Video SEO: 9 Ways to Optimize your Video for Search

According to stats, when people visit websites with engaging videos, they stay on them 2 minutes longer on average. This is why it becomes crucial to leverage videos to increase the time visitors spend on your website and improve its search engine ranking. Videos are widely used by content marketers due to their high effectiveness. They can quickly go viral, thus contributing to the success of your marketing campaigns. You can utilize good video editing and voice over tools to help you make a quality video to achieve that. By creating an optimized video, you can make your marketing efforts more efficient. As video SEO is constantly evolving, you need to pay attention to the best practices to succeed and get a cutting edge over your competitors.

What Does Video SEO Involve?

By optimizing your videos, you can ensure that they will rank higher on Google, as it will be easier for people to find them when searching for a specific keyword. To achieve this, you need to edit metadata to drive more traffic to your website. As search engines can’t understand what your video is about, you need to provide them with relevant tags and other metadata that will increase its online visibility. Use the techniques described below to make your video visible on search engines and generate more traffic.

#1 Select a Suitable Video Hosting

To make the right choice, think about your goals. Whether you need to get new leads or improve the online presence on your site, there are plenty of platforms to choose from. For instance, YouTube, Vimeo, and similar services are more suitable for promoting your brand, whereas alternative solutions allow you to get more on-site traffic. If you want to promote your brand more efficiently, you can learn how to get subscribers on YouTube for free and increase your online visibility.

#2 Use Captions

As many people watch videos with the sound turned off, they will appreciate it if you add informative captions to your clips. A transcript will help you improve the accessibility of your video and improve its visibility on search engines. You can add subtitles to video for free when using popular video editing software. Transcripts are particularly important for promoting longer videos. The more text a search bot sees on the page, the more likely it will rank your video higher based on specific keywords.

#3 Use Attention-Grabbing Thumbnails

When a user sees search results, they pay attention to thumbnails to decide whether they want to watch a video or not. A nice-looking thumbnail can function as a clickbait, which makes it extremely important for promoting your site. It should be well-designed and appeal to the tastes of your target audience. Great thumbnails can significantly impact the position of your site on search engines. We recommend you use custom thumbnails as videos that have them boast a higher play rate.

SEO professionals believe that an eye-catching thumbnail is even more important than a title as it is what makes people make the final decision about watching a video. 

#4 Edit the Title and Description

By adding relevant metadata to your video, you can significantly contribute to its promotion. Make sure to use the most suitable keywords when creating a title and description. You should use the exact keywords that your target audience will use when looking for a video.

Instead of adding as many keywords as you can, try making the title sound interesting. It will improve the chances of people clicking on your video to watch it. Make sure to learn more about website optimization to select the right metatags.

#5 Add Interesting Content to the Page

Besides optimizing your video, you need to ensure that the page is optimized as well. Your video might get a low ranking if your page doesn’t include any relevant keywords and contains the poorly-written text. By optimizing the page itself, you can promote your video using organic methods.

The information on the page should be relevant to the video instead of being generic. If you need to work on the project together with your team, you can use a collaborative video editor to make the necessary edits.

#6 Pay Attention to the Order of Videos

Search engines index the first video on the page, which is why you should put the most important video at the top. After finding a video, crawlers stop looking for other videos. SEO professionals believe that it is better to avoid adding several videos if you want to drive traffic to the page by optimizing only one of them.

#7 Make a Video Easy to Notice

When a person visits your page, they should see a video right away without scrolling down. By making your video easier to access, you can increase the play rate and ensure that your video will be quickly indexed by crawlers. Make sure not to hide your video, as you might notice the ranking of your page going down.

#8 Don’t Add the Same Video to Several Pages

Beginners often embed the same video on different pages hoping to increase its chances of being noticed. However, by doing so, you might affect the position of your site on search engines. Instead, it’s better to add relevant content to the page and put your video on the top to improve its visibility.

#9 Leverage Other Promotion Methods Besides SEO

While it’s important to pay attention to SEO, you should also use other methods to ensure that your site takes the first position on search engine rankings. Google and other search engines regularly change their algorithms, which is why you need to develop a complex strategy for promoting your site, with SEO optimization being only one of the steps that you need to take.

You can use paid advertising and other digital marketing methods to ensure that your content will be seen by your target audience. For instance, Facebook Ads are cheaper than other types of paid advertising. Many people also successfully promote their content on Pinterest and Instagram.

Summing Up

Regardless of the promotion method you decide to focus on, you can use SEO to make your video visible on search engines and drive more traffic to your platform. By alternating between different techniques, you can make your marketing strategy more efficient.

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