Videos are engaging. Videos are everything.
Video SEO is continuously evolving and staying up-to-date and best practices of optimisation is crucial.
Video SEO is optimising your video to be indexed and ranked on the search engine results pages for relevant keyword searches. There are many optimization strategies to give your videos a higher probability of ranking. Read on to know more.
Ways through which you can optimise videos for Search
1. Pick the Right Video Hosting Platform
When choosing your video hosting platform, you need to consider the reasons why you want videos to rank. Are you optimizing your video to increase site traffic and get new leads? Or is your goal to create brand awareness?
If you are less worried about getting traffic to your site, and more fixated on general brand awareness, YouTube and Vimeo are your best bets. The thing with these kinds of platforms is that if your video is indexed, most of the traffic gets directed to them rather than your own website. This can lead your future site visitors to get lost in a sea of competing for traffic.
2. Add a Video Transcript
As you are going through your Facebook feed, you will see numerous videos with captions along with the video so you can view them without disturbing your housemates. The text that comes up with the video is known as a video transcript.
Video transcripts allow your videos to be more available to a larger audience. They make your videos more findable by search bots as there’s additional text on the page.
3. EnsureThe Thumbnail Image Is Engaging
The video thumbnail is what the user will see when your video is indexed; hence it plays a crucial role in whether searchers click. Think of your thumbnail image similar to how you think of the cover of a book or the homepage of your site. It needs to be captivating, relevant, and all around attractive!
4. The Title and Description of Video
Just like they do for a blog, the title and meta description play a crucial role in ranking videos. Craft an engaging video title and description so that people will read them and watch the full video. Do keyword research to make sure you are targeting keywords that people are searching for.
5. Ensure the Rest of Your Page is Optimised for SEO
You can’t depend only on optimising your video to get placement on the SERPs. It’s as if not more significant than the page itself is also optimised for SEO, or the search engines won’t bother crawling it in the first place.
6. Embed the Video
The search engine crawlers stop crawling for videos after the first video. Having multiple videos on the page is not the best idea if you are trying to optimise for one video explicitly. Keeping the page focused around that video will make sure it receives traction.
7. Make the Video the Focus
There are websites where the video is hidden or below the fold so searchers have to scroll and scroll until they finally land on the video. This ultimately leads to low play rates as people don’t want to go out of their way to search for the video. Search crawlers may also not go out of their way to index a hidden video.
