Categories: SEO

Getting Your Video SEO Game Strong in 2019

With the amount of content growing, and customer attention being pulled on various sides and by various platforms, content creators constantly look for new ways to engage their audience and drive conversions.

Recently, video content has climbed to the top of the popularity scale of content on the internet, with various video streaming websites (lead by YouTube of course) attracting high traffic numbers. Many people record their everyday routines, lifestyle, travel adventures, opinions, gameplay, creating vlogs that are consumed by millions of viewers daily.

With internet speed increasing, mobile becomes the device of choice for browsing the internet, so video content has become more accessible to internet users worldwide. It is not rare to see people binging on the latest videos while riding the subway, standing in line, or generally, having a moment to themselves.

As video is becoming a popular form of content to entertain internet users, more and more content creators turn to videos to share their message and broaden their fan base.

With the number of vlogs and vloggers increasing, creating good videos no longer cuts it. When it comes to video production, excellent is the new normal. Instead, to make it to the top, vloggers and companies publishing videos on various video platforms have to get knowledgeable and leverage powerful SEO.

Just like with every other overcrowded industry (especially those that are trending), standing out from the crowd is hard, but not impossible. The first thing you need to recognize is that your videos driving traffic and being searched and stumbled upon by your target users is not a matter of chance or luck. You need to roll your sleeves up and work on your videos to optimize them for success.

Below, we will list a couple of game-changing tips that will take your video game to the next level, and maximize your chances of being seen and generating quality leads in 2019.

Dig into Your Content History to Prepare for the Future

The thing you need to do is to take a look at your older videos and determine which pieces have had success in the past. Doing this simple task will help you determine what approach works best, and the types of topics and videomaking your audience is interested in.

If you have some published content that is not time-sensitive, you will most probably be able to gain more traffic once you update the description and title of the videos, and enrich them with keywords, tags, and links that will make the content more searchable.

In case you want to update not only the description and searchable terms of the video, but the content as well, you can go through all of the steps above, and also add a link to a new, updated video.

This way, you will be able to drive traffic and bring in new viewers to both your new and old videos.

Optimize Your Video’s Metadata

Your video’s metadata: filename, tags and meta description are a crucial part of your video’s SEO.

“Tags” are actually the keywords you assign to your videos. Usually, you can assign more than one tag to a specific video. In fact, you should strive to use more tags, but make sure that all of the tags you use are relevant to your video. To ensure that you pick the right tags, use Google keyword planner, and check suggested queries on Google. Test your keywords by typing the words and phrases in the search box on Youtube. Testing is important since the number of viewers for a topic is not the same on Google and Youtube.

Next, you should come up with a description. A good rule of thumb is to mention your primary tag (keyword) a couple of times in the copy for your video description. YouTube provides you with 5000 characters worth of space to come up with a description for your video. Wise vloggers make the most out of what they are given.

Finally, spare a couple of minutes and rename your video file. Make sure to use your primary keyword as your video filename, instead of leaving it generic.

Make Quality Your Primary Concern

Although quality is not a guarantee that your content will be seen, even if you use all the SEO techniques from your bag of tricks, you will not be able to capture people’s attention if you don’t offer well-made content.

No one expects for your videos to perfect from the very start, but if you pour enough effort into your content creation practice, you will get better at it with every new piece. Of course, it would be great if you can afford to hire professional help to create your videos, but even if that’s not something within your budget, you can definitely learn how to create better-looking and more enjoyable videos with all the lessons and tutorials available on the internet.

Note that quality is not only a visual category. Your content also needs to be relevant and informative and addressing your customers’ pain points clearly. Find out what your target audiences search for and try to answer those queries the best way you can.

Good content packed in a professional looking video is a must for success.

Integrate Videos into Your Other Content

Chances are, YouTube is not the only platform where you publish your content. If you have a blog or a website apart from your video channel, you should consider integrating your video into your other platforms.

Integrating videos is beneficial for two very good reasons. First, videos increase the interactivity of the content, and it can deepen your take on a particular topic. Second, embedding engaging videos can not only attract visitors, but it can also increase the time visitors stay on your webpage. With time being one of the primary factors used by Google to determine whether your page should be ranked for a keyword, if you manage to achieve getting users that stay for longer than five minutes on your page, you will notice an improvement of your webpage rankings.

So, video SEO does not only improve the traffic and rankings of the video itself but also presents a way to improve the web page’s position on the SERP.

To yield the best results, there are a couple of things to consider.

Avoid embedding more than one video to a single page.
Once Google fins a video on a page, it will ignore all other videos embedded on the same page that it stumbles upon after that. The first video is given preference, so find the most relevant video to a particular page and publish that one.
Don’t embed the same video to different pages on your website.
It might sound counter-intuitive, but embedding the same video on more than one page will create internal competition on your website. That is to say, when someone searches for a particular query, Google will have to decide which result is more relevant, and show it at the top of the SERP – so your pages will compete against each other and their chances of showing up on the first page of Google’s results will be pretty low as opposed to the instances when your video is published on a single page.

Harness the Power of Transcription

You probably know that search engine bots use text for indexing. So how do you link your videos to more text, and help them get indexed?

Although your video’s metadata consists of words that can get indexed by search engines, you shouldn’t rely solely on metadata to convey the information about your video.

Instead of doing just the basics, step up your game and offer video transcripts as well. Transcripts will help search engines to understand your videos and rank them better. But getting to use your keywords a couple of more times is not the only thing what makes transcripts a must-have in your video package – transcripts will also add value to your offerings and improve your target audience’s user experience.

Don’t Forget About Social Media

Social media platforms are as powerful as ever, offering great opportunities to expand your user base and leverage the power of shareable content to drive more visitors to your website.

Lately, all of the widely used platforms have made efforts to make videos more accessible. Facebook has been working towards optimizing the platform for videos for a couple of years now. Instagram another one of the social-media-video leaders, with the launch of IGTV, which is quite similar to YouTube, allowing users to publish longer videos, as well as with the widely popular live videos, which are short, easily manageable videos, great for setting up viral, highly engaging social media campaigns.

Final Notes

Video is a powerful way to increase user engagement, drive traffic and boost conversion rates. Moreover, videos are fun, easily shareable, and can be a great way to build authority and increase awareness, streamlining the link generation process.

Video SEO is a technique that not only allows video creators to increase the visibility, reach and position of their videos but also maximize the time their visitors spend on the website and thus positively affect the website’s ranking on the SERP.

With YouTube being the leading video platform, and one of the largest search engines in general, your optimization efforts should start with YouTube. Search for YouTube targeted keywords, and pay attention to search suggestions, as they show the pattern of queries most YouTube visitors make. YouTube is very similar to Google in terms of ranking. Just as Google uses time spent on a particular page as one of the key ranking factors, YouTube measures time spent watching a video. Google measures shares and social media engagement; YouTube measures video comments. The same goes for using click-through rates of SERPs as a way to determine a content piece’s ranking.

So, although videos are optimizable – you can optimize the tags, description, and filename of a video to maximize its chances of ranking high, it is ultimately the video’s relevance and content that will determine whether your users like, share and spend time watching your videos or not. So, do your research, not only in terms of what your target audience is interested in, but also about what your competition is doing, and the ways you can create content that is more informative than what the market is currently populated with.

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