People spend many of their hours in a day engrossed in social media, and much of those hours are spent watching videos. Videos are the most powerful content marketing tool, accounting for almost all online traffic. It is a powerful medium that can attract more visitors to a website than any other means.
Videos are a great way of explaining a particular topic in just a matter of minutes. It can give people a clear idea of any subject that a particular video is talking about. You can also share your thoughts and ideas with a large audience through videos, but what can you do to make your videos stand out from the rest?
With the demand for videos on the rise, it is important to make it easy for people to be able to find your content without any hassle. This can be achieved through Video SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Videos can sometimes be created effortlessly, which may even go viral within a few hours. However, for a successful video marketing campaign, you need to first create an optimised video.
What is Video SEO?
Video SEO is the process of optimising videos so they can be indexed and positioned on the result pages of the search engine when the relevant keywords are used. It is the practice of making creative adaptations to the distribution of your video to increase traffic to your content from search engines such as Google.
The actual data of the video will not be seen by web crawlers, so in order to lead crawlers to your video, it is important to use metadata and tags.
How Has Video SEO Changed?
Video marketing has become popular with businesses, and many of them are creating as many videos as possible for their content. Unlike other types of content, videos provide both value and flexibility.
Videos can improve your SEO as well as visibility, and they also pique the interest of the targeted audience.
Nowadays, anyone who’s browsing the Internet is undoubtedly going to come across videos since marketers are producing more and more videos every day. With mobile phones being used so widely, it has become convenient to shoot decent videos anytime, anywhere. With the expanded video content thus already there, it is no longer so easy to get ranked highly in universal search results.
The 3 Steps in Video SEO
There are three most important steps in the process of video SEO:
- Index your videos
- Improve the ranking of your videos
- Measure your video’s traffic from search
Step 1: Index your videos
Even major search engines are unable to instantly locate an embedded video or understand the relevant information on a website. For this very reason, marketers need to work on helping search engines to index their videos.
This can be done by providing supporting metadata regarding your videos to search engine crawlers. Search engines must be able to discover the following to index your videos:
- Title of the video
- Description of the video
- Upload date of the video
- Thumbnail image for the video
- Location of the video file or embeddable player
- Length of the video
How to provide the necessary information
There are a number of ways to do this, but first, a video XML sitemap external must be provided to the page on which the videos throughout your website are detailed. This will then be submitted through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Or on the other hand, it must also be included as a sitemap link within your robots.txt file.
It isn’t as complicated as it sounds. There are many tools available that will index the videos on your website and rank them, and one such is the Yoast SEO plugin.
Step 2: Improve the ranking of your videos
Once your video is indexed by the search engines, it needs to achieve a better ranking in response to queries. Gaining rank on universal search is more about how much your website is focused on videos. Rather than emphasising universal search, it is better to reach for higher ranks in search.
Factors to consider:
Pay attention to the title of the video:
The title of a video plays an important factor in ranking videos, just like it does for any blog post. Research keywords and make sure you are using the right ones that people would actually search for. Consider spending some time crafting a captivating title, as video titles are definitely one of the effective ways to reach high visibility in search.
Having said that, do not stuff the title with keywords – instead, make it interesting and clickable.
Ensure your thumbnail is engaging:
Most often, the thumbnail image of the video is more important than the video itself. What makes a video stand out from the crowd is its visual element. Whether a person is going to click on your video or not depends on how eye-catching the video’s thumbnail is. So work on this with extra effort, as it needs to be relevant and compelling.
Video description:
Usually, a meta description helps to increase clicks by providing context in search results. This is exactly how a video description works too. Generally, Google tends to support video search results with a description that also includes other types of content. For instance, using hashtags in the description may give your video an extra boost.
Step 3: Measure Your Video’s Traffic From Search
Measuring results is the most essential part of optimising videos. Google Search Console is the best tool to track results gradually, allowing you to see the traffic that you acquire for various terms across Video Vertical searches. This helps you to track the performance and check the impact of the optimisations.
Conclusion
It isn’t always cheap to produce videos, but it is also not as expensive as people believe it to be either. Always keep in mind that quality is important for online video SEO, just as it is for any other type of content.
To create optimised videos, a considerable amount of time and effort is required, so you need to make the effort worth it. Since your audience is looking forward to great content from you, the achievement of video optimisation should not be neglected.
We hope that this guide has given you a clear understanding of video SEO and how you should manage it. If you are looking for a digital marketing agency in Singapore to help you drive more traffic to your website and generate more relevant leads, you are at the right place. Contact Digital M today to discuss your business needs.
