By now you’ve probably heard all about how SEO can maximize your digital marketing efforts and generate more leads, but how much do you know about video SEO? Using video content on your website is a great way to boost your search page rankings, and there are even more ways you can optimize video content.
In this article, we’ll tell you all about video SEO and how you can use video rich snippets and other tactics to boost your search rankings to the highest level.
What Is Video SEO?
Video SEO is a strategy you can use to increase traffic to the video content on your website through Google and other search engines. There are four main components of a good video SEO strategy: video rich snippets; video site map; closed captions; and link building.
Video Rich Snippets
Rich snippets enrich the code on your video pages to give search indexers specific information about your content. The snippets add meta tags that point out video information like source, duration, and embed URL. This helps provide structure data that search engine sites use to describe your video to searchers and classify the page content.
It would take a developer quite a long time to manually add video rich snippets to all the video content on your page. However, digital marketing agencies that offer video SEO have access to AI tools that can optimize video content in an instant. These tools can analyze algorithms in real-time and generate code based on the variables and parameters you set.
To use these tools, you upload your video into the AI tool platform. You’ll add a title and description of the video, and then a landing page is generated. It is important to add as much information as possible at this step because this is where your rich snippet will pull from. Finally, use the embed code generated by the tool to add the content to your website. The video rich snippet will already be contained within that embed code.
Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see immediate increases in your web traffic. It can take a few weeks or even a month or more for Google to crawl the code and update their indexes. Even with a few weeks of waiting, investing in video rich snippets is the most valuable tactic you can employ.
Video Site Map
Once your code is optimized, the next step in a video SEO strategy is to create a video sitemap on your webpage. This will add another layer of optimization by making your videos easy to find. A video site map uses a dynamic clip list with meta tags. Once the site map is created, it needs to be hosted on your website. After it is embedded on your site, you will submit the video sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, and you will start to see traffic to your video content pick up.
Closed Captioning
Not only is using closed captioning a best practice to make your content accessible to users of all abilities, but it can also do wonders for optimizing your video content. The closed captioning tracks on your videos contain microdata that helps search engines find and classify your content. Additionally, having the captioning adds much more descriptive detail to your video and allows it to be found in broader search parameters.
There are many tools available that auto-generate closed captioning tracks. You simply upload your video to the tool, and it will analyze the audio from your content and generate the closed captions. You can then check the captions for errors and correct them as necessary. The tool then exports the video file with captions into a single file, which you can then upload onto your website.
The text of the closed captioning is indexed and increases your keyword depth. Aside from boosting SEO, closed captioning can also make your content more engaging. Video content with closed captioning can lead to a longer user watch time and increase the audience size, which also play an important part in your search rankings.
Link Building
Earning high-quality backlinks to your video content is another great way to boost your search page rankings. Link building is a common SEO practice that involves developing relationships with other content creators who work in a niche or industry related to yours. You can do this to help optimize your video content.
Once you identify some prospects from popular websites, you reach out to them with information about the video you’re trying to promote and ask if they have any interest in linking to it from their website. You’ll see the best benefit if your video is embedded on their site. Be sure to ask for your site to be credited for the backlink.
Improve Your Video Quality
It might be difficult to come up with a truly unique take on your products or services, especially if you are in an industry with lots of options on the market. But using video gives you an opportunity to be creative and set yourself apart from the competition. It might be easier to take a basic approach to video or jump on the latest trends, but viewers quickly get bored with content they’ve already seen. They expect video content that is new and engaging.
Before you focus on video SEO, you might consider using a video production company with experience in creating internet videos. These companies are familiar with creating unique and engaging brand videos, like explainer videos and other brand content. Video production companies that frequently work with internet videos may also be able to help you with your video SEO.
Media Pouch: Video Production to Get You Noticed
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