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Video SEO simply optimizes your video to be indexed and ranked on engine pages for relevant keyword searches. There are many strategies to give them a higher chance of ranking.
Video content is extremely important for your digital marketing and online brand awareness. Ranking videos well on Google and YouTube is a very engaging way to promote your business and products and increases the chance of conversions. It is a visibility media to be used in SEO if your activity lends itself to it, especially in the E-commerce SEO sector which is very competitive.
Unfortunately, given the amount of video content already present on the internet, it is necessary to put in place an SEO strategy in order to stand out and obtain the expected visibility.
Putting money and effort into producing video content can yield amazing results from both an SEO and marketing perspective.
This article aims to give you the best practices and tips to apply to hope to see them rank at the top of the targeted keywords. Video is a great medium to use in your content marketing strategies.
What is Video SEO?
SEO is simply about optimizing your video’s indexing and ranking for relevant keyword searches. This work can extend to the positioning in the results of YouTube which is the second engine in the world.
For some queries, a video is a better result than a website and can offer a better quality experience (report, tutorial, test, demonstration…).
Why is YouTube the best Hosting Platform?
YouTube is the most used video search tool in the world after Google. Therefore, to rank your videos, you need to understand how this algorithm works.
There are many other hosting and sharing platforms like Vimeo or Dailymotion, but none of them has its notoriety and importance. Not using video is a deficiency, just like not using the traffic generated by referencing photos on Google Images.
YouTube is:
- The second most visited site in the world.
- The second social network with more than 2 billion users in more than 91 countries.
- The site that captures 12% of global traffic at certain times of the day.
The large user base, consisting of a very active audience, represents a great potential for your marketing and gives you a chance to reach a huge part of your target audience.
By creating useful and quality content and optimizing it, you can obtain significant visibility there, but also on Google since videos have enormous SEO potential and dominate the results.
What are the SEO Criteria?
It is important to know the rules that govern the algorithm for ranking videos on the platform to obtain visibility and hope to position at the top of searches. Engagement is the number one signal on YouTube. Here are some tips to boost their visibility.
The main components of user engagement are:
- Watch Duration: This is the watch time your video has accumulated.
- Audience retention: this is the percentage viewed on average.
- Number of views: as the name suggests, this is the number of total views.
- Number of shares: the number of times it has been shared.
- Number of subscribers: the number of subscribers to the YouTube channel.
- Ratings and comments: the number of users who liked or disliked them, as well as the activity in the comments section.
- Embeds: The number of times the video has been embedded on other websites.
- Backlinks: the number of links pointing to it.
How to increase your views?
This article explains how to increase a video’s views on the YouTube platform by creating quality content and optimizing marketing elements as much as possible to attract clicks and views.
How to Optimize the SEO of a Video?
The Duration
Users are looking for relevant and useful videos and YouTube wants to satisfy its users by delivering compelling videos that effectively cover the subject they are looking for.
By creating ones that provide quality content and drive engagement, you appeal to YouTube, which wants to keep visitors on its site as long as possible.
In general, the longer it is, the more value you can provide. This is especially true for those that are informative such as tests and tutorials.
If a topic deserves and lends itself to further investigation, a longer video of 10-16 minutes is relevant, keeping in mind that the goal is to get the majority of viewers to the end.
As seen above, these metrics must also be good:
- Number of seconds watched
- Comments
- I like I do not like
- Social actions
The content must be of quality and must not be lengthy without reason or relevance at the risk of boring visitors.
The File Name
By including the targeted keywords in the file name, you can tell its algorithms what the video is about. Just like image naming on a web page, file naming is not to be overlooked.
The Title
Titles are extremely important and are a major factor. They should be engaging and concise, you don’t want to use too many words, but just enough to give users a good reason to click through to watch your video. Thumbnails and titles work in tandem to grab attention and entice users to click to watch it.
In order to best optimize your title, use these elements:
- Target keywords
- hooks
- Secondary keywords and annotations
- Thumbnail in tune
CTRs and views play a vital role in rankings. Creating compelling headlines will give you an SEO edge.
Avoid those that are misleading or too “clickbait” which can generate more clicks and views for you, but which will cause your audience’s retention indicator to drop.
The Description
YouTube displays the first 125 characters of your video descriptions. By optimizing this description, you will be able to encourage people to click and watch it.
Description Optimization Tips:
- Summarize in text format.
- Include relevant keywords.
- Link to your site or landing page.
- Add links to other videos on your channel.
- Make links to your social networks.
Use keyword research to find the most relevant phrases that are likely to drive traffic.
Use Tags
Tags can help to understand better what your video is about. It’s not a magic bullet for positioning on specific keywords, but it’s still good to fill them in.
