How to Improve Your Video SEO and Rank Higher on Google Video
Video is a driving force in digital marketing today, and we’re quickly approaching a point where it’s just as essential as having a website and social media presence. It can play a significant role in your SEO efforts in two distinct ways.
Video often helps to keep interested visitors on your website longer.
First, Google sees a longer site visit as a sign of a positive user experience, which has a beneficial impact on your organic ranking. A side benefit here is that you’re also giving visitors more of a chance to truly connect with your brand. If you want to direct the traffic to your blog, consider putting your video very near to the title. Google associates the video with the title given in the page. This will increase the discoverability of your video as well as your blog article.
Raise your brand awareness through YouTube.
Secondly, by publishing your videos on YouTube, you have the potential to put your brand in front of a larger audience through YouTube’s search results. YouTube is often referred to as the “second-largest search engine in the world” due to its position as the second-most-visited website globally after Google, according to Alexa rankings.
If used correctly, video can be an extremely powerful form of content and make a significant contribution to your overall SEO strategy, in more ways than one.
Before you consider optimizing your website for search engines, it is important to clarify the goals of your video marketing strategy and create quality content to serve your target audience. If the video content is not amazing, it would be hard to rank highly on search engines for long. It is always better to put out fewer quality videos than a lot of mediocre videos.
How to write a SEO-friendly video title
The best SEO-friendly titles are clear, clickable and use keywords well. The title length shouldn’t exceed the recommended title length. For YouTube, keep your title less than 70 characters without spaces. You might also want to keep in mind that it’s better to keep the most important keywords closer to the beginning of your title. You can also include your competitor’s name as a keyword while adding tags to your video. This improves your discoverability when people search for your competitor’s videos. Also, don’t forget to add the appropriate tags to your video for maximum discoverability.
One pro tip is to make sure you name your local computer file name properly because YouTube and Google do take these into consideration.
How to write a SEO-friendly video description
The video description section is often an under-utilized section that could benefit from more text content. Using keywords in the video description can also increase your search visibility. Video descriptions can also include outbound links to your website or social media sites to increase traffic. For corporations, it is helpful to include a few sentence description to explain what the company does and a link to your corporate website.
How to rank higher on Google Video
YouTube, by far, is the best video publishing platform to help you rank highly on Google Video because it is the most popular platform and Google owns YouTube. However, other video platforms can be used in conjunction with YouTube to help with your Google Video ranks, such as directly embedded video on your website, Vimeo, DailyMotion, and any top tier news sites (e.g. CNBC, BBC).
Bonus Tips
Some simple practices can also make a significant contribution to Video SEO. Here are a handful.
Some SEO experts believe that longer videos on YouTube can get higher search engine rankings, the same way longer text content rank higher on Google than shorter content pieces. So, make sure you hit the sweet spot in terms of the video length.
Trending topics and videos are a powerful combination. Google considers trending content as a ranking factor. Making videos around the topic can gain you quick traffic.
Make sure you include the word ‘video’ on a regular basis throughout any metadata, as many searches could include the word and it will increase your chances of showing up on those queries.
Respect copyright laws by using original or copyright-free content and music.
