5 Ways To Optimise Your Video Content

Content Marketing SEO Article
20 mins

With over 4 billion hours of video being watched every month on YouTube alone it’s clear that the popularity of video content is at an all time high. But with 72 hours of video being uploaded every minute how do you make sure yours is seen?

It’s not enough to just post a video on YouTube or your website and hope that people watch it, making sure your content is optimised for search will increase visibility and help search engines to match your content to user searches.

There’s a lot you can do to encourage views on your video content but if you’re not a tech wizard here are the main things you’ll want to cover off.

Title, description and tags

Whether you’re hosting your video on YouTube or your own site, giving it a great title and description are a must. Not only will it help Google to understand what your content is about, it will help users to identify quickly if your video is relevant or of interest to them.

Consider your keywords just as you would any other content and make sure your title is descriptive enough to capture the viewer’s attention. Think about what your target audience may be searching for, don’t try and cover too many audiences at once. Also consider including ‘video’ in the title, while search engines allow you to filter these results, many people still include it in their search phrase.

Keep keywords to a minimum, usually 2 or 3, and stay relevant to your content, you can widen the topics by using tags to reflect additional topic areas that might be relevant. If you’re embedding video content from YouTube onto your webpage, remember to include the key word in the onpage text that surrounds it. This helps search engines to understand the content better and rank it higher in search results.

Host or third party

Deciding to hosting video on your website or posting it on a third party site such as YouTube depends on your end goal. Hosting on your own website is a good idea you’re looking to increase traffic and improve your performance in search results. Video content is a great way to get your website ranking higher for organic searches. However if you’re looking to get the maximum exposure for your video then a third party such like YouTube or Vimeo may be a batter choice. Google and YouTube are a match made in heaven and you won’t have to worry so much about creating a video site map or keyword saturation as YouTube automates this for you.

There may also be considerations around your target audience that will affect your decision. For those who communicate or market to the public sector and NHS, hosting may be a better option as many government organisations block access to social video sites.

If in doubt do both, host the video on your site and upload it to third parties. Just remember to include your website details in the description or in the video itself so you can drive traffic back to your website.

Rich snippets

If you’ve not come accross Rich Snippets before, they are a tool you can use to highlight specific bits of content for search engine’s to display alongside results. Highlighting video content and descriptive text allows Google to display a thumbnail of your video and a short description which can massively boost your CTRs. Google has them all ready to go so you just need to copy and paste the code into your webpage. If you want to know more about using Rich Snippets, we have a more detailed post with some examples.

Make sure it gets seen

Once you’ve uploaded your video content it’s time to start pushing it out to your networks. With so much video being streamed every minute, cutting through the noise means you need to be actively getting the word out.

Post links to your video on Facebook and Twitter and ensure they have the right number of tags in YouTube to show up in searches. Encourage your viewers to post comments, these act as cues to Google that your content is good quality. While viewing numbers are important, encouraging comments and sharing are the things that will boost your video up the search rankings and bring more high quality customers to your content. Make sure you’re targeting your video content to people who will find it interesting and use the tags that truly reflect the content focus. Then sit back and let your audience do the work for you.

Things to avoid

Whatever you do, don’t give your video a misleading title in the hope of gaining more traffic. It won’t help your search rankings or your customers. Don’t overdo the tags, and definitely don’t use popular tags that have no relevance in order to get seen. Your customers will not be impressed and Google may actually penalise your content as a result.

Of course the most important tip I can give is to make sure your content is good quality and will appeal to your audience. Without that you stand little chance of getting it seen by more than a handful of people. But it’s important to remember that just having great content isn’t enough, combining it with a good social sharing strategy will maximise visibility and improve your customer experience.

 

Written by Felice Ayling 

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