“Video SEO” is a term often generally applied to the increasing search engine relevance of video as the Web’s most popular media format, and technically speaking, optimising video content so that it can be discovered by search. It’s a hugely important part of a successful Video Marketing Strategy or campaign. Let’s discuss in more detail what Video SEO is and why it’s a good idea for marketing most websites, commercial or non-commercial.
What is SEO?
First we need to briefly describe what “SEO” actually is. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and describes a variety of technical practices that ensure that your businesses’ website and pages can be found in search results.
We achieve this through the following methods, often broken down into two categories.
On-page optimisation
This is ensuring the HTML mark-up of the website is structured in such a way that the search engine can crawl (or read) the page. There are several things we can do to help search engines understand a website and its content, such as marking headers that outline content and having good site architecture and navigation.
We can also research and utilise keywords that are relevant to the business – including words that we know customers use to describe products or services that they may wish to buy or use. We can then make sure these words are shown (but not overused!) on the page to increase its rankings in search engine traffic. We call this process Keyword Research.
Off-site optimisation
This normally refers to building up links to your site. Links are a very important factor in determining where a page ranks in results. Google treats links like a vote for a page, endorsing that page’s relevance. The keywords used to link to the page are also considered. We can achieve greater relevance to keyword searches by creating useful content that the target audience is interested in linking to – we can also submit links manually to directories, social media and so on.
Increasingly, search engines use social cues to assess how popular a page is. A page with more Likes, Tweets, +1’s as well as incoming traffic is more likely to rank higher than competing pages of equal relevance.
Great, so where does Video SEO come in?
The amazing thing about video is its ability to communicate so much in a very short space of time. Video engages with the emotional side of our brains and is more likely to encourage us to act than after reading some text. For both these reasons, video is more likely to be watched by busy people than text is to be read.
Online video is incredibly popular – on YouTube alone, over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month.
Even better, Google loves video – when video is so popular the search engines all have to try harder to deliver search customers the media they want to see. So Google, for example, has developed a certain preference for videos, which feature heavily at the top, or near to the top, of search results for certain queries.
All good stuff – the problem is search engines can’t watch video. They have no idea at all what the content of the video is as they can only read text. So we need to optimise our videos in a similar way to how we optimise websites – using the right technical structures and targeted keywords – so Google can find them. By using a properly optimised video on your page as part of your content marketing strategy you can increase your chances of ranking higher in search engines for your chosen keywords – this is Video SEO (one component of a Video Marketing Strategy).
Here at Tanglewood we even specialise in writing scripts around target keywords, so that the video is destined for the right search audience before it is even put into production! But if you already have a video, check out our 5 steps to improve video visibility
We will be covering a range of beginner to advanced Video SEO techniques and Video Marketing strategies, so stick around and learn from us! Stay up to date by subscribing to our RSS feed and following us on Twitter for updates. If you are wondering how your business might benefit from Video SEO or Video Marketing services then feel free to drop us a line.