Video Marketing for Your SEO Strategy

An effective SEO strategy extends beyond your written content. If you are using video as part of your marketing strategy (and you should be) then you need to know about video search engine optimisation. In this blog, we’ll be looking at how to best utilise SEO in your videos.

The first step of your video SEO strategy is choosing a platform. The right video hosting platform will depend on your goals. If you just want to get your video seen and raise brand awareness, popular video streaming platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo are good bets.

However, on these platforms, it may be more difficult to get viewers to follow through and visiting your site. If conversions are your goal, you may want to host the video on your own site instead. When it comes to using the video on social media, you may want to first research which platforms your target audience are using and focus your efforts there.

Creating a transcript for your video caters to people with different learning styles and a transcript is especially useful if you are providing a lot of information. From an SEO perspective, a video transcript gives search bots more text to crawl through and, if this text features the keywords you are targeting, you will likely rank higher.

You can create either a full transcript that offers more SEO opportunities or ‘highlights’ in text form that may be better suited for longer videos and encourage people to watch further if they are interested in a particular point.

In addition to a transcript, closed captioning allows your video to be watched without sound by viewers in a public place who don’t want to get their headphones out and those with hearing difficulties.

If you are planning to mainly generate views through a video sharing platform like YouTube, then you will need to research what keywords people are searching for, which will likely be different to what they would search for on Google.

When you start typing into the YouTube search bar, you will get search suggestions, which you can then use to your advantage by applying these same terms (if relevant) to your video in the form of tags, as well as your title and video brief.

Even if your video is the focus of the page, as it often should be, you can’t ignore the rest of the content around it. The rest of the text on the page should be relevant to the video and optimised for SEO, including the title and your meta description, both of which should be informative and engaging. You can still let the video do the talking, but there needs to be something there on the page for the bots to engage with.

Typically, Google will only index one video per webpage, so you should try and keep your pages limited to one video if there is a specific video you are trying to rank. If multiple videos on the same page can’t be avoided, then the video you want to be ranked by Google needs to be embedded first on the page, above any other video content.

On a related point, you shouldn’t have your video embedded on multiple pages on the same site, otherwise you are creating extra competition (even if it’s from yourself).

Remember that SEO doesn’t just apply to the words on your site – videos are good for SEO too! If you want your video to rank highly on the results pages, then you need to engage with SEO video optimisation by using the tips above.