Most internet users now rely so much on videos to educate and inform themselves about what interests them. So, adding the appropriate video content to your website is fast becoming an effective way to go past your competitors on search engine ranking pages.
Search engines such as Google know that users want to see video content. This is why it pays off to add videos to your SEO strategy. A survey by Oberlo showed that 54% of consumers are hoping to get more video content from the businesses that they patronize.
This is because it is far easier to consume and digest video content than text-based content. After all, videos make the information easier to interpret within a short time. This explains why videos get more than 1200% more shares compared to pictures and text content combined.
Therefore, video marketers are burdened with the responsibility of creating incredibly compelling videos, given the budget, resources, and countless hours that they have. This makes up a crucial part of the organization’s content marketing strategy/campaign. However, many people fail to account for the role of SEO in their video marketing campaigns. And without a good SEO strategy, the video will not reach the massive number of people they are expecting it to reach, and they will not get the result they were hoping for.
It is not enough to rely on irrelevant trends and virality when creating videos. A sustainable approach is to make sure your videos appear on search engines and other video platform searches. Otherwise, all the time, resources, and effort spent producing the video will go to waste. So, how do you ensure that your video marketing campaign is SEO optimized? Here are seven things you must do.
#1 Create high-quality interactive videos
Make sure your videos are relevant to your audience. It has to be something that they resonate with and serves a purpose for them. It may be educational, inspirational storytelling, creative entertainment, or it teaches them how to do something. The goal is to create video content that the audience can click and watch happily, but much more than that, it has to be of high quality that the audience is encouraged to share the video with others.
#2 Add video transcripts
Google and other search engines always try to look for ways to understand the content better. For video content, an effective way to ensure this is to add a video transcript to it. It helps the search engine bot to know what the video content is about automatically, so it has a better idea of the type of audience you are trying to reach with the content.
Adding captions to your video helps increase conversions and overall views and ensures your business is making more money online.
#3 Choose the right video hosting platform.
Video hosting platforms are available online in their numbers. You only have to choose the appropriate one for you, whether paid or free. And there are pros and cons to each one of them. For instance, a video player may have no ads, but embedding may have limited customizable options.
The best thing to do is research the different platforms and then decide the one you will be using to host your video regularly.
You may also upload your content to several platforms for more exposure and discoverability. Some popular and free platforms are YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, and Daily Motion.
#4 Use relevant keywords
Keyword research will always be necessary as long as SEO and search engine rankings are involved. You must be sure of the terms, words, and phrases that your target audience will search for when they want to search for your video. This will allow you to optimize your click-through rate for both paid results and organic search.
Thankfully, there are several SEO tools that you can use to carry out keyword research and find the best one for you. But, of course, you must also consider the video hosting platform that you are choosing.
#5 Optimize your metadata
When it comes to SEO, there is always some technical aspect that you must look out for. These technical aspects of SEO ensure that your content is SEO-optimized, and one of such is metadata.
Similar to text content, you must optimize your metadata. Your video title and description, tag, etc., go a long way to enhance the SEO of your video content. If you do not do this by yourself, Google will put something there for you, and it may not be the most appropriate for your SEO which is why you should do it yourself.
#6 Add an eye-catching thumbnail.
Thumbnails give the viewers an idea of what to expect from the video at a glance. It can either attract them to watch or put them off. These are some tips to make your thumbnail effective:
- Keep it informative and straightforward.
- Create a consistent style.
- Use engaging elements such as colors
- Use readable fonts
#7 Have a dedicated webpage for videos on your site
You can give your video more SEO exposure by having a dedicated page for each video on your site. Adding videos to your webpage adds a thumbnail to the Google listing result categorized as “rich snippet.” Google prefers rich snippets in its ranking results as high-quality pages. So, it gets more visibility and clicks.
Having dedicated web pages for videos with transcripts increases your video’s exposure as it enables that the content is on the video tab of Google results. This makes the video page another channel for inbound traffic and allows more people to discover your content and website.
Conclusion
Video marketing is not one of those things you do along the way any longer. However, it is a necessity for businesses looking to win more visitors over. The internet is getting more competitive, so you cannot be found lagging in any possible ways to reach your audience.
Author Bio
Sherri Carrier is a professional writer at an essay writing website and a member of several writing clubs in New York. She has been writing her poems since she was a child. The young author gets inspiration from her favorite writers and people whom she loves.
