Optimizing your videos to reach your intended audience and match what people are searching is extremely important when it comes to building out a SEO strategy. YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google with more than 100 hours of new video content uploaded every minute compared to 48 hours just two years ago, a clear sign video is on the rise. Maximizing a video’s search exposure should be a high priority for companies and brands if it’s not already. According to Forrester research, videos are 50 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google results than any given text page in the index.
Here are a few important tips to best optimize your videos:
High Quality Content: This may be the most obvious way to optimize your video, but it’s one of the most important. Videos have a very strong selling point when it comes to niche markets. Keep your content as relative and informative as possible to your specific audience.
Tags: Refer back to any keyword research you’ve done (with Google’s Keyword Tool) and make sure you tag the video with any of the terms you’ve deemed to perform well. Tags allow you to add extra words that wouldn’t fit naturally into the description. Keep these limited to 2-3 words at most, separated by commas.
Title: Spend some time creating the title of your video. Anyone seeing it for the first time should be able to get an idea of what they’re about to view just by glancing at it. Make sure the main keyword(s) you are targeting for are somewhere within your catchy and clear title.
Description: A good video description contains relevant keywords. Search engines will index it and rank it higher when a keyword-rich description of the video is included, this also helps viewers get a quick understanding of your video prior to watching it. Be careful not to pack it full of irrelevant keywords, this could immediately deter a customer away.
Ease of Embedding: Make it simple for users to access the code that allows them to embed the video on their own website or blog. Add visable share buttons on your website below the video to create a quick and easy way to pass it along. Both of these will help to increase backlinks and shares which overall helps to boost your rankings in search engines.
Google Sitemap: Submit your video to Google Sitemap as a way to let search engines know what pages on your site need to be indexed. See Google’s guide for Creating a Video Sitemap.
Powerful, relevant and engaging videos that are optimized for discovery are vital to boosting your brand’s awareness and will truly have a huge impact on your SEO strategy if done right. You will find that it’s worth investing the time into producing, creating and promoting a good video in order to increase your ROI.
Chicago Pet Video 