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Tips for Creating Effective Video SEO

Published on March 25, 2013
Tags: SEO

You’ve heard of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to improve traffic to your business website or blog, but are you aware of video SEO? With YouTube being the second largest search engine on the net (after Google), it is not surprising that companies of all sizes are getting in on the act and not only creating business videos, but optimising them for search as well. Just like with your webpage, you need to ensure that your videos are being found by your target audience – the relevant people who are most likely to buy your products or use your services. Here are a few tips to help get your videos to the top of the listings.

1. Make It Engaging, Relevant and Short

As with any content you create for your business, ensure that any videos you produce are engaging, relevant to your brand and your customers, informative and short. Videos longer than five minutes generally won’t be watched all the way through, so you have to grab your viewer’s attention early. If your video must be longer, you can break it into small parts, or create ‘bite sized’ videos for each aspect of your business.

2. Give It a Good Title

A catchy, relevant title is essential in attracting the right kinds of viewers to your video. You can include popular keywords in your title as long as you incorporate them naturally; a keyword-stuffed title will just put people off.

3. Make Use of Keywords at Every Opportunity

Carry out some research into what your potential customers are searching for – and how they’re using the words – and then incorporate those keywords and phrases into your video description, tags, category listing, captions, and anywhere else you can change the content of the page. Search engines often display text pages along with videos, so make use of any and all text areas.

4. Encourage Links and Indexing

Always ensure there’s a link back to your company website from your video page; put your URL in the first line of the video description as it will be easy to click on and will be displayed before the rest of the description is cut off. Provide transcripts of your video as well to encourage higher listings (search engines still like HTML content).

5. Include a Call to Action and Encourage Sharing

As with other marketing content, ensure you include a call to action in your video or on the video page; giving people a specific next step will increase the chances of them carrying out the desired action. Submit a sitemap to Google to help with indexing, and provide a code that allows people to embed the video on their website. And of course, place the video on your social network profiles and blogs to get it ‘out there’.

Videos are becoming an extremely popular way to promote businesses – especially with the rise of social media sites and the ability to quickly and easily share videos online – so if you don’t already use video in your marketing, it may be time to start thinking about doing so.

By Chelsey Evans

Follow @AmpheonLtd