Video content has become an integral part of digital marketing strategies. With the increasing popularity of video platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and TikTok, businesses are leveraging video content to engage with their audience and drive traffic to their websites through paid media and social media. Google’s search engine results (SERPs) have progressively served up more and more video results. However, creating video content is not enough if you want to squeeze every little bit of ROI from your marketing and video production budget. It’s expensive and hard to produce high quality video that is on-brand, so in this blog you’ll learn what you need to optimize and promote your videos on social media and your website to ensure they reach the right audience and achieve your marketing goals.
What is video SEO and why is it important?
Video SEO is the process of optimizing your video content to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). This involves a range of techniques, including optimizing your video title, description, tags, and transcript, as well as building inbound links and engaging with your audience.
Video SEO is important for marketers because it can help you get more out of your video production efforts. By optimizing your videos for search engines, you increase the chances that your content will be discovered by potential customers who are searching for topics related to your business or industry. This can lead to increased visibility, site engagement, traffic, and ultimately, conversions.
In addition, video SEO can help you stand out from your competitors - and even increase your share of search visibility with both website and YouTube content by pushing their listing further down in organic search results. While many businesses are producing video content, not all of them are taking the time to optimize that content for search engines. By doing so, you can gain a competitive edge and position yourself as an authority in your field.
“Videos appear in 62% of Google’s worldwide searches. - Demand Sage” [https://www.demandsage .com/seo-statistics/]
Overall, video SEO is a critical component of any comprehensive content marketing strategy, and should be a priority for marketers who are looking to maximize the impact of their video production efforts and marketing ROI.
SEO Considerations When Producing Video
Producing video content requires a significant investment of time, effort, and resources. To ensure your video content is SEO-friendly, you need to consider the following:
Keyword Research for User Intent
Keyword research is the foundation of SEO. You need to identify the keywords your target audience is using to search for content related to your business. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Ahrefs to identify relevant keywords. There are YouTube-specific tools as well, like VidIQ as well. Once you have identified your keywords that align with targeted user intent and your business goals, you’ll incorporate them into your video file name, title, description, script and tags.
Choose Video Length Based on the Audience & Channel
Video length is an important consideration when producing video content. Shorter videos tend to perform better on social media platforms, while longer videos are better suited for YouTube and Vimeo. The ideal video length depends on your target audience, the topic and the type of content you are producing.
“The average length of a first-page YouTube video is 14 minutes, 50 seconds. - Backlinko” [https://backlinko.com/ youtube-ranking-factors]
Quality is Crucial for a Video's Success
Video quality is essential for engagement and retention. Poor video quality can lead to high bounce rates and low engagement rates. Ensure your video is well-lit, has good sound quality, and is visually appealing. You can also add captions and subtitles to make your video more accessible.
Embedding Video on Your Website for SEO Benefit
Integrating videos into your website can significantly enhance user engagement and increase the time they spend on your site. By thoughtfully incorporating video into your website, you can create a richer, more immersive experience that better resonates with your audience. To help ensure success, consider these tips for optimizing video integration:
- Focus on relevant and compelling content
- Provide transcripts for easier accessibility and SEO relevancy
- Encourage Channel engagement and views by utilizing YouTube hosting
- Place your video above the fold, where it is visible to users without scrolling.
- Consider embedding your video in a blog post or landing page to provide context and improve engagement.
“We compared pages with embedded YouTube videos to those that did not have embedded videos. And found that pages or posts with YouTube video embed had more than double the number of keywords ranking in Google searches on page one. - 39 Celcius Web Marketing” [https://www.39celsius.com/ youtube-video-embeds-skyrocket-seo-exposure/]
Video Loading Speed
Video loading speed is crucial for user experience. Slow loading times can lead to high bounce rates and low engagement rates. Ensure your video is optimized for fast loading times by compressing your video and using a content delivery network (CDN). Google can also “ding'' your website’s SEO rankings for slow-loading content, so be sure not to ignore this point or your SEO efforts will fail.
Promote your videos on social media and other channels
Don't just post your videos on your website and hope for the best. You need to promote them on social media, email, and other channels to reach as many people as possible.
Pick the Right Video Format
Video format is another important consideration when producing video content. The most popular video formats are MP4, AVI, and MOV. Ensure your video is in a format that is compatible with the platforms you will be uploading it to. MP4 tends to be the universal format, but double-check.
Measuring Video Success & KPIs for Assessing Video Performance
Use analytics tools to track how many people are watching your videos, where they're coming from, and how long they're watching. This information will help you determine which videos are performing well and which need improvement. Below are some video KPIs and metrics to consider tracking:
- Average View Duration: This metric helps measure how long viewers are watching the video.
- Play Rate: This measures the percentage of viewers who click the play button and start watching the video.
- Average View Completion Rate: This metric measures how many viewers completed the entire video from start to finish.
- Traffic Sources: This metric measures where the majority of viewers are coming from (e.g. organic search, referral links, etc.).
- Average Playback Rate: This metric measures the percentage of viewers who clicked the play button and watched the video until its completion.
- Average Number of Video Views: This metric measures the total number of people who have watched the video.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): This metric measures the number of viewers who click on a call-to-action link in the video.
- Social Shares: This metric measures the number of people who shared the video on social media platforms.
- Engagement Rates: This metric measures how engaged viewers are with the video, such as how often they comment, like or share it.
Using a Video Hosting Platform for Better Engagement Analytics
Video hosting platforms like YouTube and Vimeo provide better engagement analytics than hosting videos on your website. Here are some benefits of using a video hosting platform:
Detailed Engagement Analytics
Video hosting platforms provide detailed engagement analytics, including views, watch time, and engagement rate. This data can help you understand how your audience is interacting with your video content and make informed decisions about future video content.
Ability to Embed Videos on your Website
As we already mentioned, video hosting platforms make it easy to embed your video on your website or blog. This ensures your video is accessible to your audience and improves engagement.
Monetization Opportunity & New Revenue Stream
Video hosting platforms like YouTube provide opportunities for monetization through advertising and sponsorships. This can provide an additional revenue stream for your business.
Conclusion
As digital marketing strategies evolve, video content has emerged as an integral part, enabling businesses to reach their audience, direct traffic to their website, and maximize their marketing ROI. However, mere video creation is not enough. The process of Video SEO is vital to maximize the potential for visibility, engagement, traffic, and conversions.
Optimizing video titles, descriptions, tags, transcripts, and building inbound links are crucial for search engine visibility. For marketers, incorporating video SEO techniques can help stand out from competitors and enhance search visibility. Prioritizing video quality to improve engagement and retention, optimizing loading speeds, promoting videos on social media, and tracking analytics to assess performance are essential in reaching the right audience and optimizing video content.
In our next blog about SEO video optimization, we'll help you understand how to Optimize Your YouTube Channel:
How Does Video Help SEO? Part 2: Optimizing YouTube for Engagement & SEO
Do you need your video to do more for your SEO results? Reach out and Let’s be WellMet!
