If you didn’t know, now you do: video content is becoming an increasingly larger set of content marketing (the popularity of TikTok and YouTube offer ready-made reminders of this). Video content is not only here to stay: It’s thriving and actively transforming how people like to consume their content. For instance, Google’s new MUM update will more actively account for video in search, allowing users to include video in order to answer their queries faster and more accurately. This isn’t to say that “traditional” content marketing is out the door; by all means, it’s not. It just means that companies will have to effectively optimize more mediums of communication for their audience (more work, yay!). Here’s how we suggest to optimize video for SEO—and get more out of your content from the get-go.
How SEO for Video Differs
Search intent for video (YouTube) and search engines (Google) are different, even though YouTube trails only Google in use among search engines. The difference in intent is attributed to what people want out of the platform: YouTube (and video) is often instructional, whereas Google and other similar search engines are largely transaction-based. As such, YouTube has its own set of search rules, search intent, and keywords. For instance, YouTube will populate a video feed to users that accounts for their intent and previous viewing preferences.
In effect, SEO for video and YouTube is highly specific; you (in large part) can’t see Google and YouTube keywords as one and the same. While some overlap does exist, search intent should still be viewed as exclusive to the respective platform.
How You Optimize Video for SEO
With that SEO foundation laid, the next question becomes obvious: how do you optimize video for SEO? There are a few ways to properly SEO a video for maximum relevance to your intended audience and reach. These are:
Create a Relevant Title Tag & Description for the Video. People often reference a video title as a clue into what the video is about. If the video doesn’t live up to what the title indicated, it can cause viewers to bounce—which can negatively influence your search rankings. It’s best to utilize well-researched, relevant keywords, avoid keyword baiting with unrelated or unnecessary keywords, and craft an informative title from those keywords.
Along that same vein, your video description works in much the same way—and is akin to a meta description for pages in SERPs. A description does best as a short, direct sentence with some keywords included. Bots actively crawl video descriptions; knowing this, you should avoid misguided practices like keyword stuffing or keyword misuse (doing these can end up biting you back later).
Properly Tag Your Video. Video tags help your video get properly categorized. Tags work in tandem with your video title and description, offering rich SEO value when appropriately used. In effect, tags help inform the algorithm about the video’s best matches for search intent—and offer viewers a handy way to find similar videos they might be interested in.
Transcribe Your Video for Users & Search Engines. Providing a transcript of your video in the description, closed captioning, and even comments section can offer tremendous SEO value to your video. And that’s not all. For instance, it allows those with hearing difficulties to easily track with your video content—and can be timestamped for your audience’s viewing convenience.
In terms of SEO, uploading the video transcript gives even more information to the algorithm about your video. The algorithm will crawl the transcript text as it would for any other info, teasing out researched, relevant keywords as it does.
Contact Us for Help with Your SEO
It can be difficult to keep track of all the nuances that involve, influence, and inform SEO. So much so, it can be (and is!) a full-time job in and of itself. Uptick Marketing offers a better way for you to do your SEO—whether that’s for video, search engine, or the most recent trend. We have devoted SEO experts whose job it is to help your content reach more of your intended audience—ensuring it stays in Google’s good graces all the while. Contact us to set up a no-hassle chat about how we can help your company thrive in the online marketplace.
