Video content is considered one of the most effective marketing tools used to grab an audience’s attention and interest. Videos are entertaining and easy to consume. Aside from that, it’s also easy to share videos with millions of people on different social media platforms and other digital channels.
Recent data shows that people spend an average of 100 minutes watching online videos daily. Therefore, content marketers can capitalize on this behavior and insert as many marketing elements into their video content creation process. However, this can all be useless if your target audience can’t find or see your content.
Optimizing your videos for search engines is crucial in order to make sure that you are delivering the content to your targeted audience, not just to any user online. Video search engine optimization allows search engines to rank your content as relevant and valuable to people interested in it. But how do you exactly optimize your videos for SEO?
What is Video Search Engine Optimization?
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Before we go through the different ways to optimize videos for SEO, let’s take a look at what video search engine optimization is exactly. Much like blog posts, it’s possible to optimize your video content specifically for marketing purposes. The concept of search engine-optimized videos works the same way that content marketers add backlinks, insert keywords, and create engaging titles for blog articles. However, the process of optimizing videos is not particularly identical to written marketing content.
Recently, adding videos on websites or any type of content has become a tool to boost SEO ranking. Embedding a YouTube video to your How-To guide or inserting a short explainer video on your website’s landing page can increase improve its visibility and relevance in search engine results pages. However, optimizing your video content specifically is a completely different process by itself. With that, here are some tips on how to boost your video’s SEO ranking and increase its visibility online.
3 Ways To Optimize Video Content For SEO
Insert keywords in the title and description
Keyword research is an ever-essential element in search engine optimization and digital marketing. If you want to create videos that are relevant to your audience, using keyword research tools can help you find the most searched keywords and topics at the moment.
To optimize your video for SEO, make sure that you insert an exact keyword match of what your target audience is looking for. If people are talking about the latest iPhone 14, make sure that you’re creating video content related to that subject. It can be a video talking about the device’s newest features or reasons why you shouldn’t upgrade from an iPhone 13.
Aside from the video title, it’s also important to add keywords to your video’s tags and description. Adding tags allows platforms such as YouTube to easily identify what your video is about and categorize it as such. On the other hand, your video’s meta description provides another layer for search engines like Google to determine its relevance and value in relation to the target topic or keyword.
Create an engaging video thumbnail
Source: Pexels
One of the challenges content marketers often face is that it’s difficult to find a completely unique but equally appealing title. Regardless of whether it’s a blog post, a case study, a live video, or a social video. Since digital marketers use the same framework when it comes to search engine optimization, people in the same field are using the same keywords and utilizing the same step to optimize their content to rank higher in search results.
However, video marketing has a unique feature that marketers can take advantage of in order to beat the competition. Aside from an engaging title, it is equally important to create a unique video thumbnail that can draw the attention and interest of viewers.
It’s never good to just use a slide from your video. Instead, create your own video thumbnail that is bright, interesting, and enticing. Generally, the go-to thumbnail design features a bright background and a person with an exaggerated expression, whether it’s angry, surprised, happy, or sad. If you can’t do this yourself, hire a graphic designer virtual assistant to create the best custom thumbnails for your videos.
Include video transcript and timestamps
While videos are primarily a visual type of content, search engines still pay attention to their content. However, search engine analytics software can’t watch and listen to every video and decide if it’s actually valuable or relevant. It would still rely on text, such as your video title, tags, and descriptions.
Now to make your videos optimized for search engines, adding video transcripts or captions can allow analytics software to identify keywords used within your content. From there, it can identify its relevance and determine its value based on what people are searching for. Aside from the primary keyword used on the title, tags, and description of the video, your content can also include other relevant words and phrases that are ranked valuable by search engines.
Let’s go back to the iPhone 14 video. To boost your video’s SEO ranking, your video transcript may have relevant words or phrases such as iPhone 14 vs iPhone 13, iPhone 14 camera, iPhone 14 battery life, and so much more.
There are different ways to add transcripts and captions to your videos. Some platforms allow automatic transcripts or subtitles solely based on the video’s audio track. While this is convenient, it can still be faulty at times since some words may not be as crisp and clear for the software to understand. However, it’s also possible to add subtitles as part of the video creation process.
Aside from transcripts, including timestamps or video chapters can boost SEO and also encourage viewership. While timestamps aren’t as important when it comes to quick video ads or short promotional videos, this feature can be extremely useful when added to longer-form video content.
One of the struggles of long-form content is it can be difficult to retain viewers and keep them entertained or interested throughout a 20-minute video. A viewer can quickly back out when there’s a down moment or even a short segment that they are not interested in. However, adding timestamps allows them to peep at what is coming on next which may encourage them to stay and watch for longer. Aside from SEO, adding video chapters to your content can also improve the overall user experience of a viewer.
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