Explainer videos or white-board animation, it takes a lot of time and effort to create a video for online marketing. Videos are said to now occupy a more strategic part of the conversation. According to one fo the forecasts, 74% of all internet traffic will be video by 2017.
It’s supposed to be an exciting time for consumers and video creators – From the consumers’ perspective 43% of people want to see more video content from marketers. On the other hand, 51.9% of marketing professionals consider the video to be the best type of content. So why, even after being hailed as a fun and most effective ways of online marketing, online video still remains the most underutilized content when it comes to SEO.
But here’s what you are missing in your cup of tea – online videos could be the most powerful form of contribution to your overall SEO strategy if used correctly. Let’s take you through some of the best ways to get started with your online video SEO marketing.
- Create Informative Videos
Informative videos will always remain valuable to your business. It will help you to generate social shares as well as help you to build links, which would indirectly affect your website rank on the search engine. However, creating an informative video involves working around the two important factors –
- What do you want to talk about
- Who do you want to link your video to
The point is, creating informative videos will help you to evoke a strong sense of emotional reaction that will encourage them to share your business. For that you will have to connect to the right target audience.
Take the example of the Dollar Shave Club video. It was produced for the purpose of brand awareness. However, following its upload in 2012, the video started to gain immediate attention. Part of the credit goes to its PR strategy and the amusing concept, but overall it was the informative content that increased its popularity overnight.
- Categorize Your Videos
If you are setting up a video gallery from where all your videos would be available, make sure you do not forget to categorize it. This makes it difficult for people who are interested to work with you, to search for the appropriate video sample to help them understand what kind of work you usually do. That creates a very bad user experience for a visitor. If the gallery is a part of your web page, then unhappy visitors leaving the page can increase the number of bounce rates.
The best approach would be to create a separate landing page for each videos. This will help the search engine to index each video asset individually.
- Are Your Smart with Your Metadata?
Smart content organization with rich metadata are a smart way to get the most out of your video resource library. In addition, do not forget to populate hidden tags in the HTML code of the video landing pages. Do it specifically for your Facebook’s OpenGraph tags, Twitter Card tags, and Schema.org’s microdata tags.
- Unleash the Benefits of Transcriptions
Using transcriptions can have a major impact on your search engine rank. Add the video transcriptions directly to the HTML section of the page where you are hosting your video. This will unlock the content of your video making it easy for visitors to follow while they are watching the video. You could embed relevant keywords in your transcription, thereby enriching the content value for the search engine.
- Add Captions
Captions along with a transcription will provide the substantial text that you need to get over the top of your competitors.
- Using Video Formats
Using relevant video formats can help you to build up the authority on the search engine. It also helps you to provide the most contextual information in a way that search engines can detect and rank for its potential information.
- Get a Video Sitemap
Do you have a properly configured video sitemap? It is essential for building the nuts and the bolts of your video SEO. You can look for an online video platform that will help to automate the video sitemap every time a new video gets added.
Every entry to the video site map but be directly connected to the video landing page. This will indirectly affect the value of your video gallery or the video resource site.
- Host Your Videos in Your Own Domain
It is a very essential thing even if you are hosting the videos on social platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. Hosting a video on your own domain will help you to drive the traffic automatically to your website. Or else, most of the credit goes to the social search engine platforms, which also contributes when it comes to rank building. You would want to get the credit and build your page rank. So why not host the video in your own domain?
- Use the Right Social Media Platform
It is important. Platforms like YouTube offers universal video playback, which maximizes convenience for both the marketer as well as the viewer. Besides, YouTube is also known for its mobile playback and app thereby providing an effective mobile optimization.
However, try to avoid platforms like Flash. That’s because it makes it difficult for the search engines to identify your video. It is not user friendly and can turn out to be very annoying for your online visitors. Therefore make sure that you do not have Flash in any part of your website, unless its application is needed.
- Prioritize on Viewer Feedback
It is one of the most basic ways to build up your website’s organic rank. The ranking formula of YouTube is generally determined by the number of likes, shares, and comments that a video receives. It also indicates how much viewers are actually engaging with your video content. Therefore, encourage viewers to leave behind positive feedbacks that will help search engines like Google and YouTube to value your content accordingly.
Conclusion
Experiment with different marketing and engagement strategies to build your own SEO rule.
There is no fixed SEO rule in digital marketing. The search engine is a changing landscape. So optimizing your video content means experimenting with different strategies and see what result you get for your business. Hope the above 10 tips will help you to get started with your video SEO.
Image Courtesy: Pixabay.com
