Video has become the most compelling and vibrant content on the internet. Optimizing your videos makes it easier for your viewers, and ensures a great video experience. Video marketing, as we see it now, is the future search engine optimization. Modern internet users like to digest video much more than reading plain text.
These days, much more video is being uploaded to websites, social media, and other platforms as competition continues to build between those sites. So, while you can’t deny the ability video has to bring in customers, drive traffic, and engage users, their large file size can still prevent you from obtaining the ranking you want.
In this article, we are going to look at how you can optimize your videos for the web and why optimizing your videos is so important to improve your results, especially for your conversions.
Let’s start with the Why.
Why Is Video Optimization So Important for Video Content Today?
If you are looking for a way to capture your audience’s attention, video is the way to do it. When placed correctly, video can be highly engaging and can boost your site’s professional look.
But you can’t just post and pray your videos will drive conversions. They need to be right sized, edited correctly, and have the right features like captions and subtitles. These are a few of the core elements of video optimization. Making sure these elements are taken care of is the difference between booking more calls and a laggy, ineffective website.
Regardless of how important or perfectly designed your video content is, Google will not rank your website nearly as high if you are having high bounce rates or have slow or poor page loading times. That’s why you need to optimize your video for the web. When you optimize video for the web, your videos will load faster, and you will be able to maintain and increase the traffic needed to help drive your video SEO efforts.
How to Optimize Video for the Web
Let’s take a look at some ways that you can make sure your video optimization is on lock for your site.
The Right File for Video Optimization
First, make sure you are using the right video file. If you are looking to optimize video for the web, there are a number of ways that it can be accomplished without spending a ton of time.
For starters, there are a ton of different video file types, but the most common (and the best) is .mp4. An .mp4 offers very good video quality with a smaller file size. These are used if your end goal is posting to YouTube or Vimeo.
The Right File Size Is Key to Video Optimization
If your video optimization is not in check, your site load speeds will pay the price. With larger videos, this will usually cause your page to load slower than normal. This can drive users to become impatient, which may result in a loss of viewers and traffic to your site. That’s why it’s imperative to use the right file size for your video optimization. Doing so will improve your video SEO performance.
If you are looking to optimize a video with a large file size and a high-grade quality, you can use .mov or .wmv platforms. However, you might need to use a VLC player to make sure your video can work on both Mac and Windows computers.
Once you have chosen the file type, you need to make sure your video is embeddable. You can do this by putting it on YouTube or Vimeo and then embedding it from there. This will allow your video to be compressed automatically without sacrificing the quality.
Make Sure Your Videos Are the Right Length
Video optimization requires you to focus on your video length. If the length of your video does not match the reason or type, it can be counterproductive for both your site and your viewers.
So, what video lengths should you consider? For website videos (things such as landing page videos, sales, or email marketing) most should be under one minute. Explanation videos should be shorter than a minute and a half, while tutorials should never be any longer than four minutes.
You will also want to make your videos mobile-friendly. The majority of people today are consuming their content through their phones. If you choose to not optimize your video for mobile viewing, you will be losing out on a lot of potential viewers and customers.
The Video Optimization Language
Video optimization can also be helped by making videos HTML5 optimized. HTML5 is a coding language written to optimize video content that is viewed on the web. For the best results, use WebM and MP4 formats with HTML5.
WebM is a format that was used to develop high quality playing videos in a web browser. It uses VP8 and VP9 codecs to play different audio and video files on different devices.
MP4 is also very popular as it allows for streaming of all types of audio and video in multiple resolutions. You can use it as a container or encoding format to stream any content using HTTP.
Include Captions & Subtitles
Finally, you should always make sure to include captions and subtitles. You may have noticed that most of your streaming services utilize captions and subtitles for their shows and movies. If you’ve ever tried to watch something on public transit, or a noisy environment you know why.
Captions and subtitles allow for those people watching the video to follow along, whether they can hear the video or not. Not to mention, this also makes your video ADA compliant, making it easier for the hearing impaired to view your content.
And they are also key for video SEO as they give a transcript to Google and other search engines so that they know what your video about. This helps to translate your keywords so that your video can be indexed in search results.
Media Pouch Can Optimize Your Videos
If you are looking to optimize your video so that you can drive traffic to your website or chosen video platform, Media Pouch can help you get there. With proven success, Media Pouch has become Austin’s leading video production company. Providing epic video and production to all industries, Media Pouch can help your video content get in front of more people so you can grow your business in the right way. Contact us today to get started today.
