The best ways to optimise your video for SEO
SEO can be a bit of a labyrinth and a daunting prospect for marketers. We’ve spoken time and time again about how optimising your video for SEO can really help your organic traffic and that Google actively rewards websites that use YouTube videos. But, did you know that you can take it to an extra level and optimise your video for SEO?
By including the elements we’re about to talk about, your video’s visibility and searchability will increase; ultimately driving more potential traffic to your website.
In this edition of the STM Blog, we’ll take a look at exactly how to perfect your video for SEO!
Keyword Research
You can’t optimise your video for SEO without relevant keywords.
As with anything, thorough research is the key to success. Before your video, or campaign, have an extensive list of industry or business relevant keywords.
The most highly searched keywords are probably the ones you want to try and include, but be sure to take a look at their difficulty ranking as well.
There’s loads of free tools available online to do so, because it’s not as simple as whacking Microsoft in your title and suddenly appearing before the official Microsoft website on Google.
Include your keywords in the title, the description and the YouTube tags. In terms of optimising your video for SEO, these keywords will allow the Google crawlers to understand what your video is about.
If you’re totally unsure of where to begin, tools like Answer the Public are a great place to start! It generates content ideas and gives you questions to answer in either blog posts or videos.
Video Title
The title is the first element to think about when optimising your video for SEO.
Think of the title of your video as the newspaper headline. The key elements to a good title are catchiness, descriptiveness, and relevant keywords.
Let’s play the imagination game for a moment. Let’s say you’ve got an employee from the sales department giving an interview about what it’s like to work at your company. Which title is someone more likely to click on?;
Will talks about working here
Or
What it’s like to work at ACME, leaders and innovators in the technology space
Draw people in!
Video Description
The description is essentially a continuation of your title and greater detail of what your video is all about. It needs to be a detailed overview, with the keywords we spoke about earlier included.
To carry on the example of working at ACME, the description could read something like –
Will E Coyote, sales manager at ACME, talks in detail about working here. From working culture to catapult services, get an idea of life inside the leader and trailblazer in the technology space.
The ACME Corporation is a technology and aerospace company based in Toonland, Fictionville.
Contact us today via…
Visit our website…
Find us on social media…
Video File Name
Not something you’d think of immediately, but we’re a thorough bunch here at Stone’s Throw and leave no stone unturned. It’s the same concept as your title and description. If you want to completely optimise your video for SEO, these are the granular details you need to think about. Believe it or not, a relevant file name will help search engines understand the contents of the video.
Video Transcript
Subtitles. How many times have we told you about subtitles?!
By including an SRT file on your video, it adds another layer of keywords.
When speaking about any given topic, you’ll either unintentionally/intentionally use a lot of the keywords around it.
You can then throw your video through a cheap captioning service like Rev, and it’ll sort your subtitles out for you.
When you upload it to whatever platform, you can simply attach the SRT file in the subtitles section.
Not only does it make your video more accessible for people hard of hearing, it adds another layer of keyword text for the search engines to find.
Video Thumbnail
We’ve mentioned how your title is the headline; the thumbnail is the accompanying picture. There’s another blog of ours about the importance of custom thumbnails and being able to make your video stand out from the crowd.
The same ideas of file name, description (alternative text for images) and relevant keywords within these apply here.
Not only does a nice custom thumbnail increase click through rates, it can be branded to your organisation.
Video Tags
Video tags, or metadata if you want to sound like an expert, are relevant keywords to attach to your video as yet another layer for search engines to crawl.
They work in exactly the same way as hashtags, to include your video in search results based around your tags.
Video Hosting
Host your videos on Vimeo and YouTube. These are the most crawled video platforms by search engines. It seems like a really basic thing to suggest, but this is a critical step.
If you’ve made all the effort to optimise your video for SEO, it’s completely futile if you don’t host it on YouTube or Vimeo.
In 2022, YouTube was the second most visited website on the planet, with 74.8 billion visits, second only to Google.
Simply put, you *have* to put content on YouTube. For one, that audience size can’t be ignored, but secondly, YouTube is owned by Google. Google wants people on YouTube. Google promotes YouTube. The Google circle of platforms.
Video Engagement
Share your video on social media, encourage people to comment, leave call-to-actions (calls-to-action? The English language is weird), include links in the comments, interact with those who leave comments, share it to your email list and ask for feedback.
Basically, do everything short of standing on your office roof and shouting about it. Increasing the reach of your video will give it more authority in search results!
To Conclude
Optimising your video for SEO will help increase its visibility and drive more traffic to your website.
What this means for you is totally subjective and dependent on what the goals of your project are.
Making sure you have optimised your video for SEO is key to increasing your online engagement levels and getting the best return on investment for your video project.
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