Video Marketing And SEO 101

July 30, 2018 By SEO Houston Pros Leave a Comment

An Introduction To Video Marketing And SEO

What video SEO is is just a way to optimize your video for indexing and ranking on Google and other search engine results pages for targeted keyword searches. There are numerous optimization strategies that can be used to provide your videos with a better chance of ranking. We will be outlining some of the best ones in this article. You can also get assistance from a video marketing specialist. At SEO Houston Pros we have a team of professional video marketing experts that can help you in the process of promoting your business through Video SEO.

1: Select the Best Hosting Platforms For Your Video Marketing

Whenever you are selecting video hosting platforms, it is important to consider why you are wanting good rankings for your videos. Are you trying to optimize your video in order to obtain new leads or site traffic? Or do you have a goal of achieving more brand awareness or general thought leadership? If you are not concerned about driving traffic to your site, and your focus is more on general brand awareness, then Vimeo and YouTube might be options that you want to consider. With these types of platforms, after your video gets indexed, a majority of the traffic goes to those sites rather than your own site. That can result in your potential site visitors getting lost competing videos (such as suggested videos on YouTube appearing after yours).

2: Add a Video Transcript

When you scroll through a Facebook feed, most likely you will see a number of videos that have captions next to them so that you can view them without disturbing other people in the house. The text that goes along with the video is called the video transcript. These transcripts help to make your video accessible to a bigger audience and also make the video be able to be scraped by search bots since there is extra text on the page. A video transcript serves as page copy. Make sure to pay more attention to your transcript on longer videos and when it is the main focus on a page since those transcripts can have an even greater impact on the rankings of the video.

3: Be Sure To Have An Engaging Thumbnail Image

The thumbnail of the video is what is seen by the searcher whenever your video gets indexed, and plays an important role in whether or not people click on it. Your thumbnail image is similar to how a book cover or website home page should be viewed. It must be attractive, relevant, and compelling. Videos that have custom human thumbnails get 30% higher rates compared to those that don’t. Also, make sure that it is relevant to whatever you are attempting to rank for. So if you were to type into the search bar “how to water ski,” then having a thumbnail of an individual actually water skiing will win the competition. Other videos that have thumbnails that are not as enticing or relevant are less likely to get clicked on. Video marketing is very competitive and so you must make sure that you optimize respectfully.

4: Pay Close Attention To Your Video’s Title and Description

Just like with blog posts, a video’s meta description and title factor into how a video ranks. Set aside the time to create a title and description for your video that is engaging. Do some keyword research to make sure you are targeting keywords that are actually searched for by people. Make sure your titles and descriptions for your videos are highly optimized since that is among the most effective ways of ensuring greater search visibility. Don’t simply stuff tons of keywords into your titles and descriptions. When you are uploading videos to help promote your business, the subtitles are incredibly important because they play a major part in search engine optimization.

5: Make Sure The Page Is Optimized For SEO and Relevant to Your Video

You can’t only rely on optimizing your video in order to get good rankings in the SERPs. These days it is still just as important or even more critical to optimize the page that the video is on for SEO Otherwise, the search engines will not take the time to crawl it. If your video is not raking it may be due to the fact that the page it is ion is terrible. Although it can be difficult for your website to rank organically, you can continue creating high-quality content and make sure all of your technical SEO components have been set up properly. That will help you achieve higher rankings over time. Also, make sure that the video is relevant to whatever is on the page it is embedded into. Ask yourself if the page relates to your video. If it is a generic page, and you just throw your video up, it has a very low chance of ranking.

6. Embed The Video That You Would Like To Rank First

Typically, Google only indexes one video for each page. So if there are multiple videos included on a page make sure to embed the video that you want to rank first. Usually, the search engine crawlers top crawling videos once they find the first video. If you are attempting to specifically optimize one video, then it’s probably not a good idea to have multiple videos on a page. Keep your page focused to ensure that your video gets the traction that it deserves.