Online videos are becoming more popular as the years go on. Everyday there are millions of views and various uploads to YouTube, not to mention other video platforms. Video content helps with SEO by allowing your video to drive traffic to your website and boost its ranking. It’s one of the most valuable forms of content that get people to your website.
Nowadays, it’s not just about the general search results that people are looking for. Many people are now clicking on the videos tab to find out information, look at a product or hear more about services. Videos are becoming more popular on social feeds, such as Facebook and Twitter as well. With more people having high speed Internet, the issue of a video slowing down their feed is no longer the problem it once was.
Video is taking up more prime result space on Google’s search results. When it is clicked on, it can signal to Google that this is content that is of high value and of interest to searchers. Also, for businesses, it can be easier to complete in the online world using video content rather than written. Although written, text content is great for SEO, there is also a lot more competition that goes with it. Depending on your industry, videos can be a great way to cut through the noise.
Also, if your competitors are doing videos, are they correctly tagging and providing descriptions for these videos? Are they using keywords? All of these SEO tactics are required for a well optimised video.
Videos are something that should be included within online strategies in order to drive traffic to a website and generate leads. Here are some key ways to optimise your video content.
Choose the right platforms
The two key areas that you can have your video on is your website or it can be on an external site, for example, YouTube. The one that is right for you depends on the objectives you are want to achieve. If you are looking to get as many views as possible, then YouTube would be ideal. They have millions of users on their platform every day, which will help the amount of eyes on your video.
However, if you are looking to increase your website traffic and get people landing on your pages, then doing your own hosting may be a better choice. You can simply place the video on your web page, and then drive traffic to it via links on social media platforms or email marketing.
Make sure your title and descriptions are on point
Similar to your web pages, picking a keyword focus title and description is crucial to getting your video optimised. However, just like with text content, remember to not keyword spam your descriptions and titles.
You may think this is commonsense, but the amount of videos that use random keywords after one another in a title is all too common. Ensuring you do it the right way, each time will see you leap ahead of your competitors.
Get a transcription
Unlike humans, Google focuses on written text when it is trying to understand whether a piece of content is relevant or not. Therefore, ensuring you have a script of what is being said in your video, or what your video is about, is a great way to have your video picked up by Google’s search engine.
You can simply just type in a description or script and upload it. It’s crucial to get the text content from your video in order to get your video optimised.
Don’t forget sitemaps
If you are placing a video on your website, rather than using a third party site, then you need to ensure that Google knows to crawl and index the pages that feature your videos and the text about your videos.
A way to do this is to create a sitemap for your videos. In terms of Google, you can use Google’s Webmaster Tools in order to submit a sitemap that picks up the video on your website.
Ensure the sitemap includes the description, video file, title and thumbnail.
Don’t forget about URLs
Just like optimising the actual video, the URL in which your video sits on is also important if the video lives on your website. Remember to make it short and keyword focused URL’s.
A good way is to simply have the URL that is similar to the title of your video, if your title is also keyword focused and optimised.
Short and sweet is key
Studies have shown that users appreciate and watch videos that are anywhere between 2 to 10 minutes, depending on the topics. Think about the last time you watched a video that was longer than 10 minutes. Most likely, you exited out half way through or went to find a video that could condense the information you were after.
If you have a larger video, think about segmenting them down into individual videos. This will also work better for SEO as you can then optimise each individual video and its URL. The more your can keep a viewers attention to your video, the better for your bounce rate.
Summary
Videos are an ideal way to drive traffic to your website and increase SEO. It’s important to remember that just like content, in order for it to be useful, it needs to be optimised in the best way possible.
Think about what platform you want your video to live. According to SEO Shark – SEO company, for SEO purposes, sometimes having it on your own site is a better option if you are driving traffic to your site in other ways. Don’t forget about drawing out the text within your video in order to allow Google to crawl and index it.
Last but not least, remember to optimise your video by not forgetting the basic tactics such as keywords, descriptions and alt tags.
Just like text content, it’s important that we don’t just stop at producing quality content. We need to think about how people will be finding this content and implementing tactics accordingly.
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