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What is Video SEO?

If you have tried different strategies to rank your videos and none are working, you need to learn about Video SEO.

Creating and editing videos take a lot of time and effort, and the reward for that effort is having an audience to watch the videos.

Many business owners apply different promotional strategies to make their videos reach a wider audience, and using SEO is one of them.

SEO for video promotion is a way to generate leads or reach your target audience by ranking your videos high on the Search engine.

What Is Video SEO?

Video SEO involves optimizing your video content to rank high on the search engines for relevant Keywords.

You might be confusing it with website SEO, but it follows a similar but different approach. This article will explain how to go about Video SEO.

How To Optimize Your Video for Search Engines?

Your website and channel authority play an important role in ranking your videos on search engines.

Other factors may include how well the video satisfies search intent and how it ranks for a related keyword or phrase.

But let’s dive into some actionable steps on video SEO.

Do Video Keyword Research

Video Keyword Research is different and easier than text-based keyword research because most people find videos on YouTube based on search suggestions.

So, your target keywords should be based on YouTube keyword suggestions in your niche.

You achieve this by typing a general keyword in the search bar and letting YouTube suggest more related long-tail keywords as you are searching.

Copy these keywords in your notepad and analyze them later; then check for the keywords’ competition and search volume to ensure they are worth it.

Meanwhile, your focus should be on keywords with low competition and high volume.

You can use keyword research tools like; TubeBuddy Tags, VidiQ Keyword Search, and more to help get this data.

Choose The Right Video Hosting Platform

YouTube is unarguably the most popular video hosting platform. It is a great platform to conduct your SEO practices.

Whenever you search any keyword on Google and you click on the video section, you will observe that most of the videos present are hosted on YouTube, which is a good indicator that YouTube is a perfect option.

Interestingly, YouTube gives you the chance to optimize your videos for specific keywords before posting them.

You can add keyword tags, Meta descriptions, and Meta titles, among others.

YouTube also gives you the chance to host your videos for free. Another viable alternative is Vimeo.

There are many other platforms to host videos here.

Keyword In Title and Meta Description

Just the way the Title is important in text-based content SEO, it is the same for video SEO.

Keywords in the title help both the search engine and humans understand your content better, and Meta descriptions give more details about the title. Both are major factors for video ranking.

When users find the keywords or phrases they searched for in your video title and Meta description, they will be triggered to watch the video.

Meanwhile, you should know that targeting long-tail keywords is best for video SEO because they are easier to rank.

An exception is when your video channel is already an authority in your niche.

Use Video Tags

Although Tags might not be a significant ranking factor since YouTube still asks for them, you can use them.

You should use your target keyword and related keywords for the video tags to let your video appear for more related searches.

Use A Catchy Image Thumbnail

Catchy here doesn’t mean you should be deceptive. But ensure that the thumbnail catches your audience’s attention without disappointing them after watching.

Your video image thumbnail is among the first things searchers will notice before they click on the video. Just the way a book cover can prompt you to read the book’s actual content.

When the thumbnail is catchy, it will increase your video click-through rate (CTR), which will positively affect your ranking.

A good image thumbnail should:

  • Be related to the content of the video
  • Be clear enough
  • Bring curiosity
  • Be attractive

Use Video Transcripts

Video Transcripts are a textual representation of everything said in your video.

Google uses video transcripts to better understand your video content and rank it higher on the search engine.

There is no way the Google Bots can watch your video as humans do. They will only understand the context of the video with texts in title, description, tags, and transcripts.

Several studies have proven that videos with transcripts perform better than videos without them.

The use of transcripts makes it easier for you to incorporate your desired keywords and make your videos accessible to a larger audience.

Meanwhile, you should use a closed caption for the transcript because it is indexable by search engines.

Also, a closed caption gives a better user experience as it allows viewers to toggle on/off the caption.

Embed the Video You Want to Rank

It is not enough to embed a video you wish to rank on a relevant webpage but putting it at the top of the page is very important, especially when you have more than one video on the same page.

If you have more than one video on a page, Google will index only the first one and leave the rest unindexed.

Therefore, you must include only the video you wish to index at the top of the rest.

Conclusion

There are more SEO practices to improve your Video Ranking, but the steps discussed here will do some magic in skyrocketing your video views.

However, you shouldn’t solely rely on SEO to increase your video views.

You can try other strategies like; encouraging users to subscribe and share, sharing your videos on other social media channels, creating great content, and more.

The post What is Video SEO? appeared first on GrowMap.



This post first appeared on Growmap - Map Your Path To Grow Your Business, please read the originial post: here

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What is Video SEO?

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