Without videos, a content marketing campaign can quickly lose traction. Moreover, searchers demand creative videos, and a terrific video strategy offers you the chance to improve SEO and boost your search engine page rankings.
There are several ways that video helps your SEO, but one of the most powerful is the video thumbnail next to a search engine result. Search engine results with video thumbnails have a higher click-through rate and a higher chance of prioritized rankings.
Furthermore, an extremely important metric that helps your SEO on Google is the backlinks to your domain.
Both written and video content rely on SEO strategy and research, but their presentation differs. However, you can’t have one without the other, and your aim must always be to present high-quality content. Understanding video SEO can boost your company’s brand presence and find new leads.
1. Choose Your Video Platform and Distribution Channels
Whether you decide to self-host or use a third-party like YouTube channel depends on whether you want traffic directly on your website or to create brand awareness. YouTube is great for boosting video views.
However, once you have excellent video content, part of a successful video SEO strategy is to ensure the video is shared. SEO is not always enough to ensure that your target audience will see your video. Several ways to promote the video and optimize its success include paying to advertise and working with influencers.
2. Publish Your Videos Correctly
Leverage your video SEO by embedding them onto your website, blog, and other sites. Always make sure that the placement is well thought out and makes sense. For example, a brand video may fit perfectly on your “About Us” page, and testimonial videos share a powerful message and work well in several places. You can also repurpose videos to use on content elsewhere, helping to boost your marketing strategy.
3. Where Else to Upload
Video marketing has the added advantage of sharing it across multiple channels. Find the channels where your audience is present most, and use your video content to get their attention and engage them. It is the best way to direct them to your website landing pages.
Therefore, besides your website, share your videos on your social media and use them in your email marketing (still one of the most remarkable ways to engage audiences and nurture leads).
4. Give Google Context
A video on a blank page cannot have the same effect as a video embedded in a beautifully written article with relevant content and visuals. In addition, including a video transcript allows you to target more keywords, giving Google the ability to understand better how your video fits the content and getting you better results.
5. Educate and Empower Your Audience
The more you answer customer questions about the industry, your brand, services, and products, the more you help them make purchasing decisions. Furthermore, the more you provide solutions, the more value you provide, helping you gain credibility and authority in your field. Therefore, leverage video SEO to your advantage by creating content that continues to educate audiences and answer their questions.
6. Create Consistently
As with everything in life, one time does not equal anything. You must work at regularly providing value to maintain a high ranking. Therefore, create consistency and watch the results pile up.
7. Give Search Engine Crawlers the Technical Details
It’s not enough to upload your video to YouTube or Vimeo; you must also give the correct information on the backend that will allow search engine crawlers to recognize how to categorize and rank your video.
The information used by YouTube to rank includes title tag information, audience retention, description tag keywords, tags, and video length. You can control these. However, the things that aren’t in your power are comments, likes, and dislikes.
8. Optimize Video With Subtitles
Not everyone views videos with the sound on, so add subtitles, giving more people access to your videos. As we mentioned earlier, subtitles also have the added advantage of adding essential keywords to your content.
9. Give Viewers a Customized Thumbnail
YouTube videos with customized thumbnails fall into 90% of the channel’s best-performing videos. Therefore, it’s perhaps a great way for you to leverage your video SEO by creating a creative one that matches an image with the title of your story to capture your audience’s attention.
10. Create Killer Titles
Standing out on flooded platforms for algorithms and audiences requires imagination. Use Google Analytics to see your audience’s favorite keywords when looking at your website or channel, and incorporate these into a title that will immediately attract attention.
11. Mobile Optimization
With more than three-quarters of the world’s population using smartphones, most searches are on these devices. Therefore, optimize everything, including video, for mobile, ensuring your video SEO is relevant and can attract new leads.
Final Take
These are just some ways to leverage video SEO for greater visibility within search engines and for creating new leads. Of course, technical aspects can create better video optimization, but remember that a successful video campaign requires you don’t forget what your audiences crave – emotion-evoking, informative, and entertaining videos uploaded consistently.
