A picture speaks a thousand words, and a video speaks many more. With shortening attention spans of both young and old, it is difficult to keep someone focussed for long. Short videos are better at getting more attention than boring long text.
As a result, videos are becoming more popular than ever for tutorials, guides, and product demonstrations. This makes it necessary to get your videos on top of the search results. Hence, you need to work on video SEO as well.
In this blog, we will specifically focus on video SEO tactics for 2024 and beyond.
So, let’s get started.
What is Video SEO?
Simply creating videos and uploading them on the web is not enough. You need to ensure that they are seen by the target audience. This is when video SEO comes into the picture.
So, you need to optimize your videos to improve their ranking on search engines and in video search visibility. This has to be done while keeping relevant keyword searches in mind.
Videos have become a more popular mode of digital marketing compared to earlier years of search engines. This is because it is much easier to create videos now than earlier, and this can be done without expensive equipment.
Tactics for Success of Video SEO
Now as you know what video SEO is and how it can be utilized for your advantage, let’s go through 7 tactics for the same.
Tactic#1: Do Your Keyword Research Properly
Keywords help search engines understand the topic of your video and what it contains. Search engines match this with user queries, and by targeting the right keywords, you can improve your ranking.
There are several tools which can help you with this task. Let’s have a quick look at some of them.
SEMrush– It is a paid tool that can be used for SEO and video optimization. Its features include traffic analysis, SEO audit and keyword research.
Ahrefs is a paid tool that provides comprehensive SEO services with keyword insights. Features include competitor analysis, search volume, and keyword explorer competitor.
VidIQ– This tool is specifically meant for YouTube, which provides analytics and insights. It has both paid, free versions and features include competition analysis, trend alerts and keyword research.
Google Keyword Planner– This is a free tool from Google which helps in finding keywords and traffic estimates. Its features include keyword suggestions and traffic forecasts.
TubeBuddy– It has both free and paid versions and specifically meant for optimizing YouTube videos for search. These tools features include SEO audit, keyword ranking and tag explorer.
Tactic#2 Work on Your Thumbnail Image
Video thumbnail is clearly visible when the video is indexed and has a direct impact on the number of clicks it receives. It has to be attractive, engaging and relevant at the same time.
So, you need to create a unique thumbnail which stands out from the competition. Firstly, ensure that your thumbnails are high resolution images and not blurred. You can include a brief text which indicates what the video contains.
The text should have bold fonts and contrasting colors to be clearly visible.
Images of the thumbnail can highlight important sections of your video. The style should be consistent throughout your various thumbnails to create a brand identity.
Engaging thumbnails get more viewers and contribute to better video search visibility and rankings.
Tactic#3 Improve Loading Speed
As no one likes to wait more than a few seconds for web pages to open, the same is the case with videos. If your videos fail to load within 2-3 seconds, your target audience will go for another video on the search list.
Loading speed is also one of the factors for search engine rankings. Google and other search engines give priority to fast loading videos.
You need to follow some best practices for your videos to load faster. First, you need to choose a reliable hosting platform like YouTube or Vimeo. They are optimized for scalability as well as speed.
You should also reduce the file size of videos without compromising on quality, as this will decrease the load time and bounce rates. Cached versions of videos on browsers can reduce load times for returning audiences.
Last but not the least, your videos need to be optimized for mobile devices, as the majority of the traffic these days is from mobile devices.
There are several paid as well as free tools available to work on your videos.
Tactic#4 Choose the Right Platform
You have to decide what is the purpose of your video, whether it is to get leads and more traffic or to enhance brand awareness.
If you want to get more traffic, leads and conversions, go for Wistia. This video hosting platform automatically inserts SEO metadata to increase the chances of your video getting indexed.
This is not the case with every platform, and some even require you to create a video site map, which is a difficult task.
However, in case you are more concerned with increasing brand awareness, go for YouTube or Vimeo. Once your video is indexed, most of the traffic will go to these platforms rather than your website.
So, you need to be careful as your target audience may get lost in competing traffic.
Tactic#5 Use Video Transcripts
By making use of transcripts, you make videos more findable by search engines. This is due to the fact that transcripts provide words with which search engine algorithms can identify the content of the video. This helps search engines in indexing them properly.
Along with this, transcripts help people with hearing disabilities to understand your video. It also provides viewers to quickly go through the video and understand the main points.
If the video is in another language, English transcripts can make videos useful for larger audiences.
However, you should create your own transcripts and not rely on platforms like YouTube for captions, as they can be inaccurate.
Transcripts make videos better not only for viewers but also for search engines to index them.
Tactic#6 Focus on Technical Aspects
You must have worked hard on coming up with a wonderful video about your products/services but you cannot ignore technical aspects.
You should include the right information in the backend, which includes title tag information and keywords in the description tag.
YouTube makes use of this information along with video length, comments, likes, dislikes and number of subscribers for ranking.
You should use your target keyword in each video, as YouTube is capable of understanding 90% of the words in a video. However, you should avoid keyword stuffing in video descriptions and use only those that fit naturally.
Tactic#7: Analyze Your Results
You should always keep track of the performance of your videos. This will help you in coming up with better videos that are more effective.
Regular monitoring helps a great deal in improving SEO and achieving your marketing goals. You get insights into audience behavior, which parts they watch or skip.
With this, you can optimize your engagement rates and Click-through Rates. There are several tools for monitoring video performance, which include YouTube Analytics, Google Analytics, and Social Blade.
The key metrics to keep track of include the number of views, watch time, number of likes, comments, shares, and subscribers.
Wrapping Up the Video…
So, now you know what is video SEO and how videos can be used to promote your products/services. As the world goes increasingly digital, videos on your website or hosting platforms are going to become even more important for user engagement .
The online audience now prefers to watch rather than read long texts about your products/services. With the introduction of 5G services across the world, even long videos get played on browsers without any delay.
Go ahead and use this marketing tool to your advantage!
For your SEO requirement and other IT services, get in touch with Evoquesys.