You can specify ten tags:
- Specific tags (keywords).
- Tags describing the type (tutorial, test, review…).
- Relevant niche tags in your industry.
Make a Playlist
By integrating your videos into a Playlist whose name is optimized and evocative, you help the algorithms a little more to understand its subject. You can create several playlists to group them by themes and groups of keywords with targeted annotations…
Customize Thumbnails
Your video thumbnail is the first thing users notice, so make it intriguing and captivating. Thumbnails are essential for attracting attention. By adding a custom thumbnail, you can control a user’s first impression, and it will look better than the thumbnails offered automatically by YouTube from capture.
Some tips:
- Use bright, contrasting colors.
- Include visual cues (colors, images, shapes, personality) consistent with your brand.
- Attract attention with readable bold text.
- Be original on the visuals used without falling into the click trap.
Customizing the featured thumbnails will lead to a significant increase in click-through rates (CTR).
Take advantage of social media
Social media has changed human behavior and forced Google and YouTube to factor it into their ranking factors.
If you want to boost the visibility of your videos, share them as much as possible by automatically syncing your channel with your social accounts to automate sharing.
Use an SRT File to Add Subtitles
They can enhance the viewing experience. But transcripts also help bots understand what your video is about because they have more text to analyze.
They can be crawled, so YouTube and others can use the transcripts to understand your content better, helping to rank for relevant keywords.
Optimize the Presentation of Your Channel
Optimizing your channel will help make your videos more visible and make your channel more credible in the eyes of YouTube and viewers.
It can be done through different levers:
- Create a background image and a profile presentation image. Think about optimizing image file tags.
- Complete the channel presentation with quality text.
- Create links to your channel from your other sites to drive traffic and help associate the channel with your business.
- Subscribe to other channels addressing the same themes and topics to send a consistent signal.
Optimize for Engagement
It plays an essential role. You must therefore stimulate activity: viewing, sharing, comments, likes…
- Directly ask your audience to like and share your videos.
- Invite people to subscribe and like.
- Give good reasons to comment, create the buzz..
- Stimulate it by replying to the comment and restarting the conversations.
Embed Video on Your Pages
Another tip to improve your YouTube Video SEO is to embed videos in your blog and other sites.
Why share on your sites:
- Integrations are a signal of engagement.
- An embed counts as a link.
- The videos will be visible to more potential visitors.
Integrating them on your website will also bring benefits to it. Indeed, publications with video generate three times more backlinks. The most engaging ones will reduce the bounce rate and dwell time on your site.
Promote Your Videos and Build Links
Both YouTube and Google depend on authority signals to rank videos and backlinks. This is why it is essential to promote them and create links to them.
For your website, you will need to set up a netlinking strategy using the most appropriate means. You need to promote not only your videos but also your channel. Both need backlinks to build authority. If you want to download a YouTube video, here is a guide on how to download a YouTube video with GenYouTube.
What are Video Ranking Factors?
Google forgoes anything about engagement and insists on some more traditional signals, including two main ones:
- Relevance: it must be relevant to the query entered and the user’s intentions.
- Authority: popularity takes into account the number of backlinks and referring sites pointing to it.
Although each of the two engines uses different factors, the optimization steps largely overlap.
How to Reference a Video?
Here are some tips and advice to apply:
- Google wants to provide the best possible results based on their intent. If the videos can be relevant to answer the questions formulated by the Internet user, he can decide to offer them. Thus, depending on the requests, the presence of videos may be more or less important.
- Find the right keywords: The first step is to do some keyword research to identify high-demand topics to create videos on.
- Choose the right topics: Look for topics that are relevant to your business, but also topics that interest you. Some types work very well (information and news, how-to, tutorials, reviews and tests of popular products, entertainment and humor).
- Observe what works: By observing the style of results that are displayed on your target queries, you will already have an idea of what works best.
- Insert a transcript in text format: Transcripts not only make your videos more accessible to a wider audience, but they also make them more readable by robots because they contain additional text on the page that helps robots identify the topic being discussed.
- Make sure your thumbnail image is engaging. The thumbnail will be visible if it comes up in a search, so it plays an important role in attracting the click.
- Pay attention to the title and description: Using primary and secondary keywords in your titles and descriptions will increase your chances of showing your video on different keyword combinations.
- Work on page texts: make sure the rest of your page is relevant to the video and optimized for the targeted keywords. You cannot rely solely on its optimization to hope for good positioning. It is just as important to work on the referencing of the texts present on the page.
- Make the video the center of the page: it should not be lost at the bottom of the page. It must be highlighted to stimulate interaction with visitors.
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