So far, video content has become one of the most powerful tools that can significantly enhance your marketing campaign. The presence of videos on a website boosts the site’s rankings on search, generates times more traffic, and increases high-quality leads.
Realizing the power of video content, over 86% of marketers used to have it extensively implemented across marketing campaigns, according to Wyzowl.
Videos are also at the top among the most favorable content types on social media, which has a huge impact on building the brand’s online presence.
Additionally, a properly planned video marketing campaign can show more efficient ROIs, thus generating more profits back in the result.
Nevertheless, it’s not just enough to invest in video content to make it go viral in just a few hours. That’s where the best video SEO practices should come into play: these approaches allow for increasing the online visibility on search engine results pages for the relevant query.
Properly optimized video content can potentially drive more conversions and empower the site’s performance online, which is surely one of the key aspects of any digital marketing strategy.
In this article, we’ll discuss the video SEO topic, explaining the following details:
- Why it’s so important today and how it works;
- What’s the impact of video content optimization on search algorithms;
- How you can improve the visibility and usefulness of your videos online with the best SEO practices.
Table of Contents
What Is Video SEO & How It Works?
Video SEO is a common practice of video content optimization in such a way that it ranks higher on the search engine results page after being indexed for the relevant queries you’re targeting.
Typically, it covers writing out the video metadata based on the relevant search intents and creating the video content that drives more traffic from the search.
Having videos incorporated into the site’s content can significantly enhance its rankings on SERP. However, to make it helpful for website SEO, the multimedia content should be optimized to be easily scanned by web crawlers and start generating traffic from search, mainly through the tags and metadata.
At the same time, video content has to be optimized for your target audience, who will look for it on search. It’s essential to ensure the video has a relevant title and engaging description that can be easily findable on a particular platform.
SEO video optimization practices can be useful not only for taking the content live on the site but also have been highly applied on social media and help rank higher on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and other online video platforms.
Why Is Video Content SEO so Important?
Though video SEO is still undervalued at present, more and more marketers can now see a huge potential in this immediate incorporation. According to the forecast by Statista, the average time spent with video content among U.S. adults will reach 80 minutes per day in 2023.
Therefore, optimizing your videos for search can boost the chances of your videos being found and significantly increase their target audience. However, there are many more notable benefits of doing video SEO today, the key of which we’ve explained below.
Google’s Search Algorithm Prioritizes Multimedia Content
Currently Google’s algorithms favor video content as they can provide more value to consumers than typed content. For instance, they can identify what visitors are looking for based on the time on site, click-through rate, bounce rate, and many other parameters for each query.
You can find video content on SERP across different sections, including the landing pages, people who also ask queries, video search suggestions, YouTube search, and many more.
You can also convert video to MP4 and reuse the content in the audio format. For example, make an agreement with a website to exchange a backlink to an audio version of one of their blog posts. This way you can get more backlinks and increase your chances of being featured on top of the SERP.
This doesn’t indicate that you need to solely mind the editing aspects to make video drive the leads. Instead, taking video content SEO live surrounded with properly selected keywords, strong descriptions and key highlights can be a great signal for the search algorithms to rank your page higher on search.
SEO-Optimized Videos Can Improve Your Marketing Presence
The videos that are continually shown up on search won’t only be beneficial to your site. In most cases, such content can contribute to your digital marketing presence.
When sharing the new video on your site, you can also embed the links to social media platforms, reference the webinar content, and YouTube channel, filling them with high-quality traffic accordingly.
Upgrading the SEO parameters of your video can help people understand the value of your content for their intent, providing a better grasp of what to expect when they go to your site.
Greater Link Building Potential
Backlink factors remain a significant ranking factor for websites. That is why the best SEO strategy is to include backlinks in the marketing strategy to boost search engine rankings.
Video content production is an excellent way to attract backlinks, the more effort you’ll invest in creating EATable media content, the more likely others will reference it for their content.
Additionally, videos are considered top-of-the-funnel content (also known as TOFU), aimed at educating people in the initial stages of their sales journey and driving them further in the sales funnel.
Recommended Read – FlexClip Online Video Maker Review
How You Can Optimize Video Content for SEO: 6 Tips
Typically, the video SEO strategy highly depends on the search engine you’ve targeted and the behavioral principles of your target audience.
Below we have covered the top X optimization tips that will help you to improve the visibility of your videos online and make the most of your online presence on search.
#1 Integrate Relevant Videos on Your Website
Any type of SEO marketing strategy starts with selecting the relevant content for a website. Adding a random video to the webpage won’t bring it to the top of SERP, so it’s important to meet the following criteria:
- Relevance. Any of the videos added to a webpage must be coherent with its main topic. This will help to intensify the page’s topic and make it helpful to review.
- Exclusivity. Aim to build video content that is unique and cannot be found elsewhere by adding topic-specific information. This can increase the value of your videos.
- Expertise. Make your videos professional: add maximum expertise, mind the production and editing, ensuring they’re easy to consume and deliver a certain marketing value.
Depending on the end goal of your video content, you can create a diverse number of videos based on a specific intention.
For instance, to increase awareness or develop an interest in your site, the best videos to produce are webinars, explainers, sales videos, and behind-the-scenes and how-to videos.
