The field of SEO largely focuses on written content, focusing on keywords and providing valuable information to the reader. However, visual content has become much more popular thanks to video-sharing sites like YouTube and modern social media platforms. Using video content can be a great way to stand out from competitors, and video SEO can help your videos rank higher in search and provide a new avenue that gathers traffic.
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Marketing Videos Online
As the internet continues to develop, its content shifts over time. This is best seen through social media sites, which started as wordy messaging boards. While those still exist, trendy social media platforms moved toward short-form posts and now, video content dominates. Today, video content is most often used for promotional, informational, and entertainment purposes.
In some industries, video is the main content being offered. You can see this with tutorial videos and presentations, or videos that are featured on iGaming websites. Those casino sites offer online blackjack for card game enthusiasts, which is presented through a live stream with a real human host and interactive action on the table. Both on-demand and live video have become popular by satisfying user intent much more than the written word. Sometimes users are looking for a video instead of an article, for demonstrative or entertainment purposes. As a result, savvy marketers can rank those videos and draw customers in that way.
Google is way ahead of this video content revolution. For a while now, they have offered featured video snippets and video carousels that pull from popular sites and display them at position zero. That means video can show up at the very top of a results page for certain queries, above everybody else who used traditional SEO tactics. It’s the best, most demonstrable way that video SEO can pay dividends when applied correctly.
Video SEO Best Practices
Video SEO starts a lot like most other SEO strategies – you still need keywords. If your video covers something nobody is searching for, then it isn’t going to perform well. Interesting, trending topics within your industry present ideal video opportunities. You’ll want to seed keywords in the video, in the video’s transcript, in time stamps, and in the video’s title and description. Keep titles under 60 characters and descriptions under 120-150.
Remember that good SEO isn’t just about hitting all the keywords and satisfying the algorithm. You also need to satisfy human users by fulfilling the objective of the video in an entertaining, informative way. People won’t like a tech review if it fails at a very basic analysis of a product, no matter how tricked out its backend SEO profile is. Good videos tend to have pertinent, attention-grabbing info in the first 20 seconds, good framing/lighting, and don’t mislead viewers.
In the same vein, thumbnails also help make video content much more clickable. The algorithm doesn’t have a taste for artful thumbnails (yet) but people do. Thumbnail trends have changed over time but there are a lot of guides for video creators that tackle this topic. Even Google has a guide on how to create a thumbnail.
Once you have a clickable, watchable video packed with keywords, you should embed it into your site pages where it fits. If an article ranks well, then a related embedded video can get a boost and provide some extra juice for the site’s SEO profile. On those pages with embeds, you’ll want to add schema markup to make them eligible for those all-important snippets. You don’t need strong coding knowledge to throw some VideoObject schema on your site.
Lastly, don’t forget that link-building is still important for videos and video-embedded pages. With all of these best practices, your video content should have the best chances at ranking in results pages against your competitors. By leveraging video, you can tap into a new and growing audience that opts for visual media over written content.