecting the sitemaps that are already in use.
All you need to do is add schema markup for different elements of your video including the title, description, thumbnail, duration, and URL (either content URL or embed URL). This will help your video appear exactly the way it should appear in video search results even though it is actually showing up in general search results. Rising above the crowd will also offer added SEO advantages to your video.
Quality should always be your priority for developing excellent video content and these optimization tips can improve its exposure significantly by ensuring better rankings in SERPs. So, follow these SEO tips for your video marketing campaigns and take your success to an all new level.