If you want to increase conversions, the best video options will be product demos, testimonials, feature reviews, and other related video content.
#2 Support It with the Basic SEO-Friendly Features
The next thing to mind for SEO video optimization is making sure the video can be interpreted not only by the end consumers but also by the crawlers.
No matter if you’re optimizing for the search engines like Google and Bing, or focusing on content-specific platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, it’s important to add SEO-friendly features like:
- Video title, which includes the relevant keywords with numerous monthly search volumes and lower competition.
- Video description, aimed to explain in more detail what the video is about, adding useful links and references people might be interested in.
- Timestamps to help people better navigate the video and easily find what they’re looking for.
- A “watch next” section linking to related videos or those you’re referencing within the target content.
- Link to a webpage with supportive content.
- Subtitles and foreign language support to increase the audience geo.
These are probably one of the most frequently used elements that can add more value to your videos for both users and search engine crawlers. It adds more convenience in navigation and a better understanding of the content while making your SEO-optimized content rank higher on search.
#3 Add More Educational Elements to Your Videos
Another important thing that can make your video more professional-like and provide more insights is the educational components.
For this reason, when producing the video and planning the meta tags (Title and Description) explain why you’re qualified to make the video, emphasizing how this content can help your audience.
Additionally, you might want to cover some of the following elements:
- Adding an intro and an outro
- Covering the specific terms mentioned in the video and their meaning (to help people better understand the topic)
- Adding visual elements to improve the engagement (overlay text, animations, diagrams, etc.)
- Using the relevant statistics, case studies, research, and demonstrations
- Answering the potential questions concerning the related topic that people might have by the end of the video,
Of course, that’s not the full list of things to be added, feel free to add your modifications as you progress. The end goal of this step is to make the content helpful to your audience and cover all the aspects within the target topic they might wonder about.
#4 Mind the Tech Parameters
Depending on the platform you’re going to host your video on, you’ll also need to ensure the video meets all the required specifications.
This is an important technical element of any on-page SEO strategy, as it impacts the performance of the page (speed, user-friendliness, device optimization, and other factors).
For instance, here are some details on hosting your video on popular platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook:
| Feature | YouTube | ||
| Aspect Ratio | 16:9 | Between 1.91:1 and 9:16 | 16:9 and 9:16 |
| Resolution | 2160p (maximum) 240p (minimum) | 1080p (maximum) 720p (minimum) | 1080p (maximum) 720p (minimum) |
| Length | Up to 12 hours | 3 seconds to 10 minutes (and 60 minutes for selected accounts) | 240 minutes (feed) 1-120 seconds (stories) |
| Video Formats | MOV, MP4, AVI, MPEG4, WMV, MPEG, 3GPP, or WebM | MP4, MOV, or GIF | MP4, MOV, or GIF |
Following the video specifications will help you ensure the video is high-quality and provides an outstanding user experience which in turn will result in higher search engine rankings.
#5 Work on Thumbnail Improvements
Talking about the SEO strategy for video content, marketers should also consider behavioral factors, such as time on site, click-through rate, bounce rates, and others.
All these parameters are critical for the current video SEO and are believed to keep their relevance in the near future.
One such aspect that surely must be considered in optimization is the video thumbnail, as it’s the very first thing people see once they land on your webpage or see your video in SERP.
Here are some great suggestions on how to drive more clicks to your video with a professional-like video thumbnail:
- Make the thumbnail picture relevant to the content of your video
- Ensure the text is readable
- Align the text to the left (great hack for YouTube video SEO)
- Maintain similar color patterns and themes across the content and specific video categories
- Implement up to 3 elements to prevent overloading the thumbnail
These simple but useful hacks can help to boost the click-through rate, drive interest towards the content, increase the brand visibility and also make your video stand out among competitors.
#6 Empower Your Video with the Great Website SEO
Finally, an important thing that should be considered when optimizing content for SEO is on-site SEO. Keep in mind that search engines won’t rank your videos if the rest of your website has poor performance.
Therefore, the standard list of factors that should be highly taken when working on your video SEO includes:
- Ensuring the site is mobile-friendly
- Adding the keywords relevant to the topic and keeping the master silo within the target niche
- Optimizing the pages’ Titles and Descriptions
- Installing an SSL certificate and using HTTPS
- Launching a .xml sitemap
- Checking the site is crawlable with a robots.txt file
- Ensuring the site shows a good performance through Google Webmaster tools
- Optimizing the multimedia content on a page to make them indexed correctly
- Minimizing pages redirects and fixing client errors (404)
All these on-page SEO parameters play an essential role in video ranking, so it’s definitely worth the time, cost, and effort to keep it optimized according to the search engine’s requirements.
Conclusion
As you can see, optimizing video content with SEO is not as challenging as it seems at first. As this practice is still underutilized, there’s never been a better moment to jump into the play and start working on the desired content optimization.
The only aspect you should always keep in mind when performing the SEO for videos is that optimization is constant work on content improvement, not just a one-time thing.
However, the more effort you invest in this process today, the earlier you’ll see the results and the higher profits these videos can generate.
Having the latest tips on SEO video optimization uncovered, what else are you waiting for? Start implementing the top SEO practices for videos and gain profits from day one!