Basics of Video SEO

As video content has become more popular with consumers, video marketing has become a much more viable tool for businesses.

Popularity of Videos

Videos have become one of the most popular methods to absorb content. With the increased speeds available on networks combined with current technology, watching videos on mobile devices or desktops has never been faster or easier.

When you add to that the flexibility you have with the types of content videos can deliver, from instructional to informative to customer support, it makes sense as to why this is such a valuable way to share information.

Basics of Video SEO

There are specific steps that should be done for each and every video you are going to post if you want to maximize exposure:

Keyword Research - Keywords are a driving force behind search results for both Google and YouTube, therefore, you need to spend adequate time doing your keyword research. This should be done on both platforms because plenty of people search directly within YouTube for information while other people use a search engine like Google which can then pull results from YouTube.

Maximize Metadata - Your metadata acts as a secondary tool in search so it is important to optimize it properly as well. Metadata means the tags, filenames, and descriptions.

One-to-One Ratio - The ideal ratio for video publication is one video on one page. There are a couple of reasons for this with the most important being how Google tracks videos. When Google finds a video on a webpage it then associates that page with that video and ignores additional video content on the same page.

Use a Video Sitemap - Google encourages the use of video sitemaps, and that alone should be reason enough to use one. A video sitemap provides Google or other search engines with metadata for the video content on your website. It becomes an extension to your existing sitemap.

Use Video Transcripts - This is a useful method to ensure that search engine bots fully understand that content of your video. By providing a complete text transcript, the bots will be able to crawl and index all of that information to help understand the video content and rank it properly.