With the increasing dominance of video as the preferred content format across platforms and social media sites, businesses and marketers are transitioning to a video-first strategy, not just to engage and highlight their brands, but to build the overall SEO authority surrounding their main sites.
Videos deliver content in an easy to consume and flexible manner while retaining the value and relevance of the context. However, videos can do a lot more than just promote your brand or generate leads; they can effectively boost your website SEO to give you better rankings on search results.
In this post, let us look at some effective ways to use videos to improve your website’s search engine optimization and get it discovered.
1. Pick The Right Hosting Platform
The choice of video hosting platform is a crucial step to using video marketing for better ranking. It depends a lot on the purpose of video optimization – whether you are using it to spread brand awareness, gain traffic or convert leads.
YouTube, being the second-biggest search engine, is the best platform to host your videos. This will also save you from increased load times and taking up too many resources at your web host.
2. Add A Video Transcript
Most videos on Facebook and other platforms are watched without sound, so it is essential that you include a video transcript to facilitate watching it anywhere at any time.
The additional text provided in the video makes it easier for search bots to index videos, allowing your videos to get ranked higher on search results for queries.
3. Insert Keywords Naturally
Most marketers who are just getting started with video marketing have the habit of stuffing keywords, even those that are barely relevant, just to increase view counts.
However, this is counterproductive, and can often result in lower engagement metrics as your video ends up in front of audiences that may not be interested in your topic, resulting in lower rankings overall.
Make sure to insert keywords naturally while only focusing on the end-user and user experience in mind for optimum results.
4. Embed Videos On Your Website
A key metric tracked by Youtube and search engines is the number of embeds a particular video gets. By embedding your own videos on your website, you can kickstart a chain that could eventually help your content gain traction.
Your website needs to have videos for better engagement and conveying information, so the best way to do it would be to upload your video on Youtube, and then embed it onto your site.
5. Post On Social Media
Facebook users watch about 100 million hours of video on the platform. Research says that video content would get up to 135% more attention and interaction as compared to posts containing images.
Increasing focus on video creation has resulted in more shareable content garnering increased website traffic. Platforms like Instagram and Facebook see mass video consumption which means your video is likely to get more clicks if shared on social media networks.
With the proliferation of simple-to-use online video maker tools, creating, editing, and repurposing of content has brought about endless possibilities, which only continue to improve.
6. Give Your Video Some Context
Posting your video anywhere does not make much sense. Make sure you embed the video where it is highly relevant and add related text and visual content around it. You can also include a transcript to target more keywords and convert visual graphics to JPEG files.
The better the search engine understands how your video fits into the content on the page, the better are your chances of ranking higher.
7. Make Sure The Video Delivers Value
The video you create should educate potential customers by answering the questions they may have about your products or brand, thus helping them make a buying decision.
By delivering value consistently, you establish a sense of credibility and authority which drives the search engines to boost your pages further. Q&A videos and product demonstrations are great choices for product pages. You can use videos on blogs to provide an alternative to educational material.
8. Don’t Ignore The Technical Details
Uploading your video on a hosting site is not enough. It is important to enter the correct information on the backend to help crawlers better prioritize and categorize the content.
YouTube, for example, uses keywords, title tags, comments, video length, tags, likes and dislikes, and other details to create the video ranking.
While not all of this information is in your control, you can work on those you can control, so you know you have done the best to boost your video ranking.
9. Optimize Load Times
Page load time is an important factor affecting SEO as it affects the user experience. Most viewers tend to turn away from slow-loading sites.
So, it is best to use optimization techniques like thumbnails to improve the video performance on Google as well as streaming platforms.
10. Be Consistent
Video marketing is not something that you can do one time and get instant results. Dedication and consistency are key to success.
You should make consistent efforts to deliver value and work not just for ranking a keyword but for several other relevant keywords matching the search intent of the user. Seeing how well it works encourages you to create more content.
11. Backlink From YouTube video
Though links shared on YouTube videos don’t always result in quality traffic, unless it’s an incredibly viral video, you can still generate plenty of SEO link juice.
Add your webpage to your YouTube channel profile and insert the link in the video description, to maximize this, while ensuring that it doesn’t come across as spam.
12. Use A Video Sitemap
Though information on the video sitemap duplicates some keyword labels, it is a different technique and should deliver results. Video sitemaps are an addition to the general sitemap of your website.
Some of the metadata you can edit include rating, duration, view count, whether the video is embedded, and other details.
Final Thoughts
People love videos, and if recent trends on video consumption are anything to go by, this format is going to dominate content on the internet, over the next few years.
Ensure that you use video marketing for its power and impact on your website SEO and get your site ranking better on search results.
