SEO Video Beginner’s Guide for Viral Content
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The popularity of video content has skyrocketed in recent years, and it’s easy to see why. Below, we’ll discuss a beginner’s guide to video SEO to make your videos appealing to all age groups, also turning them into an important marketing tool.
Next, we’ll talk about developing a specific video marketing strategy that generates more leads and boosts sales. Video content is also used by businesses to build a better brand experience and stand out from the competition.
Although it’s very possible to create high-quality video content and share it through platforms like YouTube, there’s no guarantee that your video will catch the attention of many people. Why? Because millions of video content are uploaded to the internet every day.
In this post, we will discuss five ways to optimize your video for search engines.
After reading this post, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to implement video SEO techniques to improve search rankings and reach a larger audience.
Before we begin, let’s take a quick look at the basics of video SEO and why it’s so important.
What You Need to Know About Video SEO
Most consumers browse the web when trying to make decisions before making a purchase. So, if you want to take advantage of video marketing, your videos must be optimized for search engines.
Video Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques are used by successful video content creators to improve their search rankings and increase visibility on search engine results pages.
Today, people mostly consume video content on their phones for things like sports events, walking around campus, doing tasks around the house, and other daily activities. Why is this?
In 2021, it was identified that millions of minutes of video content were successfully uploaded every second. As a result, a lot of videos will pass through your network.
Globally, video IP traffic is expected to reach 82% of total consumer internet traffic by 2021, a significant increase from 73% in 2016.
This overview represents a huge portion. You might be wondering, what does this have to do with video SEO? Well, SEO is just one of the important components of digital marketing.
Another crucial element is converting that video traffic into paid traffic. Video can be the perfect tool to help you do that. To take advantage of video marketing, your videos need to be optimized for search.
Here’s how to drive more traffic to your video content and make video search results more visible while generating quality leads.
5 Ways to Optimize Video SEO for Search Engines
Over the years, the use and popularity of video have skyrocketed. Video helps explain complex topics in simple ways and plays a crucial role in improving conversion rates.
Next, your decision to use video as a digital marketing tool will yield significant results, assuming you optimize your video content for search.
It’s easy to see that video is on the rise. Let’s discuss some different ways you can use video SEO to stay ahead of your competitors.
1. Use Video SEO Keywords
You may have noticed that Google is showing more and more videos in search results, mostly from YouTube. Video publishing sites like YouTube and Vimeo are major traffic sources that receive higher click-through rates than regular text-based results.
Keywords are responsible for the search results displayed on the two largest search engines on the internet: Google and YouTube. So, if you want your video to succeed, you need to use keywords.
But how do you find keywords? For example, if your video content is about web design, you can start by running a Google search on terms like web design tutorial or web design tips and tricks.
Once you have good keywords to start with, the next step is to check their search volume. We recommend using Google’s Keyword Planner for this.
Keywords that get between 1,000 and 10,000 searches per month with low to medium competition are generally good to use.
2. Optimize Metadata Tags, File Names, and Descriptions
Tags are keywords assigned to a video. Think of them as a set of words that summarize the content of your video. For those who aren’t familiar, tags, file names, and descriptions play a significant role in video SEO.
Next, use the keywords you’ve chosen in your video tags. These are the tags that you should focus on and optimize. Remember, you can use more than one tag as long as it’s relevant to the video content.
YouTube gives you a description field of up to 5,000 characters, which you can use to describe your video content. If you don’t use those 5,000 characters to take advantage of SEO, you’re missing out on a lot.
Lastly, make sure to save your video with the main keyword as the file name, as there are third-party tools on the web that crawl and index file names, even though Google and YouTube don’t.
3. Add Video Transcripts
A video transcript is a complete textual representation of the spoken content in the video. Metadata and video tags don’t offer as much detail as a transcript does for search engines. Search engine bots crawl text and use it for indexing.
So, video transcripts help search engines understand the content of your video and improve its ranking. Follow these steps to transcribe your video file on YouTube:
- Your transcript file should be saved as a plain text file, i.e., .txt.
- Special characters can interfere with speech recognition, matching, and transcript readability.
- Use double line breaks to indicate long pauses or new sentences.
- Add >> at the beginning of a new line to identify speakers or changes in speakers.
- Insert links to your website in the transcript at the end of the video.
Using these steps to transcribe your video content will help provide more value to your viewers. Additionally, it will improve their user experience and give you the chance to use targeted main keywords.
4. Publish One Video SEO Per Page
Give each video a dedicated page on your website. Google prefers the first video it finds on a web page and will ignore any other video content it finds on the same page.
To work around Google’s video ranking preference, set up your web pages so that there is only one video on each page (or post). You can then publish the same video to different web pages on your site.
If you display or embed multiple videos on the same page, imagine this: when someone searches for “web design tips and tricks” on Google, Google’s algorithm has to decide which page to show in its search results.
5. Create a Video Sitemap
A video sitemap provides metadata about the video content on your website to search engines and is an extension of the existing sitemap on your site. You can use a video sitemap to inform search engines about the category, title, description, duration, and target audience.
Additionally, you can use it to provide more information to search engines about your video, such as the URL of the playback page, expiration date, restrictions, and platform. If your web page has a video, its sitemap might look like this:
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schems/sitemap-video/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://wwww.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg </video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>Grilling steaks for summer</video:title>
<video:description>Alkis shows you how to get perfectly done steaks every time</video:description>
<video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/video123.mp4 </video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc autoplay="ap=1">http://www.example.com/videoplayer.mp4?video=123 </video:player_loc>
<video:duration>600</video:duration>
<video:expiration_date>2009-11-05T19:20:30+08:00</video:expiration_date>
<video:rating>4.2</video:rating>
<video:view_count>12345</video:view_count>
<video:publication_date>2007-11-05T19:20:30+08:00</video:publication_date>
<video:famili_friendly>yes</video:famili_friendly>
<video:restriction relationship="allow">IE GB US CA</video:restriction>
<video:gallery_loc title="Cooking Videos">http://cooking.example.com</video:gallery_loc>
<video:price currency="EUR">1.99</video:price>
<video:requires_subscription>yes</video:requires_subscription>
<video:uploader info="http://www.example.com/users/grillymcgrillerson">GrillyMcGrillerson</video:uploader>
<video:live>no</video:live>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>http://wwww.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html
http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg
Grilling steaks for summer
Alkis shows you how to get perfectly done steaks every time
http://www.example.com/videoplayer.mp4?video=123
600
2009-11-05T19:20:30+08:00
4.2
12345
2007-11-05T19:20:30+08:00
yes
IE GB US CA
http://cooking.example.com
1.99
yes
GrillyMcGrillerson
noVideo content is on the rise. There are several ways you can enhance your video’s visibility, improve its ranking, and appear on search engine result pages.
We’ve shared some ways to get started with video SEO on your website and hopefully, you’re now in a good position to move forward.
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