How to use SEO for video content

It’s a powerful way to engage users and boost your online presence. However, simply creating great videos isn’t enough – you need to optimise them for search engines to make sure they reach the right audience. Discover new strategies to boost your video rankings on search engines for maximum visibility and engagement.

1. Choose the right keywords

Just like traditional SEO, video SEO starts with keyword research. You’ll want to discover relevant keywords with high search volume and low competition to have the best chance of ranking high on search engine results pages (SERPs). You can try using video-specific keywords such as ‘how to’, ‘tutorial’ or ‘review’ as well as long-tail keywords to target a specific audience. If there are any topics currently trending in your industry, it would be a good time to jump on the bandwagon and make a quality video using the trending keywords to capitalise on it.

2. Optimise video titles and descriptions

A well-crafted title and description can make a huge difference in rankings and isn’t dissimilar from writing an optimised title and opening paragraph for an article. As usual, you’ll want to include your primary keyword naturally in the title, making sure it sounds engaging and isn’t too long. Your description should be compelling, explaining what the video entails and including timestamps if necessary as well as your call to action. Your timestamps can be included on SERPs (see below) as ‘key moments’, allowing users to pick up your content from the exact moment they need it. Don’t forget to optimise the file name of your video before or when uploading it, instead of leaving it as something like video123.mp4 since this can also help search engines understand your content better.

3. Use tags wisely

Tags and categories play a crucial role in optimising your video content by helping search engines understand your content, suggesting it to the right audience and improving your discoverability. Choosing the right tags will come from your initial keyword research by incorporating your primary and secondary keywords as well as any relevant competitor or trending tags you might want to include. While we may be used to short hashtags, don’t miss out on tagging long-tail keywords as well to improve rankings on conversational and voice search queries.

Video tags: What not to do

• Do not use too many tags and avoid using the same words in your tags over and over again (known as keyword stuffing). Google frowns upon over-tagging content, stating that using over 60 hashtags will result in all tags being ignored and applying too many tags can even lead to your video being removed from uploads or searches on YouTube.
• Don’t ignore the importance of ordering your tags. Prioritise the most relevant tags first since sites such as YouTube consider the first few tags more important and push your content based on those.
• Avoid irrelevant tags! It may be tempting to include popular or trending tags that aren’t too relevant to your content as an attempt to boost your views. However, this can backfire and hurt your rankings if the audience don’t relate to your content, and it doesn’t answer their queries.

4. Add captions and transcriptions

Captions and transcriptions make your videos accessible to a wider audience, including non-native speakers, those with hearing impairments and those who may choose to watch a video without sound (I’ll never understand why). They also help search engines understand your content more effectively since Google and YouTube can’t ‘watch’ videos the way humans do, they rely on text elements to understand and rank your content. You can use automatic captioning tools to save time or upload a custom transcript.

5. Embed videos on your website

Embedding videos in blog posts or landing pages can improve page dwell time as well as target multimodal search queries to bring users to your website – your page can appear in both Google search and Google video search results! There are a few choices you have to make when it comes to embedding videos on your web page, such as whether you’re going to self-host the video or use a third-party platform like YouTube or Vimeo to host it for you. Using a third-party platform can grant you the SEO benefits of having an embedded video with the lowest effect on site speed. You’ll also need to decide where on the page would be the best placement for your video which is important for engagement, and this depends on your content:

• If the video is your shining star and can answer users’ search queries, you might want to keep it at the top of the page, above your written content so it’s the first thing users see and engage with.
• If your video is relevant to a specific part of your blog, then embedding it within the text where it naturally fits can be the best option.
• If you’re mainly using the video for marketing, such as showcasing a product or service visually, placing it near a call to action will be beneficial.

6. Use a video XML sitemap

A video XML sitemap is an essential tool for improving your video’s visibility on SERPs. It provides search engines with detailed information about your video content, making it easier for them to index and rank your videos. Since search engines don’t crawl video content as easily as text, a video XML sitemap helps by providing direct URLs to your video files, giving search engines detailed metadata and ensures all the videos on your site are indexed as sometimes they can be missed! By including all this information for crawl bots, your videos have a higher chance of being displayed on Google’s video carousel and featured snippets.

7. Make the most of social media and backlinks

This shouldn’t come as a surprise but just like traditional SEO, you’ll want to promote your content through social media and build high-quality backlinks to truly maximise reach and visibility. While each social media platform has its own best practices for video sharing, the main idea is to spread your content far and wide with a link or call to action bringing users back to your website or original video. When using social media to do this, don’t forget to respond to comments and encourage engagement to boost your metrics.

Building backlinks, both internal and external are well known methods to increase your rankings on search engines. Creating high quality content that others want to share and link to as well as reaching out to get featured in industry blogs and publications can set you on the right path.

Need a hand optimising your content? Look no further!

If you’re looking to optimise your video content, website or blog articles for search engines, the amazing SEO team at Adido can help you out! With overflowing knowledge and expertise on all things SEO, we can give your content the extra nudge it needs to start ranking higher on SERPs. Contact us today for more information!