Video has been around for years, and the popularity of videos (short form and long form) has increased year on year. From YouTube to TikTok sensations, video content marketing is still the future of digital marketing. We know the importance of SEO on your written content, but how do you optimise your video content for search engines?
Before you begin creating your next online video, thinkabout where you’re going to be publishing the content. If you want to generateleads, initiate instant engagement, or facilitate product orders, publishingvideo content on your own website can be advantageous. However, if you want togenerate brand awareness and establish thought leadership, publishing videocontent on sites like YouTube and Vimeo can be beneficial. Have a look at our YouTube channel.
While YouTube, Vimeo, and other social media sites cancertainly result in lead generation, there is a risk that users will becomedistracted by content from alternative providers. Furthermore, optimising yourcontent for YouTube video search will mean that traffic gets directed toYouTube, instead of your company’s website.
Publishing a transcript alongside your video makes it moreaccessible and enables a wider audience to engage with your content, but thisisn’t the only advantage on offer. When you publish a transcript alongside yourvideo, search bots can analyse this content to determine what your video isabout and who it’s relevant to. As a result, your videos are more likely toappear on search engine results pages (SERPs) when you incorporate text-basedcaptions into your content.
Similarly, subtitles or captions provide a text-basedaccount of what’s happening on the screen in real time, which is important ifyou want to meet accessibility targets. As YouTube and search engines arecapable of crawling this text, you can optimise a brand video by includingsubtitles or captions in the content.
While many platforms and software offer automated captioningor transcription services, do check the accuracy of these before you publishyour content. Background noise and various other factors can affect the qualityof automated transcripts and subtitles, so check they’re accurate and modifythem if necessary.
An effective SEO video marketing strategy always includeskeyword research, so don’t skip this critical step if you want to reach theright target audience and rank highly for keywords that are closely related toyour products and services.
Once you know what keywords you want to target, you cancreate a varied and original content strategy that will enable you to publishengaging and informative content. To increase your reach, however, it’s vitalto include these keywords in your video titles and descriptions. As theseelements are text-based, search engines rely on them to learn what your contentis about, and including relevant keywords helps you to rank highly for relatedsearch queries.
A thumbnail is a still image that users see before yourvideo plays, and it can have a substantial effect on whether a user clicks onyour content or skips forward to the next video. The thumbnail gives you theopportunity to grab the user’s interest, give them an insight into what yourvideo offers, and entice them to watch your content.
Some creators rely on bright colours to make their thumbnailsstand out, while others use text overlays to provide additional information.While the exact thumbnails you use will depend on your branding and the themeof your content, always create custom images and add relevant keyword-focusedtext where possible.
If you’re publishing video content on your own website orhosting a live webinar, make sure that the web page is optimised for the targetkeyword(s) too. This tells search engines that the entire page is highlyrelevant to the user’s search query and means your video is more likely to rankhighly.
Both on-page and off-page search engine optimisation areimportant when you want your site to rise through the rankings, so payattention to site speed, site security, keyword placement, backlinks, etc.
When you have domain authority, it can help your web pagesto rank highly for your focus keywords. If your site contains video content,you’ll want to boost your domain authority to ensure that you’re not missing outon SERPs placements. However, this isn’t the only place where that authoritymatters.
If you’re publishing video content on external websites,your in-platform authority can have an impact on where your videos appear insearch results too. YouTube uses numerous ranking factors to determine whichvideos it recommends to users, but your YouTube Channel Authority certainlyplays a role.
Your YouTube Channel Authority is determined by the numberof channel views and subscribers you have, as well as how many videos you’vepublished and how long you’ve been a publisher. By publishing great content ona regular basis, you can gradually increase your YouTube Channel Authority anduse this to help increase your SEO video rankings.
When you create great video content, it seems natural topublish it in as many places as possible. After all, you want to maximise yourreach and increase views. When you publish the same video in multiple places,however, it simply means that your content will be competing with itself whenit comes to achieving SEO rankings.
Due to this, restrict where you publish your content andfocus on creating new and original content that you can use on alternative webpages and external platforms.
Whether you’re planning to launch a long-term videomarketing strategy or you want to boost live video SEO, professional videomarketing services can enable you to achieve your goals. As you can see,successfully optimising video content requires experience, technical knowledge,and expertise, so it’s well worth using specialist video marketing services tomeet your needs.
To learn more, contact H2 now on 01225 302473 oremail us at hello@h2.co.uk
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