How to Improve Your Video’s Performance with SEO
Video is the biggest brand influencer that you could use, so make sure your videos are visible, learn how to improve your video’s performance with SEO.
For the past decade, video content has become one of the breakout trends in the marketing world year after year.
Video content continues to be an integral part of branding. No matter what industry you’re in, there is someone building their brand’s authority through video content.
Most businesses have since included it as part of their marketing strategy.
Video content has the potential of increasing traffic to your website, generate leads, influencing sales, and promote brand understanding and reception.
However, that all depends on your video’s performance…
As such, the online space is crowded with many different content creators. When you post your video, it is not a guarantee that it will reach your target audience.
Will they even see it in the first place? You need to have a strategy to increase its visibility.
Consider these SEO tactics to improve your video’s performance and ensure your video ranks well in Google.
Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash
1. Create a Strong Strategy
The first step is to formulate a strong growth strategy that will help your video perform better on YouTube and search engines like Google.
YouTube and Google both rank videos better based on engagement metrics, so you need to come up with a plan as to how you will get people to engage with your content.
Before you even begin shooting your video, you need to think to yourself how to create content that will make people stick around till the end, and like your video.
Some key tips for doing this are:
- Meaningful Story Telling
- Emotional Impact
- Compelling/Innovative Products
You need to use at least 1 or all 3 of these components in your video in order to spark and maintain the interest of your audience.
If you can master at least one of these aspects in content creation, you will be able to drive tons of traffic that engage with your video. This will, in turn, increase its rankings on Google and the YouTube search algorithm.
For more information on how to create a successful video campaign, check out this article.
2. Choose Strong Keywords
Search engines like google and YouTube have an algorithm that they run all their content through to determine the best video to be recommended to visitors for their search entries.
This is a ranking factor used to determine which videos end up at the top of each search engine results page (SERP).
Do you want to climb to the top of search engine results? You will need to incorporate relevant keywords into your videos.
Conduct keyword research to learn what search entries people make when looking for content such as yours.
Use these keywords strategically in your titles and descriptions. Since your title should be catchy as well, make it interesting, and use emotions to spark curiosity while still maintaining the place of the keywords.
Additionally, use the keywords in your descriptions and tags, without keyword stuffing.
As a ground rule, include multiple tags that include the video category, video content, shoot location, and the cast in the video.
Check out this article on how to research keywords for more in-depth information on this topic.
3. Optimize Titles and Descriptions
Make your title specific and relevant.
It should inform the audience exactly what they should expect to see in the video.
Remember the video titles are almost always their initial interaction with your content.
If your title is clear and compelling, viewers will take a very short time before deciding to click on your video.
Make sure your title and description are concise, engaging, and relevant.
Very long titles are boring. Viewers may lose interest and ignore it.
If it is too short, they might doubt if it is relevant to their search entries.
A title of about 60 characters is great. This would just be enough to inform your viewers what they are about to watch at a glance.
Make your title interesting enough to compel a user to click. For instance, a video titled “My Home” won’t really grab viewers’ attention because it is fundamentally uninteresting as opposed to “My Eco-Friendly, Sustainable Modern Home”.
I mean, how many home videos have you seen in your lifetime? Create a title that reflects the specific content of your video. This way, your videos will have a greater chance of visibility in SERPs.
4. Carefully Select Thumbnails
They say, “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. However, in reality, most people do.
Look at your video’s thumbnail as the face of your video because this is the first thing your target audience sees when your video pops up.
Therefore, ensure to wow them at first glance. The thumbnail should be eye-catching; an image that makes your viewers just want to click on it.
To get the best thumbnail image, take time to create an appealing custom image that engages more with your audience.
You don’t want to use YouTube’s automatically generated screenshot, which is mediocre at the best of times.
The perfect YouTube thumbnail is one with a resolution of 1280 x 720 and an aspect ratio of 16:9. Make sure the image format is GIF, JPG, or PNG. It should have a file size of fewer than 2 Megapixels (MP).
A thumbnail can either promote or slander your video, when you customize your thumbnail, it enables your video to stand out from the crowd. It draws people closer, generates traffic, and tremendously increases click-through rates.
5. Pick The Right Video Platforms
It is fundamentally vital to choose the right video hosting platform, depending on the purpose of your video.
Why are you optimizing your video in the first place? Is it to create brand awareness? Is it to gain traffic or generate new leads?
Since this is best known to you, be sure to upload your videos on the right platform(s) that you know your audience uses the most. Conduct some research on this.
If you aim at building brand awareness through your videos, for instance, then YouTube and Vimeo are the ideal options for you.
They have the biggest video audience. However, note that if you are indexed on these sites most of your visitors will probably browse on those platforms and not your website.
Add a link to your website for them to visit your site as well. If you aim at increasing your website traffic, a platform such as Wistia is a good option for you.
It automatically adds SEO-friendly metadata for your videos, making it easier for them to get indexed and ranked.
Photo by Szabo Viktor on Unsplash
6. Create an Optimized Landing Page
It pays to build landing pages around your videos.
Google even suggests creating a landing page per video. Pick your best quality videos for that.
The result of this will be that your videos will be noticed more. Besides better ranking in such engines, you will reap such benefits as an increased number of visits to your website and reduced bounce rates.
A well-optimized landing page also increases the engagement of potential customers with your brand.
Remember, engagement is everything on Google and YouTube. By driving more successful engagements with your content, the more powerful of a boost you will get from their platforms.
In Conclusion
Search engine algorithms are always changing.
And with some of the most common trends like video and mobile surging over the last few years, it’s time more than ever to start thinking about incorporating video into your SEO strategy.
They can affect your search visibility and search engine ranking, affecting the performance of your website and, by extension, your business.
Create a landing page around your best videos and optimize it. Do your research and pick relevant keywords that will make your content ‘findable’.
Since these may also change, keep researching and find new relevant keywords. Additionally, carefully select a thumbnail that will represent your video well to its viewers. These tasks may seem simple but they have a lasting positive impact on the performance of your video.
