Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the one trick every marketer needs to have up their sleeve. We all know there’s no point in putting blood, sweat and tears into a video content marketing strategy if it’s only going to appear on Page 2 of Google Results. Keywords, Google, YouTube, and social media are all critical in bumping up your rankings and gaining brand visibility.
The internet is a noisy, chaotic place, especially if you want potential customers to see and learn about your business. As video becomes a necessity rather than a luxury to every content marketer’s strategy, it can be difficult to make sense of SEO. In the midst of the pressures of developing your creative approach, this can seem like an unnecessary hurdle to overcome.
With our handy tips and tricks, you can get up to speed with optimising your video content strategy for SEO. Understanding these technicalities will help you get the most out of your video content.
1. High-Quality Videos
There is such a thing as bad publicity. Without spending enough time on the visual quality of your videos, you risk creating uninteresting and unhelpful video content. In short, they will quickly become disengaged and know to avoid your brand. As a result, this will increase your bounce rate and tell Google that your website has no value to users. Therefore, your rankings will plummet, as Google won’t drive users to view your content. The bounce rate is how often visitors click in and out of your website, so this has to be as low as possible.
Educational videos on your website that provide context and ensure consistency are key to high-quality video production. Product videos, testimonials and promotional content are all valuable to keeping visitors engaged and, most importantly, on your website. Embedding them on relevant web pages will keep viewers interested and your video content purposeful.
Educational video content is particularly significant in boosting SEO rankings. Users will most likely visit your site if they can learn something from you. Product demo videos or clips answering FAQs are perfect for this type of video content. Context that includes relevant and numerous keywords will also help, as Google will understand what your video is about. Therefore, the right audience will be directed to your site. Most importantly, enter the correct information on the backend, so search engines know how to categorise and prioritise your content. You’ll then be able to track your video’s performance and see how your website is attracting visitors.
2. Google and YouTube Video Rankings
Videos are all over search engine results pages (SERPs). Just simply typing a query will have you scrolling past videos to get to any kind of written content. That’s because almost 75% of users prefer watching videos to solve their problems rather than wading through articles. Google has clocked this.
Although video content enhances brand awareness, simply publishing a video won’t necessarily get you on that first page of results. SERPs tend to highlight videos from YouTube, so building your presence on both Google and YouTube is inextricably linked. Researching which keywords are relevant to your website’s SERP ranking will help you build a purposeful keyword database for YouTube. The keywords listing videos on the SERP will tell you which ones you need to include in your YouTube search. As a result, you can optimise your title and meta-description as you go.
The power of YouTube is in your hands. YouTube looks at not just the metadata of your video but also the time viewers spent on YouTube after watching your content. These time-related metrics determine your video’s rank, so even if someone starts watching your video and goes onto other channels, this will still benefit your video’s standing. Treating your video title as a search title, such as incorporating a keyword, will help you see what your audience is searching for and what kind of video content you need to create. The sheer volume of YouTube can be daunting, but making the text around your video as specific as possible will help it stand out from the crowd.
3. Social Media SEO
SEO isn’t just about your Google and YouTube rankings. Social media plays a significant role in video SEO – there’s no denying the link between social media performance and Google-focused SEO.
This is especially the case with Facebook. Video is now the only type of marketing content that seems to break through the noise of posts, updates, and images continuously being uploaded. That’s because Facebook has emphasised its intention to prioritise videos in its Newsfeed algorithm. But that’s only if you directly upload your video to Facebook – sharing links out to YouTube will make Facebook divert traffic away from your page, reducing its impact and reach.
Ensuring your video is optimised for social media has its own criteria. Choosing a custom thumbnail will attract more viewers, especially if the image contains people. Optimising your captions to fit your video will spur more people to read and view your video. These captions should be short and incorporate hashtags related to your topic, increasing your brand’s shareability. It’s worth bearing in mind that 85% of Facebook users watch video content without sounds, so uploading captions is crucial to your video’s accessibility.
But how do you choose which video content to place on social media? Using Wistia can help. Wistia is a video-hosting site with a huge variety of metrics to delve through and track your video’s performance. One of its perks is the engagement graph, which tells you where viewers resonated the most and where they rewound your video content. This data will give you a clear indication of where to cut down longer videos so that they will perform best on social media. Remember – based on declining attention spans, short snippets are ideal for this type of video.
You can make sense of social media video metrics here.
4. Static Content Meets Video Content
Video can also help build your SEO presence for your existing written content. Adding a video to your web pages and blogs will give users another way to search your website. Your brand appears twice as many times via two different types of content, increasing brand visibility and doubling the opportunity to entice visitors.
Instead of reading through swathes of content, a video gives your visitors the option to watch an engaging summary of your blog. Offering them this flexibility will also make your content more accessible and shareable because visitors have the freedom to choose how they want to consume your information. You want your visitors to spend as much time as possible on your website, keeping a low bounce rate, and transforming click-throughs to conversions. Video content boosts on-page SEO, with the average user spending 88% more time on a website with video. This is clear proof that video enhances your website’s presence on SERPs and has the potential to grow your client base.
Combining both written and video content also increases brand familiarity, which in turn makes your website more trustworthy, credible, and recognisable. Consistently embedding videos onto your website will keep visitors hooked and coming back for more. Integrating both types of content also boosts your keyword strategy, as you know which specific keywords your viewers are searching for and, therefore, to home in on. As a result, your SEO will significantly improve, and you can rest assured that your video content is doing all the hard work for you.
5. Text, Text, Text
Video SEO is not just about visuals. Although 90% of the information transmitted to our brains is visual, text-based information plays a critical role in SEO. This is where we see the importance of off-page SEO. Whilst on-page SEO refers to factors on your website you can control, off-page SEO is the behind-the-scenes workings of your website, such as backlinks and the popularity of your website. In short, this is about your brand’s online exposure and promotion, which text has a significant impact on.
Incorporating as much text as possible into your video embed plays a significant role in boosting your SEO rankings. Building text around your video in the form of transcripts, captions and meta-descriptions will aid your off-page SEO, as SERPs will be able to index your website accordingly, increasing your search traffic.
Including a transcript helps you target a greater range of more specific keywords, as it functions as page copy for search engines. Captions, as discussed, also help nail those keywords down whilst allowing your audience more flexibility to watch your video. The more a search engine can understand your video content, the more likely it will recognise your website, knowing exactly where to categorise it.
Ensuring that other written content on your website bears relevance to your visual content will benefit your SEO rankings, as visitors won’t feel inundated with unnecessary marketing tactics and knowledge that doesn’t truly represent your business. You want your brand personality to be as authentic as possible, resonating and building a connection with your audience.
Final Thoughts
Like all good things in life, developing a strong SEO strategy for your video content marketing strategy takes time. Consistency and dedication are your helping hands in making the most out of your video content and ensuring it targets the right audience on that crucial first page of search results. Cutting through the clutter of the internet is no mean feat, but boosting your SEO rankings on and off-page will help you achieve that #1 position.
We can make video work for you, not the other way around. With over 2000 videos, both animated and live-action, we can sort all of the logistics associated with your video, meaning no hassle or stress on your part. Still interested? Give us a call to get our creative partnership started.
