Video content is on all-time high demand. Right from Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar and Hulu its videos that they are offering and people are watching on them. People spend more time-consuming video content than text-based content nowadays. But, all videos are not that great as content to garner organic traffic. The videomakers need to learn how to make SEO friendly videos to get organic and relevant traffic.
There is no denying the fact that creating videos is a great way to inform and engage your target audience. But, like the other content, it should be discoverable.
To do that you need to make SEO friendly videos that find its viewers from the organic searches. There are a lot of techniques that you can use to make SEO friendly videos.
Best Practices for Making SEO Friendly Videos
Let’s see some of the best techniques for making SEO friendly videos. It will give your videos the greatest opportunity at gaining visibility in the search engine result pages.
1. Upload Your Video on the Best Video Hosting Platform
It’s always the best option to be present on the platform where a lot of viewers are present. In the case of the videos, the best platform is YouTube where it has 1.3 billion viewers.
Amazingly around 300 hours of videos are uploaded on youtube every minute and around 5 billion videos are watched on youtube every day.
With this much data, you can easily imagine the potential of youtube as a video hosting platform.
However, there are other platforms as well which can be used to host your videos like Vimeo, Wistia, Vidyard, Brightcove, SproutVideo, Vzaar, Metacafe, Ooyala, Ocula, Dailymotion, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
Some of these platforms are paid and require payments to host your videos on them. But, uploading your videos on youtube is free and has many other advantages.
Advantages of Using YouTube as a Video Hosting Platform
Youtube is easy to use and free. On the android phone and android based operating systems, YouTube apps are pre-installed. Hence, chances are higher that users use the app to watch youtube videos.
Youtube has great analytics that offers data on everything about your videos. As the number of views, duration, geography, age, gender, and device they use to watch your videos.
The youtube app also makes it possible to upload videos directly to youtube right from your mobile phone.
Even you can broadcast a live video through this app. For other channels, you need to download their app or use the web option to upload your videos.
Videos can also be directly uploaded to Facebook and Instagram using a mobile phone, but they have limitations.
Like you won’t get the analytics data on them for your video viewers and subscribers like the youtube offers.
You can also choose to upload your videos on your own servers or rented servers, but again you need to provide the video player along with that for your format of video to play.
And it might have loading issues when users want to watch your videos.
People prefer youtube because youtube videos can be played in almost every browser and a dedicated youtube app. Hence, my recommendation is to use youtube to upload your videos.
Another great advantage of using youtube as your video hosting platform is that you can ask your viewers to subscribe to your channel.
Once they have subscribed to your channel they start getting notifications when you upload a new video on your channel. This way you get more views on your videos.
Bigger the number of views better the search engine rank for your video.
2. Make Best Use of Video Markup
The entire objective of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to make your content discoverable and indexed in the search engines. The same goes for the video content.
Hence, the very first step in making your videos SEO friendly is to help Google and other search engines understand and properly index them.
As you know that Google and most of the search engines require important elements of information from any piece of content to properly index it like, title, description, image alt tag, etc.
But in a video content it mostly requires three most important information elements which are as below:
- Title of the Video
- Video description
- A Thumbnail
You can pass this information to Google and other search engines through on-page markup or video sitemaps. However, in most cases, the page where your video is embedded is not descriptive enough to allow search engines to understand the content of your video and index it in their search directory. Most of the time-on-page markup is hidden because of the descriptive text within the source code of your web page.
In case you don’t know what is on-page markup, you can learn it on the schema.org and implement it on your website to make your website indexable by the search engines.
The other way for indexing your videos in the search engines is through the Video sitemaps.
Technically, video sitemaps are XML documents that describe your videos to search engines and search engines according to their algorithm index and rank your video.
In case you don’t know what is video sitemap, you can learn more about video sitemaps to get started and make SEO friendly videos.
3. Optimize Text Content (Title, Description & Keywords)
Keywords are what people search either by typing or voice in the search engines to get the results for their query.
And obviously you always do research about the trending keywords to create your content and submit it to the search engines for indexing.
Similar to optimizing web pages, you should always perform keyword research before creating your video.
Find popular keywords or key phrases people are searching for related to the topic of your video.
You can find relevant terms by simply typing a query into the search bar of YouTube or Google.
Spend some time researching the different combinations of the keywords and key phrases to get the best video title and keywords associated with it.
