Suppose you have just started producing videos for your brand or have already started publishing videos for your brand on various online platforms. In that case, you must have come across the term video SEO and its importance.
If you are wondering what video SEO is all about and if it is crucial for your video content performance, keep reading further.
Video content has taken over the online space and is expanding rapidly. According to studies conducted by WyzOwl, people watch 16 hours of video content per week on average. Furthermore, 84 per cent of people claim that watching a brand’s video influenced them to buy a product or service.
With the ever-increasing demand for video consumption and its power to influence the end customers, it is inevitable for brands to ignore video content businesses to establish their brand and promotions.
With growing video content and competition, it becomes crucial and challenging for brands to stand out in the cluttered online space and reach the target audience effectively.
In layman’s words, SEO or search engine optimisation is the process of optimising your website or content to make it more visible when people use Google, Bing, and other search engines to look for products or services linked to your business.
Similarly, video SEO is optimising your brand videos or video content to be indexed and ranked on search results for relevant keyword searches.
Key Benefits of Video SEO:
- Traffic: 87% of video marketers say video has increased traffic to their website. Video SEO plays a major role in driving traffic to the business website or the landing page where the purchase occurs. It also helps increase the overall ranking of the websites as it ascites as quality backlinks.
Videos benefit by driving traffic from multiple platforms and resources like YouTube, Newsletters, Emails, Social media, etc.
- Keywords ranking: Through strategic positioning of target keywords in Video content can help reach a targeted audience that can drive traffic and potential revenue to your business.
- Reach and revenue: According to a study conducted by Wyzowl, 80 percent of businesses who implement a video strategy say that videos have directly helped them increase sales.
The overall ranking of your video SEO can lead to a higher ranking and reach of your brand to a large audience base across platforms, especially on Google. Video SEO plays a key role in promoting your product or service.
- Brand building: Through better visibility, businesses gain better brand positioning. Better reach and visibility lead to brand building and help gain the customers’ trust as video SEO establishes credibility on search platforms.
- Cost-cutting: Video SEO helps minimize costs incurred on paid advertising. With the power to drive organic traffic to your website, video SEO helps reduce additional costs on paid marketing campaigns.
Best Video SEO Practices:
As we have seen some benefits of Video SEO, let’s also look at some best video SEO practices for your business:
Use transcripts:
Using transcripts and captions helps improve user engagement and attention and helps index keywords that can be relevant to the video and the brand.
When target keywords are inserted into the transcripts, they get identified while the search engines scrape through the content. This, in turn, will lead to keyword ranking and organic visibility.
Optimize your Title and Description:
One of the most efficient techniques to increase search visibility is ensuring that video titles and descriptions are optimized. Your video title and description play an important role in SEO. They carry essential keywords to attract a potential customer to view your video and an overall ranking.
Keyword research:
One of the most critical SEO practices is to conduct keyword research. Keyword research helps identify which keywords the audience uses to search for the queries on the search networks and identify the keywords that are ranking well in that particular segment. Implementing strong keyword research and identifying the right keyword plays a major role in the overall success of your video SEO strategy.
Create and submit a video sitemap:
Video sitemaps are additional information that you submit along with your website sitemap. A video site map includes video duration, view count, rating, category, etc., that help crawlers identify your video and rank better.
Produce high-quality videos:
It is also important to note that the videos should meet the expected quality not only to meet the requirements of the platforms but also to attract and retain the audience. Better quality videos gain higher engagement and watch time, which leads to better ranking.
Make sure the duration of the videos, the resolution, and the size of the video files meet the criteria of the platform on which they are hosted. Many online video editor are available to make necessary edits and changes required to publish on each platform.
Create video snippets:
A video snippet is similar to a rich snippet. Video snippets provide additional information and a visual to highlight your video on search results and help you find it easily. There are also featured snippets, which promote video snippets over text to the top of the SERPs to address a particular query.
Include a visually appealing thumbnail:
Thumbnails are not just visually appealing, but they also play an important role in video SEO strategy.
Because the video thumbnail is what a searcher sees when your video is indexed, it has a big influence on whether they click on the video or not.
Strong thumbnail images can significantly increase click-through rates, views, watch time, and other video SEO metrics, boosting the video ranking.
Some important video SEO metrics to monitor and improve are:
- Views
- Watch time
- Audience retention
- Search rankings
- Engagement
- CTR
Final Words:
Implementing Video SEO into your campaigns will help with better reach and views. Still, it will also help in the long run as websites get better indexed and ranked over time, giving them an overall competitive advantage and a higher return on investment.
