How to use video SEO to make your website rank higher
With videos expected to make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic — 15 times higher than it was in 2017 (Cisco)
Companies across all industries and channels are routinely spending a lot of their hard-earned marketing dollars on finding a video marketing strategy that works for them.
You’ve likely observed that more and more businesses are now using videos on their websites. Whether it be embedded in a blog post or as a homepage video, which makes it clear that video content continues to rise — making it the ultimate lead generation tool of the time.
But having said that, with so many efforts in video marketing why organizations are still struggling to match the ROI?
The problem is SEO.
Yes, SEO.
As a marketer, you may have got your website SEO strategy right and might have managed to get a truckload of visitors. But what about your videos?
Even though your team has spent a lot of time, and effort in creating amazing videos, they are still not giving you the desired results.
To help you solve this problem, this is exactly where video SEO comes into the picture.
So, what is video SEO?
- Video SEO is optimizing your video to be indexed and rank on the search engine results pages for relevant keyword searches.
But simply adding a video to your webpage won’t boost your rankings. That’d be too easy. The impacts of videos on search rankings are a little more nuanced than that.
While Video SEO may sound like a daunting task, it’s not that complicated.
So, let’s begin…
There are two techniques that are unique to Video SEO, and only when used together, will achieve the best results possible.
Structured Data
With traditional web pages, Google utilizes crawlers to discover and index web content. Unfortunately, Google can’t read Flash very well and as a result, most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers.
Adding structure data like keywords, description, and transcript helps search engines like Google to crawl your videos, including your YouTube videos embedded on your webpage.
Structured data is a markup language that helps search engines like Google understand your company’s website better. The information present on your website is organized as chunks of data, which is decoded by the search engines to interpret it.
As you can see here the data is messy and disconnected. JSON-LD organizes and connects it, creating a better Web.
When Google crawls the page, it can read and understand that format (JSON-LD) to extract information about your video.
This schema mark-up gives additional information to Internet browsers. A rich snippet will show a small preview of the content.
According to an infographic from BlueGlass shared by Moz, companies that use rich snippets experience a 20% to 30% rise in click-thru rates and a higher dwell rate, both elements that lead to a higher ranking over time.
If you’re interested in checking out all of your video metadata, just enter your webpage URL that is hosting your video in Google’s structured data testing tool. If you see VideoObject is present, that means your video is optimized and SEO friendly.
Video Sitemap
To crawl and index the content on your site, search engines depend on a specially formatted file called a Sitemap.
Video sitemaps are like a signpost pointing search engines to where your rich content lives. A properly formatted video sitemap is a big piece of the SEO puzzle to help your video content rank properly for your targeted keywords.
Submitting a video sitemap to Google helps to ensure that the search engine has indexed all of your videos to your domain and not YouTube or another platform. It’s another step that helps viewers find the right videos.
If you’re embedding video on your website, you’ll want to create a video sitemap and submit it to search engines. This is the best SEO strategy to drive traffic to your website.
Insert the following line anywhere in your robots.txt file, specifying the path to your sitemap. Google will find it the next time we crawl your site:
Add the following line below to robots.txt
Sitemap: http://example.com/my_sitemap.xmlClick here to know more about sitemaps…
Now that you know the techniques of optimizing your videos for search results. Here are some ways and best practices to boost your search results with your videos.
1. Keywords - The traditional SEO technique, keywords are most important when it comes to determining relevance — the connection between the search terms and the results. Similarly, keywords take an important role in video optimization. Choosing the best keywords for your website is an art to make them pop up on SERP. The video keywords must highlight the content of the video to the search engines to make them enlist in the first page of search engine rankings.
The keywords in videos are generally long-tail and cover human language phrases, which make videos dominant over the other content type and allows it to reach a larger and wider audience.
To get started with video SEO, you need to first identify your target keywords, because that will help shape your content and a lot of the other elements on the page. Next, ensure your video, its title, tags, description, and other content on your video landing page, contain the keyword(s) you are targeting.
This method of optimization of video with keywords makes it more valuable and expressive.
2. Video Tags - Video tags are words or phrases used to sort and rank videos. Tagging is one of the best SEO features. Tags are used to let viewers know what your video is about.
But you’re not just informing your viewers — you’re also informing the search engines. Search engines use tags “to understand the content and context of your video.” That way, they out how to associate your video with similar videos, which can broaden your content’s reach. Make sure to choose your tags wisely.
Video tags must lead with the most important keywords, including a good mix of those that are common and more long-tail.
3. Backlinking and Social Media - The zealous content which easily circulates among the audience is video content rather than a blog or any contextual content. A viewer watches a video and finds it more interesting he/ she happens to share it with other viewers through social media.
It’s been widely seen that viral content is mostly videos. And, the more viral a video goes, the more backlinks it will receive, and the more traffic you will gain.
Best Practices for Video SEO
1. Thumbnail: Adding a custom high-quality thumbnail, and a thumbnail URL is important for the video, as it is the main image viewers see when scrolling through a list of video results. Along with the video’s title, thumbnail sends a signal to the viewer about the video’s content, so it can impact the number of clicks and views your video receives.
2. Transcripts: No doubt transcripts lure Google, as they are filled with keywords. Inserting a Video transcript not just make your videos more accessible to a larger audience, but also make your videos more scrapable by search bots since there’s additional text on the page.
3. It is generally advised to embed the most important video on the top as the search engine crawlers usually stop crawling for videos after that first video.
4. Ensure the Rest of Your Page Is Relevant to the Video and Optimized for SEO.
5. Make sure that each video lives on the publicly available page.
6. Include the target keyword in your title and make a long description
7. Add a Call to action (CTA) in your video.
VIDEO SEO: WINNING GAME STRATEGY
While we are all in another rumble of recession due to COVID 19. Thereby, it’s important to make our business recession-proof. The trend of online videos doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. The importance of video in SEO seems pretty convincing — with the emergence of virtual communication.
Investing in video SEO now will not only help to curb the decrease in visibility but will place these companies ahead of their competition once the outbreak has passed and markets stabilize.
I hope you have understood the success of video SEO during recessions. How will it perform to improve your business? Let me know in the comments!
Still confused about how to SEO your website videos? Watch our webinar that explains it in a step by step approach and helps you do this process in under 3 mins.
Want your videos to be easily found by search engines like Google?
Try our Free Video SEO Tool and start ranking for your videos now.
