Did you know that search engine optimization (SEO) doesn’t just apply to text and images but also to videos? When you utilize some video SEO best practices, your videos will rank better, drive more traffic, and generate more leads.
What is Video SEO?
Optimizing videos to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keyword searches is what is called video SEO. If you’ve ever tried to find out how to SEO Youtube videos, you probably did so to boost traffic and reach a wider audience. When using SEO for Youtube videos, you have to keep these two important video optimization aspects in mind:
- Get your videos indexed: Since search engines don’t understand the information that is embedded in videos on a website, your video content has to be indexed, which refers to the process of providing viewers a way to access and navigate your content easily.
- Improve your video ranking on SERPs: When your videos show up on the first or first few pages of a search engine, you get more traffic. The more traffic you get, the more you can grow your audience and your business.
No matter the platform, video is now at the forefront of content online. People prefer interactive over static content, which is why they spend significant time watching video content on the internet.
Therefore, as part of an effective marketing strategy, you have to create and post videos to capture a large segment of the market. Fortunately, with all the exciting advancements in technology, filming your own videos is neither expensive nor difficult.
While investing in the production of high-quality content is important, it’s equally crucial to spend resources on good video marketing. It’s one of the best ways to reach your target audience and engage them, and an effective video SEO strategy can help you achieve that.
So, whether you want to know how to get more Youtube views or how to get more views on Instagram, here are our 7 video SEO best practices to help you easily outrank your competitors.
1) Choose A Video Hosting Platform
Before anything else, you have to choose a video hosting platform for your content. If your goal is to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry or niche, then you may find success on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. Keep in mind that this means you will garner traffic on those sites instead of on your website.
However, if your goal is to generate traffic for your website, you may opt for a video platform like Vimeo, Wistia, or Vidyard that allows you to host videos on your own website. Therefore, whenever someone finds your videos through search results, you get all the traffic on your website and not a third-party platform.
Displaying videos on your website can also improve the user experience as people don’t have to search for your website once they finish watching a video of yours.
2) Make Sure Your Videos Are Easy to Find and Index
An important aspect of our video SEO best practices is indexing. After selecting a platform to host your videos, you have to ensure search engines can easily find and index your videos. You can do that by simply creating one page on your website for each video.
Then, when you embed a video on a page, make sure to include your video in an HTML tag. That way, search engines can easily identify the video on your web page. Also, make sure that the video, title, and topic are prominent on the page.
Lastly, check and ensure that the page isn’t blocked in your robots.txt and that it has a no-index robots meta tag.
3) Use an Engaging Video Title and Description
Similar to other content, video titles and descriptions are essential when it comes to search engine ranking. Add your main keyword to the title to help search engines easily understand what your video is about and help convert users into viewers who click and watch your video.
To find relevant keywords, use a keyword research tool like SEMRush. Make sure that the title you come up with either solves a problem or answers a question the viewer may have.
Additionally, spend some time properly writing your video description. Ensure that it’s engaging enough for people to click on the link in search results. The title, video description, and meta description all play an important role in your clickthrough rates, which helps boost your SEO.
4) Include an Optimized Video Transcript
A lot of people don’t do this, yet one of the most clever video SEO best practices is publishing an optimized transcript on the page where the video is embedded. This can help your video be more visible in search.
Similar to page copy, it enhances your visibility when you add relevant keywords, match the copy with user intent, and include keyword-optimized header tags.
Since Google cannot crawl video content, a published video transcript can make your content more accessible and reach a wider audience. It also improves the chances of your video being indexed by search engines since it shows them what your video is about.
5) Add a Video Sitemap
Website sitemaps are pages that provide information about the individual pages and files on a site. A video sitemap does exactly that: It provides information about the videos on your website, thereby helping search engines find and understand your video content.
You can use free online tools to create a video sitemap like Slickplan or XML-Sitemaps. Once you have created a sitemap, submit it to search engines like Google to be indexed.
6) Pay Attention to Your Video Thumbnails
Thumbnails impact how Google and other search engines rank your videos. If you have poorly designed thumbnails, you get fewer clicks, which leads to lower rankings on SERPs. That’s why you should design eye-catching and engaging ones.
Thumbnails help improve your clickthrough rates (which tells search engines that your content is valuable to users), increase your views, grow your audience, and, ultimately, your business.
Here are a few SEO tips and tricks to keep in mind when designing your thumbnails:
- Always use high-quality thumbnail images
- Don’t create clickbaity thumbnails
- Instead, focus on results, emotions, and faces
- Add your brand for better brand awareness
- Consider adding subtitles, so people know what your video is about
7) Incorporate Links
The final tip of our video SEO best practices refers to links. As with blogs, links are essential to boosting your SEO. Make sure to incorporate and build internal, outbound, and backlinks.
- Internal Links – Internal links refer to links that lead to other pages on your website. They are a crucial part of boosting the pages that your videos are on. For example, use a blog post on your website that has relevant information included in the video and link it.
- Outbound Links – Outbound links lead from a page on your website to a page on another website. Using outbound links helps build the authority of a page. Always link to trusted sites that post high-quality content and make sure that what you link to is relevant to your video.
- Backlinks – Backlinks, or inbound links, are one of the most significant factors that Google and other search engines use to rank a site. They act like a vote of confidence that proves that other websites value your video content. The more backlinks lead to a video on your site, the higher it ranks in search.
You can build backlinks to your video by finding and fixing broken links, running an outreach campaign, writing a guest post on a reputable site and linking to your video content, or checking what your competitors do, then reaching out to the publishers that link to them.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve always wondered how to get more views on Youtube or other video platforms, implementing some video SEO best practices is your answer.
After choosing a platform to host your video, and making sure it is easy to find and index, invest some time to come up with a compelling video title and description, and design an eye-catching video thumbnail.
You should also add an optimized video transcript on the page where your video is published, as well as a video sitemap. Lastly, incorporate internal and outbound links, and build backlinks to improve your SERP ranking, drive more traffic to your content, and grow your audience.