You see tons of videos online, from social media, YouTube channels, Vimeos, and websites. This only tells you that videos are the trending contents in the online community today.
Improving your brand awareness and organic engagement can be done through videos. In fact, you can incorporate keywords to help your video contents be visible online. Before I share with you some cool stuff about videos, let’s have a quick walk through on what SEO is.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
These are the things you do on your website or contents to make them more visible to viewers online. You need to do keyword research and add that to your contents to make them more visible when people search for that specific keyword. Once the click through rate of your website and contents grows, it helps rank them higher on search engine results.
The best practice for SEO is to do your optimizations as frequently as possible, since the keywords searched by people changes over time. You can use any keyword research tool and analytics to monitor the SEO performance of your website, contents, and landing pages.
This idea is one of the things done by a digital marketing agency. A video production agency also does this thing, to help businesses grow their engagements and followers.
What’s the relationship between video and SEO?
When it comes to optimizing your contents, you need to align your internal contents with the ones Google is prioritizing for search. We understand that not all the time, Google is transparent with the keywords that are ranking for a certain niche, yet we do know that videos greatly help businesses rank higher.
How do videos help your SEO rankings?
Google adds a video thumbnail to most search results, and this helps click through rate. Majority of the people are more likely to click if they see a video thumbnail next to your blog title and meta description.
Video thumbnails are rich snippets that Google likes. That said, you can make the most out of it, and out of your video production.
When you add videos and thumbnails to all your pages and blogs, it can increase your click through rate between 10% to 200%. There are also several studies telling that people are twice more likely to stay on your page if there are videos embedded on it.
If you add these things (videos and thumbnails) to your contents, you’re confident of getting better organic traffic to your website and social channels.
How to produce quality videos to help improve your SEO?
Videos can boost your SEO performance if done well, what does that mean? It means you need to make quality videos that are optimized with the right keywords you’re targeting for your niche.
Having a good video isn’t enough to sustain the traffic and high click-through rate on your site. You need to have good on-page SEO to sustain your rankings on search engine results.
Apart from adding the right keywords to your video title, captions, and thumbnails, you also need to have quality video production. It means your contents must answer what your viewers are looking for online. If Google sees that users bounce off easily from your site, it tells them that your contents are not good. Therefore, it will be shown less on the search engine results page.
How can you incorporate SEO on your video marketing strategy?
Here are the practical tips you can do for making an effective video marketing campaign for your business.
1. Publish your videos on your site
Producing videos is not the end step, you need to publish them on your website and social channels. You can create different types of videos for your business. Brand video is good content for your About Us or Our Difference page.
For social proof, you can publish testimonial videos that’ll support the credibility of your business. These are some of the video contents you can utilize for your marketing.
2. Add context to your videos
Video alone couldn’t suffice how Google would understand your content. You need to add some words to it. There are many ways to do that, for instance, you can provide a transcript of your video on your site or social channel. Embed keywords into it, and see how it can improve your visibility online.
Other written contents are video descriptions, copy on thumbnails, and showcasing relevant resources on your video description. These are wonderful written contexts you can add to nourish the SEO aspect of your videos.
3. Let your video educate your viewers
Viewers resort to watching videos since they’re bored of reading. Audio-visual contents are effective at educating people, so you must take advantage of that. Q&A videos are powerful in building your authority online, and many users are looking for that. They want to be informed so that they’d make the best decisions for themselves.
4. Constantly produce videos and publish them online
Gaining traction on your video views and website traffic, that doesn't happen overnight. You need to have the stamina in creating quality videos and publish them on your site and social channels. Continue doing this, and you’re confident of making a huge difference on your organic traffic and engagement.
5. Never miss those technical information of your videos
Whether you’re uploading your videos on YouTube or Vimeo, these platforms require details about your content. It helps them understand what your content is all about, thus, also helping your online visibility for viewers. Below are the common video technical details you need to provide to them:
- Title tag
- Tags
- Video length
- Comments and reactions
- Keywords on video descriptions
- Transcripts
How is YouTube helpful for your SEO?
If you want to rank better on Google, then you need to publish your videos on YouTube. Recently, around 25% of those search results on Google’s first page results have a respective video content beside them. This tells you that if you have a video for your blogs or pages, they are more likely to be featured at the first page of search engine results.
In terms of SEO, these two platforms work slightly differently. On YouTube, they take note of your metadata to understand what your content is all about. Secondly, the viewing time of users matters most on how you rank on YouTube.
In contrast, Google takes a more traditional algorithm for ranking your videos online. Your metadata still matters, but there are other things considered in knowing your rank on Google. Below are the factors Google looked into when ranking videos:
- The rate at which viewers watch your videos until the end
- How your videos entice users to watch your other relevant videos
- Playlist is a good leverage
- Publish your videos on your site
- Doing paid campaigns to advertise your videos
- Promote your videos on different channels
That said, being a YouTube videographer is not the only key element to ranking higher on YouTube and Google. You need to be strategic and technical when it comes to online video production.
