Video content is becoming more popular as a marketing tool. If done correctly, optimised videos can give your viewers the best experience possible and increase your conversions. Videos are one of the most powerful tools on the internet. YouTube is the second most used search engine after the main Google search engine. This indicates how important it is to have optimised video content to increase your reach and market share. Better yet, when you optimise your videos for SEO they will be able to reach more people both locally and internationally.
What is Video SEO?
Video SEO is all about optimising your video in such a way that it ranks well on search engine results for the keywords you are targeting. It involves creating meta-data with relevant information, which will generate traffic from people looking for video content online.
Web crawlers cannot “watch” videos, so it is important to provide and include tags and metadata to give context to and help search engines understand your content.
Why is Video Search Optimisation Important?
In 2020, adults in the USA spent more than 103 minutes of each day watching digital video on their devices. That’s exactly why you need to optimise your videos so that they are easily discovered by search engines and crawlers.
Let us look at a few more reasons why you should optimise your videos.
Increase Your Brand Reach
There are many different platforms that you can use for your videos, such as YouTube or
Facebook. Having optimised video content can help you reach a large number of people through these platforms.
Improved Customer Engagement
When audiences are actively engaging with media you’re directing to them, they will then take action in favour of that content – whether it’s watching for longer or sharing on social media networks & platforms. By using metrics such as play rate, ad requests, and completion rates, you can understand how engaged your audience is and use that to factor in how to better encourage more interaction, which helps build a sense of community around each video post.
Search Results Visibility
Optimising your video for search engines will help it rank higher in SERPS. The more
optimisation, the easier Google can crawl and display your content. This means you’ll be placed more consistently at the top of the SERPs page (search engine results page).
Video SEO Best Practices
Now that we understand why Video SEO is important, we need to establish what are the best practices for Video SEO.
According to Google, there are 5 main recommended best practices:
Make Your Videos Publicly Accessible
One of the best ways to get your videos discovered by Google is making sure they’re available publicly on the web. That means you should have a corresponding website with an URL that can be accessed easily and quickly via google search.
Include Video Structured Data
Structured data helps Google to understand the type of content on your webpage so that it provides users with the kind of information they need. To help them do this, site owners are able to use Schema’s Video Object markup which includes things like video tile descriptions or duration info – all without prefixing videos with HTML code. You can also use structured data to include video key moments.
Provide High-Quality Thumbnails
Thumbnails are the most important element in video marketing. They provide viewers with a quick visual representation of what they’re looking at and help them decide whether or not they’ll click on the video.
It is also important to make sure that your thumbnails are not blocked by your robots.txt file. If they are blocked, Google will not be able to access them.
Create & Submit A Video Sitemap
Video sitemaps are a great way to help Google accurately represent your videos in search
results. The data you put into the video map must match what’s actually on site for it to work effectively, including length and titles/descriptions of each clip- whether short or long format.
Accessible Video Files
Ensure that Google can fetch your video content files so your pages are eligible for search
features like video previews and key moments.
Video previews are a unique feature of Google search results. They grab seconds from videos and use them as thumbnails, which can make for more engaging content, rather than just having static images or text associated with your keywords in the SERP’s sidebar information
box.
Video optimisation is an important part of video SEO. Quite a bit of Video Search Engine
optimisation needs to go into optimising videos in order for them to be successful.
If you need assistance in deploying your digital video content marketing strategy, our experienced search consultants are on-hand to help you. Contact Algorithm Agency.
Author : Khethi Mthimkhulu
