Because unlike the Dodo bird…organic traffic is back!
So, you’re finally making video a priority in your marketing strategy. It’s about time! Companies that use video for marketing and advertising grow their revenue 49% faster than companies that don’t. And with audiences completely overloaded with content these days, video is one of the only ways to reach them. But here’s the thing — just because you upload a video to YouTube doesn’t mean your content will suddenly become irresistible to search engines. And the more that brands rely on video, the harder it’s going to be to win search queries. Not to worry…we’ve got 6 SEO secrets that’ll send your videos straight to the top of SERPs. Check em’ out!
1. Create Awesome Video Titles
Don’t allow titling your videos to become an afterthought. Search engines certainly don’t see them as such. Titles should be clever and short (less than 65 characters to avoid being cut off). They should also be relevant. Don’t try to trick your audiences into watching your video with a catchy title that doesn’t accurately reflect its contents. This will irritate your viewers and cause permanent damage to your reputation.
Pro tip: Sneak a keyword into the title, preferably near the beginning in case the SERP cuts your title short. This will help audiences identify your title as a promising answer to their search query.
2. Use Metadata
Because video doesn’t involve much text, and text is what search engines use to understand and rank your content, metadata is super important. Metadata is the textual information that exists behind the video. For example, the date and location of recording, copyright information, media format, and most importantly — the title, video description, and tags.
Even though some metadata is automatically captured, you’ll want to manually work keywords into the most important areas whenever possible (reserving long-tail keywords for use in the description box).
3. Transcribe Each Video
Transcribe each video verbatim. Include the text in the description box for the video and in the HTML of each page on which your video is hosted. Doing so will provide more content for search engines to crawl, and will give your audience the option to choose how they’d like to digest the information. Transcriptions also create another opportunity for you to leverage keywords — so keep that in mind as you develop your scripts.
Here’s some Google advice on how to create a transcript file for your video and enter a transcript directly into your video.
4. Add Closed Captions
Closed captions create even more text behind your video for search engines to crawl. They also make your videos more accessible to viewers with limited or no hearing capability, viewers who speak a different language, or viewers who watch your video without volume.
Pro Tip: Stay away from automated captioning features (like that offered by YouTube). These features frequently misinterpret the spoken language and can result in the total butchering of your video content.
5. Always Host Via a Third-Party Platform
Video files can be large (especially HD-quality videos), which means you could exceed your storage space quickly. This contributes to a host of issues, including limited disk space and long backup times. Your videos may load too slowly, or pause frequently because they don’t have enough bandwidth, and this is a surefire way to tick off your viewers.
From an SEO standpoint, you’re also missing the reach popular third party platforms like YouTube and Vimeo provide. YouTube is the No. 2 search engine in existence. It’s where people go to search for videos. The logic is so simple it sounds stupid, but if your video doesn't exist where people search — you won’t be found.
Our advice: upload your video to a well-established third-party video hosting service. Then copy your video’s URL and paste it to your website. When viewers click to watch your video, they will be routed to the location where you pasted the URL.
6. Use a Video Sitemap
A video sitemap is a text file that contains valuable data about the contents of your video. When a sitemap is submitted to Google, you are directly informing search engines that your video exists, what its titles are, what the subject matter is, the run-time, who the intended audience is and more. This information will influence how the video gets indexed by search engines.
FYI: Your website provider should be able to configure and submit a video sitemap for your website to Google.
When properly optimized, video is capable of driving a 157% increase in organic traffic from search engines. Considering that most marketers believed “organic traffic” to be an extinct phenomenon — this is major news!
Put these video SEO secrets to the test and let us know how they work out for you!
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