Oh, hey! Four seconds before you got here, what were you doing?
We aren’t stalking you … but because we know how algorithms work, we’ll take a guess.
A lot of you were on Google and saw something vaguely relevant to video and SEO tips – and clicked it. If so, you were doing the very thing you want your customers and audience to do.
So meta.
Video SEO best practices aren’t rocket science.
To get your head around it, in fact, just think about your own habits.
You turn to Google (or the search function on YouTube) to try and figure stuff out. Stuff you need, stuff you want, stuff you probably have no business doing. Like, help to fix a leaky toilet. You don’t need a plumbing license when you have Google, right? Or, you don’t need to hire a professional to get some DIY corporate marketing video together, right?
Of course not! We aren’t living in the dial-up age – you can Google anything!
The words you stick in a search engine (keywords) take you where you want to go (ideally).
Magical internet algorithms surface the best (i.e. keyword-stuffed content) information and consumers click their way into plumbing disasters and shopping carts full of stuff they don’t need. Luckily, though, companies are producing high-quality content that consumers want and need and video optimization helps ensure your hard work gets noticed.
Search engine optimization (SEO) takes into account what consumers are already searching for, how they search, and what type of content they like best. (Spoiler: Video is hot.)
When you know what you’re doing, SEO strategy can be the No. 1 way consumers find your product or service and end up becoming your customers.
But what if you don’t know what you’re doing? You’re in luck. We designed this blog just for you.
When it comes to SEO and juicing your rank and brand, there are strategies to deploy both in choosing your video content and distributing it. For the purposes of this blog, we’ll focus mostly on video optimization and distribution.
How Would You Apply SEO to Video Content?
For starters, any text elements (title and description) should be packed with relevant SEO keywords. Here, you follow the same best practices you would for written content. Keep it concise, on topic, and aligned with trending keywords or search terms with high volume history.
Pay attention to in-platform tagging and meta-data fields that translate to search engine rank. This often will include a categorization field (topic and sub-topic) as well as a text field for entering comma-separated keywords.
How Does Google Rank Video Content?
YouTube reigns supreme (guess who owns it). Uploading your content to YouTube – especially videos with keyword relevancy to likely consumer searches – will help your findability with Google.
Some experts opine that websites with properly tagged and relevant videos are 50 times more likely to land on the first page of Google results.
What Is the Best Practice for Video SEO?
In terms of the video itself, creating digestible (read: short, one-topic, focused) content is key. In addition, how long viewers stay with your page or video can affect your rank on search engine result pages (SERP).
Helping the consumer quickly and easily find the content they’re looking for not only increases traffic from relevant leads but also gains favor with the Google gods.
Now, drilling into some specifics, here are a few quick tips for video SEO:
- Use Key Moments (or equivalent): Marking timestamps and labeling your content creates not only a navigational aid for users but also for the bots scraping information to figure out whether your video should be served in search results.
- Upload A Great Thumbnail: If your metadata and topic are good enough to appear in Google search results, you don’t want to lose eyeballs because you have a poor static image on your content.
- Honor Platform Preferences: Your super-special corporate mini-doc doesn’t belong on TikTok – but the blooper reel your intern shot might do well there! Consider creating several iterations of your video to deploy on specific channels so that your content has the right look and feel for your chosen platform.
- Set Up Video Pages: Spread the love if you’ve got lots of high-quality videos to show off. For one, the best-ranked sites contain video content so the more landing pages you have with moving pictures, the greater chance you’ll land on the first page in your core areas. Secondly, as Google indexes your website content, there’s a high probability it will only analyze and score the first video per URL.
Video SEO Company
For the times we live in, SEO is seriously important to any content you publish – and videos are no exception. There’s an art and a science to creating engaging videos for a digital audience. At Hackstone, we try to be artful with our science. No doubt, the quality and substance of your digital ad or video content should come first. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t think about search strategy, distribution, and video SEO best practices. It’s really a both-and process.
If you’ve made it this far in the post, we’re ecstatic that SEO worked the way it should and served up relevant content. We’d love to work with you on the next step of your project, too! We help clients produce unskippable content – including video that’s easier to discover via search engines. Once you’ve done enough Googling to figure out you need to hire a creative team of professionals, give us a call or get in touch!