In today’s overcrowded social space applying SEO to your videos is crucial if your videos are to be seen among the competing videos that struggle to attract and retain viewers’ attention.
Businesses are increasingly using videos as part of their content marketing strategies. Videos are here to stay. According to Tubular Labs, over Five Million videos are uploaded to social channels daily.
Here are some tips for applying SEO to your videos.
SEO is the process of optimizing a digital asset for search engines to earn higher web traffic levels and improve asset visibility online. Your digital asset could be in the form of an entire website, webpages, videos, images, documents, in short, anything in a digital format that you own and wants to be found via the search engines, especially the Google search engine.
Youtube is the most popular channel for uploaded videos, so optimizing your videos for the Youtube search engine and other video hosting platforms is a great video marketing strategy that makes sense. You also get the cross benefit of appearing higher on Google if your video ranks well on YouTube.
- Firstly upload your video to as many platforms as possible to increase the chances of being found. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google, thus making it the most obvious choice for hosting your business videos. Optimizing your videos with keywords that people commonly use in YouTube and Google searches will help to ensure your video is listed nearer the top of both Google and YouTube.
- Do keyword research to discover the words people put into Google when searching for content similar to your video topics. Make a list of these words and phrases. Google tries to determine the intent behind the searcher’s query (search intent) and then correlates this with the words in your content. The closer your content is to the search, the higher your content will rank.
- Use descriptive titles and meta descriptions – the words you place in your meta description are used by the search engine to determine how well your video correlates with what the enquirer typed into the search engine. Make sure to include relevant keywords in your titles and descriptions that would be an answer to the enquirer’s search intent.
- When uploading your video to YouTube, complete all the fields provided by YouTube. Optimize the title of your video by inserting one of the keywords or phrases you noted in your keyword research. Make the title readable but catchy enough to attract enough interest. Use powerful words that attract curiosity, such as “how-to,” “tips,” “hacks,” “product tour,” and “best” in your video title. Try to envisage your content as answering the common questions of “how,” when, where, and what.
- YouTube will ask you for tags related you your content. This is another opportunity to add some of your keywords and related phrases. Select tags closely related to your keywords.
6. Write a short description explaining the topic of your video; 100-200 words will suffice. Use your keywords in the description at least 2 or 3 times. This gives YouTube a good idea of your video and how to recommend your video to viewers searching for similar content. The first line (or the first 125 characters) of your video’s description will appear in the search results; ensure this is as compelling as possible.
7. YouTube will ask you for tags related you your content. This is another opportunity to add some of your keywords and related phrases. But beware of keyword stuffing which Google frowns on!
Consider making a transcript of your video and uploading this as well. If possible, caption your video with subtitles to increase accessibility for viewers.
8. Like you would for an article or blog post, ensure your content is informative and engaging. This helps increase watch time and decrease bounce rates, another factor used by search engines to rank your video.
9. Voice searching is gaining ground, especially with AI searches. A potential viewer may use some of your keywords and phrases while asking a voice-enabled bot to search for content they are interested in watching. Make your video findable by using proper file naming conventions. When naming your file on your local device before uploading it, give it a searchable name. For example, if your video is about car seats for babies, save the video file’s name as “best car seats for babies.mp4” and not a name like “video20-12-19.mp4.”
10. To increase your click-through rate, make your video thumbnail or cover image visually appealing. Use a combination of images and relevant text for each thumbnail. Make them exciting and attractive to catch the viewer’s attention as they scroll through the multiple videos the platform recommends for viewing. And lastly, of course, monitor your video’s progress through video analytics, which you can find on your YouTube channel, social media channels, or any other video hosting platforms you may be using.