Are you wondering how to improve your video SEO? This article will give you tips on improving your video content and the accompanying pages to rank better in search engines. It includes advice and suggestions to help you get organic traffic for your videos.
SEO, Dwell Time, and Videos.
There are a lot of factors that impact SEO, but before we dive into those, let’s talk about the potential boost video content can have on a page. For example, it could increase your chances of showing up in search results under video searches and increase your pages’ perceived value to search engines.
The world of search engine optimization is constantly changing and a little hidden. A successful piece of content yesterday might not be so today because there’s often an algorithm change to determine ranking in the SERPS. To make matters worse, search engines rarely disclose when changes happen, so it can be hard to know what factors are essential for SEO-changing things without warning! It doesn’t stop people from doing their best, though; some try different things based on current success or failure rates. Other opinions are mixed because they constantly change with new information about rankings.
Add a Captivating Thumbnail
A good thumbnail is a vital part of video content. It’s often someone’s first impression of the video, whether they are doing a Google search that embeds the video or if you’re on its page and see an embedded thumbnail before clicking play. One should manually select their thumbnails for videos to ensure they always represent this content well. A few options include: using an online generator with sliders to skim through and find the best moment in time, uploading your custom image as a representative of your project (for instance, from it), or finding footage from another source. Like YouTube to use instead!
Embed the Page with SEO Best Practices
As part of this, the page it’s embedded on should follow best practices for SEO. This can be challenging as many strategies shift all the time; however, it pays to stay updated with current best practices. Some good ones include:
- Give this page a unique keyword, which any other page on your site will not use.
- To rank well in search engine results, you should include a relevant meta title and description on your page. It would be best if you also mentioned the keyword at least once in both (meta title and meta description).
- Include the keyword in an H1 tag on the page.
- Put your keyword in the page URL.
- The content on the page should be at least 300 words when we create it, but ideally much longer.
- It is essential to include your keyword in the first paragraph of your copy. You can also feature it a few more times throughout the body copy, and make sure to mention it in any sentence where you describe what you do or who you are targeting.
- Put images on the page, providing alt text for each one that contains a keyword.
Stay Relevant
On the other hand, if you embed a video in an unrelated article on another topic, it could easily confuse and frustrate the reader.
Video embedding to a webpage is an excellent way to improve performance. As a result, it can be alluring to try and cram video content on as many pages as possible. However, the video should line up with the page’s content so that viewers find it relevant too! Here’s one quick sanity check: “Will this video’s audience also find this article or copy on this page relevant?”
Enable Closed Captions for Your Video
Captions for video content have a lot of benefits. For example, it is much easier to comply with the law and satisfy customers than to increase SEO. However, captions benefit because some people can’t enjoy the content without them. If someone in a noisy environment or who’s hard-of-hearing spots videos without captions on their site, they might leave immediately if there are no other options available for consuming an audiovisual piece.
Automating the process of generating captions is a great way to save time and allow your business to be scalable. There are many ways you can do this, such as through IBM Watson, which has speech recognition capability. With it comes AI capabilities that will automatically generate captions for any content owner’s assets.
Insert Transcript Copy on Your Page
Captions benefit viewers and SEO: transcription. Captions are essential for viewer enjoyment and time spent with the video, but they also have another, less-direct impact on search engine optimization (SEO). Transcripts are text representations of content, so taking someone’s voice or speech and converting it to text is called “transcription.” To create captions, you need something close to a transcript. Transcriptions can help make your assets more scrapable by doubling as page copy. These copies provide context that can be picked up in a query. For example, you can take passages from the transcript or full transcripts and insert them into your pages; this will help direct visitors to your site when they conduct internet searches.
You can use IBM Watson to generate captions by downloading the associated VTT file. However, this raw file has timestamps which make it difficult for copy and pasting of text. But don’t worry! There are services like this white will remove the time stamps while leaving spaces between lines which both can be removed with online tools such as these. After that, content owners will have their transcripts, and they’ll be able to start adding them to pages so that rankings may improve.
Place the Video as the Center Point of Your Page
To give your embedded video an edge, try putting it early into the given content. The earlier visitors see it, the more likely they will watch and stay on your site for extended periods if it’s too far down in a piece- especially if there is also a transcript beneath this asset. Viewers might abandon their visit before realizing there was even anything about videos posted on these pages! Putting more content on the page can help when indexing is a good idea, but you want to avoid “burying” your video because of its placement.
Avoid Overloading a Page With Embedded Videos
We recommend only one embedded video per page. This is because if you have twelve embeds on a single page, Google will only index the first embedded video. So if you have five videos on a single page, generally, they can all be found by using Google search results- not in order of your choice if this seems like an issue for what you are trying to accomplish with your site design visually or content-wise then try putting the most “valuable” embed first and save yourself from having to scroll through the other eleven pages of links.
Restrict the Embedded Codes
Copying your content and embedding it on their site is often a common tactic to rank higher in search engine results. It can be hugely demotivating to go through the work of creating and promoting a video, only for another site that has scraped your video off of yours, outranking you in search results. To prevent this from happening again, restrict the embed code so that unless the URL of where you are posting it is www.mysite.com, then playback will not happen from wherever else they copy-pasted or rehosted it onto their website or blog page – meaning if someone copies our code snippet and puts it on theirs without changing anything but just putting ours into their domain settings: IT WILL NOT PLAY!
Create Engaging Video Content
Search engine optimization best practices evolve. A recommended best practice today could frown upon tomorrow. In addition, since search engines wisely don’t reveal how they prioritize results, much guesswork is involved around what helps a page rank. One constant best practice is creating compelling content that people will want to see and read if your video is interesting or helpful for users on the platform in question. You are rewarded with higher rankings in the long run. How from an SEO perspective might change – whether it’s through increased shares on social networks or decreased bounce rates for visitors who land on pages. But search engines aren’t working against people; instead, they’re trying to get excellent content front and center to meet user requests more effectively than ever! As such, future-proofing your approach towards SEO can mean creating great content that meets these standards already established by companies like Google: genuinely high quality (or “as natural as possible”) posts explicitly designed to get consumers hooked into returning again and again.
Video content can be a powerful addition to any page on the web. It has advantages, like improving rank and engagement. That said, some strategies will make it more successful- from providing a balance of written text and video content to making sure both are relevant to each other. When all is said and done, though, the video should generally be the star of that page, while the compelling text is your best strategy in this case. Assuming you have an exciting thumbnail for people to click on to watch it!
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