After creating a YouTube channel, creating your video is the next step. Unless you optimize it for SEO, it will not rank on search engines, and people may not find it. Of course, you can optimize for all you’re worth, but if your content isn’t worth watching, there’s no point. Combining high-quality, engaging video content with SEO is the way to be successful.
Video SEO has changed significantly over the past few years, and as video popularity increases, it has become harder to rank in universal search results.
10 Video SEO Tips
One factor that influences this is the overall authority of your website. It is easier to reach higher ranks in video searches. With that being said, here are some video SEO tips to help you increase your ranking.
Video SEO services may be costlier, but you can do SEO for your videos for free. If you need to do YouTube SEO, then these tips are also useful.
1. Create a compelling thumbnail
The thumbnail of your video is what searchers will see when finding it on search engines. Think of it the same way you would the cover of a book. It should be high quality, engaging, and relevant because it greatly impacts click-through rates. Videos with custom human thumbnails have a 34% higher pay rate than others.
Relevance is very important – if you want to learn to play the guitar, you’re likelier to click on a thumbnail showing a person playing the guitar. Google does not rank you higher according to the content of your thumbnail, but it’s crucial to making people want to know more and getting those clicks.
2. Include keyword-rich titles, descriptions, and tags
Do some keyword research before creating your title and description so you can use terms people are using to search. Make sure that your title and description are optimized with these search terms to ensure visibility in search results. This does not mean stuffing your title and description with keywords.
Tags help search engines understand the video’s topic, and you may be able to include keywords you couldn’t use in your title or description. Try experimenting with different titles and descriptions to see what works best.
3. Add captions or use a video transcript
When you scroll through your Facebook feed, you’re likely to see videos with captions alongside so you can watch them without audio. The more text you attach to your video, the more recognition it gets from search engines.
Captions and video transcripts make videos accessible to a wider audience and to search engine crawlers who need text to understand what’s in them.
More text to index means ranking for more queries. You can provide a full transcription or text highlights when transcribing video content. Do some testing to see which method offers the best results.
4. Optimize the whole page, not just the video
If your video isn’t ranking, it could be the fault of the page it appears on. Optimizing your video alone is not enough; you must also optimize the page it appears on for SEO. The video must be relevant to the page where it’s embedded.
If you have a generic page and throw in a video, it has little chance of ranking. If the page and the video are optimized for SEO and provide excellent, original content, the chance of being ranked is much higher.
Focus on giving your original take on trends in your niche, and it will improve your relevance on search engines.
5. Make one video the focus of a page
Search engine crawlers will find a video on a page and not look for any others. If you have multiple videos on a page, you must ensure that the top-performing one is first. People who visit your website shouldn’t struggle to find a video.
Place it front and center to make it easy for them to click. Some businesses even use a video as the main focus on their homepage, with hero image placement. They design the whole page around the video.
6. Don’t embed the same video on multiple pages
If you embed a video on multiple pages on your website, you’re competing against yourself. It’s the same as creating multiple pages using the same keywords. The pages then get indexed and ranked for similar search terms, competing unnecessarily for rankings.
7. Choose the right platform
YouTube and Vimeo are options if you want to focus on extending your reach and creating general brand awareness. If you’re concerned about getting traffic to your website, would-be visitors could become lost in all the competing traffic (such as suggested videos appearing after yours on YouTube).
Using video hosting platforms is the best idea for driving traffic to your website, and many of these platforms automatically add SEO to your videos, thus maximizing your ranking.
8. Focus on mobile optimization
According to Exploding Topics, 6.5 billion internet users own a smartphone. Video viewing on mobile devices has far surpassed desktop viewing, and the gap keeps widening. A video SEO campaign is dead without mobile optimization. Your website and video player must be responsive to mobile viewing.
Many hosting services offer automatic mobile optimization for your video content. Videos are optimized for mobile viewing on platforms like YouTube and Vimeo.
9. Collaborate
Link building applies just as much to videos as to other content. Collaboration increases your exposure and improves SEO with link building.
You can have a reciprocal agreement with others on social media platforms regarding social media shares or links in descriptions. You gain more authority when search engines see that your channel and videos get attention from other reputable sources.
10. Get viewer feedback
Search rankings depend on your audience and whether they are watching your video content. The more positive viewer feedback your audience provides, the more authority the search engines give you.
YouTube also ranks videos according to the number of likes, shares, and comments a video receives. Encourage your viewers to interact so that YouTube and search engines will value your content.
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