How to Build an SEO Video Optimization Plan
At this point, you already know how search engine optimization (SEO) is essential to your business. Now, you’re trying to wrap your head around SEO video optimization and thinking, how can you execute it correctly together with the other SEO stuff you’re doing?
Thankfully, involving videos in your current SEO game plan isn’t complex. To be honest, the optimization part is easy. The more challenging part is the process of making the videos. Nonetheless, you’ve come here for the former, so here are the things you need to do so you can build an SEO video optimization plan.
Start with the platform
Before anything else, establish the location where you’ll upload your videos. Depending on what you’re planning for your video marketing, you have a few options.
One of your primary choices is popular and free video hosting platforms. The most significant advantage with them is that they’re fast and can manage thousands of viewers or more with ease. These platforms are often preferred by small and new webmasters, developers, and marketers since it doesn’t add any cost to their full link building strategy budget.
However, the biggest drawback is that they make your video in their platform searchable on the web as well, which may compete against the page where you plan to embed your video. If people click on them, the traffic goes to the platform instead of your site. This is one of the biggest link building mistakes you can make.
Of course, you can turn that disadvantage into an advantage by using that opportunity to market on those video hosting platforms as well. Since you’ll create an account in one anyway, why not include the video hosting platform in your greater online marketing strategy.
On the other hand, if web traffic is your priority, you may want to use business-oriented video hosting platforms. Instead of keeping traffic to themselves, they prioritize sending the traffic back to you. The downside with them is that they can cost you a bit.
Your last option is hosting the video on your website or hosting account. Note that this is only a viable option if your hosting account or server has a lot of bandwidth available to allow video downloading and streaming. Even considering it if it’s possible is cumbersome. Hence, only think about this if you’re website is corporate level.
Keyword research
Every SEO strategy starts with keyword research. Even before you plan the topic of the video you’ll shoot, you want to make sure that it’ll fit the keyword that you’ll want to target for your website.
To find the best keywords for your video, you may want to start looking in search engines. Many SEO tools can help you with this one. Next, you can try searching on the video hosting platform.
If you want to make it easy for you to rank your video together with your content, you may want to focus on question-like keywords. Know that most viewed content and videos on the web often answer a specific question. After all, most people use search engines or the internet mostly when they need to look up information on something or get an answer to some of the most pressing questions they have in mind.
Make your videos
While it’s tempting to provide you with tips, tricks, and a solid tutorial on how to make your videos, this article won’t discuss any of those. After all, video making is a massive topic on its own. However, if you want to get started on it, you may want to learn more about online video creation tools.
Nonetheless, at this stage in your video plan, you can start strategizing and making your videos once you have decided on where you’ll upload and store your videos and what keywords you’ll capitalize on.
Craft your video’s title and description properly
You can treat your videos like ordinary articles on your website. Of course, you need to ensure that the title and description are attractive to searchers and search engines alike.
First of all, don’t forget to make sure that your target keyword is included in the video’s title and description. Also, don’t just overload the title with other keywords you found. And, don’t just focus on the keywords; make sure that both the title and description will still perfectly reflect the content of your video.
Second, you might want to practice writing great headlines. To get started, ensure that you become familiar with using powerful yet simple language. It will also help if you add in figures, which are effective at attracting the eyes of searchers. If possible, try making bold and borderline controversial statements in your headline. However, don’t try to be too clickbaity even if you really want your video to go viral.
Third, when it comes to descriptions, make sure that you get specific as much as possible. But make sure that you still sound like a human being. To ensure that your description can hook your searchers with as well, you may want to add something of value to your video description and a call to action if possible.
Lastly, to make it easier to write a description, you may want to check videos similar to yours. It’s pretty safe to imitate how they wrote their description. Of course, don’t plagiarize.
Make an exciting and interesting thumbnail
Aside from the title and the URL of your website, your video’s thumbnail is one of the things that searchers will see. Most of the time, the majority of searchers will base their decision to click on the video on its thumbnail.
Because of that, you must make sure that your video’s thumbnail is exciting and interesting to searchers. A quick way to make that happen is to ensure that it has these four elements:
- The thumbnail must communicate the subject of the video. One way is to include the title of the video in it. When you do, make sure to use clear and bold text.
- It must showcase your brand or name. A logo would work fine. Also, it would be great if you make great use of your company or logo’s colour. Lastly, the design of your other thumbnails must be consistent with your first one.
- The thumbnail must also showcase the speaker, host, or the most interesting person in the video. As much as possible, the person poses interestingly or invitingly. For example, the person may pose in a surprising manner if the video title includes the words shocking, surprising, or any similar terms. The most important thing here is that the face of the person must convey a readable emotion.
- It must be perfectly viewable on any device.
Writing transcripts
As much as possible, it would be great if you had talk-heavy videos, like podcasts or explainers. The most significant advantage with them is that you can generate transcripts worth thousands of words—an easy source of text content, which search engines can index willy-nilly.
In addition, putting a transcript together with your video makes your content more accessible to everyone. One, it allows your visitors to watch your video in silence. Two, people with hearing difficulties can opt to read instead.
On a different note, you may say that videos often come with captioning or subtitles. However, not all hosting platforms provide that handy feature automatically. Manually editing captions in the video may prove to be difficult work on your part—transcribing, chunking, timing, and rendering can easily eat a lot of your time.
Build your page around the video
Know that you have the option to support your video with additional content to raise its chances of getting ranked. While it’s true that the transcript should be enough content to go with the video, remember that most search engines can transcribe and index the content of your video without the transcript. Because of that, it’s advisable to add related content to the page where the video will be in to further optimize it for search engines.
Also, make the page worth it. Don’t forget how much resources you may spend on videos; you don’t want to waste all of those just because you didn’t capitalize on the video’s value in SEO. If possible, put the video front and centre. Don’t hide it or put it inside folds. Make it the first thing your visitors will see.
Plus, never make the mistake of embedding the same video in multiple places. You don’t want to make your websites or web pages compete against each other.
Put the video you want to be ranked first
Take note that most crawlers will stop checking the page once it encounters a video. Because of that, most experts discourage embedding multiple videos on a single page. However, if you genuinely need to post or include multiple videos in one webpage, be sure to place the video you want to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) first.
Adding videos to your SEO strategy can bring plenty of benefits. Some are increased online exposure, improved brand awareness, additional website traffic, reduced bounce rates, and even better conversion rates. However, if you want to take advantage of all of those, you may want to execute your SEO video optimization plan properly. Fortunately, you can do just that by following the things mentioned here.