Increase Your Video’s SEO With These 5 Tips
SEO (search engine optimization) for your website is important for page ranking and driving conversions. But, did you know that there’s a different strategy for getting your videos ranked using SEO? Let us break it down.
1. Choose your video platform wisely. If your focus is brand awareness and thought leadership then YouTube or Vimeo is the way to go! However, if you’re looking to increase your website traffic or convert leads, then it may be worth using a platform like Wistia that inserts metadata automatically. Metadata is the information about your video file that isn’t visible to the public (see the image to the right). Read more about choosing a hosting platform here.
2. Upload a video transcript. Since SEO is based on text, it’s important for search “bots” to be able to detect keywords and phrases associated with your video. As a bonus, having closed captioning and transcripts will make your videos available to a wider audience. See YouTube’s tips for creating a transcript file for more information.
3. Create an engaging thumbnail. The thumbnail is the first impression
your video makes, and directly impacts the click through rate (CTR). Research shows that videos with custom human thumbnails receive a 30% higher play rate. When possible, your thumbnail should be 1) high quality, 2) engaging, and 3) contain a person. Finally, it’s important that the thumbnail is relevant to what the user is searching for. This is because a relevant thumbnail that appears further down the search results page may still receive more clicks because of how it relates to a topic and earns people’s attention.
4. Spend time curating your video title, description, and meta tags. Don’t overwhelm a user with keywords. Instead, pick 1-2 to highlight and create a title that’s useful and interesting. Try brainstorming on these phrases when you’re producing your next video title.
How To _____________
5 Ways to ____________
Become A Millionaire Doing ____________
Why Are You Still ______________?
10 Reasons Why ___________
5. Embed the video you want ranked first on the page. Since Google only indexes one video per page, you’ll want your strongest content as the first thing the search engine sees. As a general rule for ranking your videos, it’s best not to have more than one video per webpage. On the same note, don’t compete with yourself by embedding the same video in multiple places on your site. Instead, allow it to live on one, relevant webpage.
