Here, we will talk about how video SEO works, and what you can do to improve the SEO for your already existing videos.
Videos are a popular form of content for businesses to use, because it tends to do well with audiences. It only takes a couple of minutes to have a topic explained to them or get instructions or details on a product they are thinking of buying. Many people prefer watching videos over reading content because it is quicker and can better visualize the topic.
How do you make your videos on your website stand out? How do you use SEO for videos?
What Is Video SEO?
Video SEO is the process of making both technical and creative changes to your video distribution to help you increase traffic from search engines to your videos. When a search engine indexes a video, it categorizes the page it is on as a video page. This makes Google treat the page differently in search results; the page is ranked as a search specifically for videos, and it can pop up as a video snippet in regular searches.
Improving Your Video SEO
There are a few things that can help you improve your video SEO.
Indexing Videos
When you have a video embedded in a page on your website, a search engine will have trouble understanding all of the important information in it. Thankfully, there is a way that you can help search engines index your videos; it just takes a little more work on your end.
Provide Metadata
You need to give search engines metadata about the videos so that they can crawl them. The search engines need the title of the video, a description, its length, the date it was uploaded, the video file’s location or embeddable player, and a thumbnail image of the video.
There are a few ways you can do this. Creating a video XML sitemap that is external to your page, with the details of every video on your site. Submitting this through Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. Simply include your sitemap as a link in your robots.txt file.
You can also put the metadata for your video on your page using Schema markup.
While this sounds like it is highly technical, there are plenty of tools to automate this process, or you can work with an expert agency like Oregon Advertising. If you are unsure if your video is already indexed, you can go to google.com/video and search for the URL of the page your video is on. If it appears with a snippet, then you know that your video has been properly crawled and indexed.
Be Patient to See Results
Once you get your videos optimized to be indexed, you will need to give it a few days before they start coming up in searches. Google’s crawler for videos, Googlebot Video, does not crawl sites as frequently as Googlebot does, so it can take a little time before they begin to show up. This is often dependent on the size of the video and your site’s domain authority.
Improve the Ranking of the Video
After you have ensured that your videos are being properly crawled and indexed by search engines, you next need to work on optimizing them so they can start going up in the search engine results.
Video Title Optimization
One of the most important tasks you can do to optimize your videos is to improve your videos’ titles. You can compare the clicks on multiple videos on your site that are of a similar style and examine the title structure of them to look for a common thread in the clicks. You can also simply make subtle updates to your video titles to see if that improves anything.
Video Thumbnail
Your video thumbnail is much more important than you might think. This is the first thing someone will see in the search engine results, so you want it to look good to entice them to click on your site. Take the time to create an attractive and custom thumbnail for every video on your site. You can pick a pre-generated one on most platforms, but you are giving it a personal touch by creating a custom one.
Meta Description
Providing a meta description for your video will also help provide context in Google searches. It gives you another space to optimize and input some important keywords, and it gives people a little more context into your video before they click on the link.
Captions
Captions are one of the other important things to consider including in your videos. It makes them more accessible to people with disabilities and people secretly watching videos at their desks with the sound off. You can note in the metadata you provide to Schema.org that the video includes captions too. This will tell crawlers that are unable to go over the videos what is in them. This can help increase the relevancy of keywords in your videos, and it should also increase how often your video appears in searches.
Measure Traffic from Searches
When optimizing anything, it is not a one-and-done situation; SEO is something that needs to be worked on regularly to ensure you get to the top and stay there. You can track your traffic through Google Search Console to see how your videos are doing and make optimization adjustments accordingly.
Are YouTube SEO and Video SEO the same thing?
No. While Google may own YouTube and you see YouTube videos show up in your Google searches, optimizing a video on your site and one on your YouTube channel are entirely different things. Anything on YouTube gets indexed automatically, and it is not directly on your website. However, if you tend to upload your videos to YouTube before embedding them in your website, you might be able to extend your video reach by having an optimized video in both places.
You can’t afford to miss out on video SEO searches. Our Oregon Advertising team will make sure that you don’t. Give us a call today.