Video Search Engine Optimization

 

Having invested significantly into producing a marketing video for your organization you want to get the most value out of your web video as possible. This is where Internet can really help. One of its marvels is that it is an excellent source of advertising, and not only paid but free advertising. Once you have concluded your paid advertising campaign your video project will still be a source of traffic & income. Through Search Engine Optimization of video content it can continue to perform for your Organization in the long term.

 

These days, the internet is the largest source of information when searching for everything from product reviews, to socialising, and reading the news. The target audience here are those who turn to internet search for products and services, and potentially from your business.  One way of capturing that audience is by delivering them the answer to their search either by your video or website ranking for the search term they used.

 

For an example of this, go to google and search “Sports Motorcycle Tires”

 

 

 

The image above is a screen capture of a Google Search for “Sport Motorcycle Tires.” You’ll notice that the primary kind of results are item postings from a number of merchants. Those are really sponsored listings, so each time someone clicks on one, the seller gets charged a specific cost per click. The following rankings are three suggested videos only then followed by normal site listings. Note that 2 of the 3 suggested videos are for the same company that is the first store on google & in the item listings, leading to higher conversion rates for potential customers.

 

Lets focus on the video rankings, since that is the subject of this article. By a wide margin the best way for discovering information online are the search engines – Google in the number one spot taken after by Bing & Yahoo. For a long while now, search engines have blended videos into search results alongside web results and each end each time your video gets clicked on by a potential client who typed your keywords into a search, you get free publicity.

 

All in all, how do you ensure your video ranks in google and other search engines? Obviously, you could pay to have it appear in the sponsored search results or higher someone known as a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) to enable you to rank. Both of these have a cost, so let’s take a look at how you can have a chance to achieve some video SEO:

 

Research Keywords for your Rankings

Before you do anything, you have to realize what search terms you need your video rank for. Try not to shoot for the moon to start or select exceptionally wide keywords, similar to tires – you need to target narrower, something more particular – like “Sports Motorcycle Tires” in our example. Ensure you include a few varieties of related keywords – more often than not Google will give suggestion to you – either while searching your keyword, or by using tools like Google Trends.

 

Upload To Video Sharing Sites

Using video sharing websites like YouTube enables you to host a video up for nothing, so make sure you do that. Since YouTube is the world’s largest search engine for videos and the second biggest US internet search engine short of Google. We suggest you begin here.

 

Add Keywords To Your Videos

 

When you upload a video, YouTube will give you options to include a Video Title, Tags, Categories, and a description of the video. Be sure to use these as a place to embed your keywords and related phrases while also ensuring anything humans interact reads clean and isn’t going to be penalized for keyword stuffing.

 

 

Video Sharing

 

Share your video with everyone you know (ask that they comment and SHARE your video!!!) – link to it on your Facebook page and other social media, groups, & linkedin discussion group. Write an article for it and post it on your website’s blog, ask other blogs that syndicate relevant content to repost it linking back to your website. Leverage the connection you have to make it as visible as possible, since social signals as a data factor in google rankings, this includes reviews, likes, and shares on Facebook.

 

Get Legitimate Interactions

Make sure your targeted keywords are actually what the video is about, otherwise it will increase your bounce rate, negatively impacting rankings; Showing google users don’t find this content helpful for what they searched. Above all make sure your video gets a few likes, shares, and comments that are from real users, however don’t attempt to cheat otherwise YouTube will penalize you and actually omit the video from search results. The more interactions you get (especially within a short time period) will be a signal to youtube that this content is relevant to the sites users, and suggest to more people.

 

Post The Video To Your Website

 

Make sure you post your video to you’re website, and ensure the title of the page incorporates your primary keywords as well as the content of the page is relevant to the video’s subject. If you require more content for the page (300 words is the minimum your post should contain, consider 1500+ words your target length), you can always transcribe the video.

 

Video Linking

 

Any websites that share the video, make sure they link towards the video from pages that target keywords related to the video. This still remains one of the biggest factors google uses to determine what order it ranks pages in.

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Make More Content & Don’t Give Up

 

This practice can take some time to work, often taking weeks or months before a new ranking changes begins to appear on google. In case you don’t succeed at first, it doesn’t mean you did something incorrectly, in all likelihood, you have to put more work into it. You have to draw in more people to get more remarks, share it via social media more than once, sign up for every social media platform you can. Also don’t expect to create one piece of content and suddenly rank first, that takes time and regular contribution of high quality content including videos & articles. This is what builds you as an authority in google’s eyes, and one of the major factors that affects your internet visibility.

 

Repeat The Above

 

This article is obviously a straightforward checklist you can follow but it points you the direction you should take to get there.If your video happens to be in an exceptionally aggressive market, you may need to do some further advanced work. We will try and right further articles on the topic in the future, but there are numerous sites that offer Video SEO Advice, such Moz.com. You can likewise request help on many Internet forums.

 

Best of luck with your new Internet marketing tools and if you choose to give video optimization a shot, contact us and  let us know your result!