In the past few years, thanks to improvements in the Intranet’s infrastructure and the increasing computing power of not only traditional personal computers but of mobile devices, consumption of video-based content has surged. As video content has grown exponentially, the major search engines have taken steps to make sure that they are also collecting data on the video to help them provide quality search results. Video content is increasingly important to ensure that your site and pages are ranked high in search results.
If you are not using video yet in your online marketing and on your website, now is the time to act. You don’t need a video production company and a Hollywood sound stage to make a quality video. What you do need are some pointers on video SEO.
As a Houston-based digital marketing agency, we help clients develop, manage and execute their video marketing strategy. Improving video SEO is an ongoing process thanks to new technologies, search engine algorithms and competition. Below are key pointers to be aware of, or make use of, in your video content and boosting its search ranking.
Just as with written content, make sure your video content is relevant. Stay focused on providing quality video content that is useful or informative for your target market. It sounds obvious, but put yourself in your target customers’ shoes and think what questions do they have and what are their needs for your products or services. All your content regardless of text, images or video should be customer focused on those two points.
Provide a transcript of the content of your video. This is a double shot for the search engines. The video will be ranked, and then you will also have the transcript of the video that will also be indexed. This will help with rankings. It’s simple and can pay big dividends for search rankings. Always do it.
When setting up your video make sure to provide tools so that your watchers can share your video with their friends. This is viral marketing at its most basic. As your video is distributed across the Internet, search engines will recognize its proliferation, and that helps increase your video’s search rankings. Simply put, the more content is shared, the more likely that search algorithms will see your content as an “authority,” and that boosts in and of itself will increase rankings.
Optimization, for this pointer, refers not to making the video prettier or laden with special effects but rather a technical optimization. You want to make sure that your video is set up to play on a broad range of video players. And, that it has been saved, formatted or compressed so that it will upload and play quickly and smoothly. There are many techniques and details to consider. If you don’t have the resources to do this in-house, consider retaining a digital marketing agency that can help you.
Where and how you host your video content can have a significant impact on your video’s search engine rankings. There are advantages and disadvantages of hosting on your domain or posting it on YouTube or a similar sharing platform. Having your video on your domain gives you ultimate control of it and its distribution, but it also takes space and server optimization and bandwidth if it begins generating significant traffic. Posting your video to YouTube can help its Google search results. On the other hand, it can forward searchers directly to YouTube thus bypassing your site entirely. There are more pluses and minuses on hosting environments, but for brevity, we highlighted the critical ones.
Ok, here we unleash the inner geek. When setting up your videos and their related web pages, to maximize their SEO, Internet marketers need to use best practices to ensure that all the metadata and tags that help the search engines index and rank your content are done correctly. This can be time-consuming if not done properly. But it is worth it to get the most out of your video SEO. Tackling metadata is another area where consulting with a video and digital marketing company can save you effort, time and boost results.
If you have questions about video SEO, feel free to contact us. IMPROZ is a digital marketing agency that provides marketing services throughout the greater Houston area.