In case you want to embed your video on a webpage, then you should optimize the title tag and meta description for the web page on your site where the video will be embedded.
It will also help search engines understand what your video is about. Always keep in mind that the keywords you choose are highly relevant to the topic of your video.
Otherwise, you will see a high bounce rate on your website, because people would not find it relevant.
In case you are hosting the video on your own website, which people do sometimes to reduce the script loading time from third-party websites to play those videos, make sure there is complete information relevant to the video’s topic on that same page. If you do that, search engines would be able to find the information and index your videos.
4. Include a Video Transcript
Transcripts are like the subtitles of the video, which is in text form and appears on the video when it is played.
Video hosting platforms like YouTube offer to add transcripts to the videos, which is a good way to tell the search engines what the video is all about.
Video transcripts also help to optimize the keywords which make the videos more SEO friendly.
Another benefit of the transcripts is that the users who don’t know the language of the video can still watch and understand the content of the video by reading the captions, subtitles of the video.
This way you can encourage more people to watch your videos.
Always remember in the digital world bigger is always better.
Bigger the number of viewers on your video higher would be ranking of your videos in search engines.
5. Use Engaging & Informative Thumbnail Image
“A picture is worth a thousand words.” Well, that’s true, and on YouTube, you have the option to add thumbnails to your videos.
A Thumbnail is a picture displayed by the search engines as the cover of the video. A nice engaging and informative thumbnail encourages users to click and watch that video.
It obviously requires additional work to create an engaging picture for your video thumbnail, but trust me its worth it.
If you create an engaging and informative thumbnail for your video, your chances of getting views on your videos go higher.
6. Upload the Video to Multiple Locations
If you want to host your video on your own site you can do that. And that way you can attract visitors and generate leads. Also, you can encourage the leads for conversion through your videos.
Also, it helps you to keep your traffic on your own website instead of sending them to the third party site.
But, there is a downside to that, you won’t get that backlink for your website if you haven’t hosted your video somewhere else. That’s completely based on your choice.
However, if you want to increase brand awareness and want more viewers on your video then post your video on multiple platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe, etc.
This will help you to reach a larger audience who may not be familiar with your brand or products.
7. Optimize Your Videos for Mobile Viewing
Most of the people watch videos on their mobile phones, you need to optimize your videos for mobile viewing.
In late 2016, Google rolled out mobile-first indexing, meaning Google will predominantly use the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing and ranking.
If your website doesn’t have the functionality to optimize the videos for mobile viewing, don’t host your videos on your website.
Instead, you should upload your videos on the platforms which have the functionality to convert and optimize the videos for mobile viewing.
For instance, when you upload your video on YouTube or a similar video hosting platform, your videos are automatically optimized for mobile viewing.
8. Avoid Using Adobe Flash for Videos
It’s best to avoid using Adobe Flash because it typically slows down the loading of the web pages.
Which is not in the good interest of the viewers, since they don’t usually wait for pages to load slow.
Also, all devices and browsers don’t support flash videos. Users have to download and install flash to watch those videos. Users usually don’t want to install additional software on their devices.
And sometimes they even don’t know how to do that, all they want is the hassle-free video viewing experience.
9. Avoid Embedding Same Video in Multiple Pages
If you embed your one video in multiple pages, it would confuse the search engines about which page they should index and rank on the top.
Hence, you should not embed the same video on different web pages. You can give a link on other pages for the video for people to view if it is important as per the content requirement.
10. Make Videos Focus of Your Page
If you are embedding video on a webpage, it’s better that you make that video focus of your page.
Otherwise, what is the reason for embedding a video to a page which has a lot of text content and images already on it?
If you make your video focus of the page, you get more views on the videos and obviously better page rank.
11. Use Social Media and Other Ways to Promote Your Videos
Don’t just rely on SEO to get views on your videos, also promote your videos through social media channels. Promoting your videos on social media channels would get you more viewers and subscribers.
Conclusion
So, there are a lot of Dos and Don’ts for making SEO Friendly Videos which we discussed above. The methods we discussed above will help you create SEO friendly videos and gain a better visibility within search engines.
Before and after everything it is most important that your video is informative, engaging, entertaining, and shareable. If your videos have all these elements then you will see tremendous results.
Get in touch if you need more help with making SEO Friendly videos.
