By now, we all know the power of video in communications and delivering a brand message—particularly to younger audiences. You probably already know how to shoot video, edit it, do Facebook Live. But in a cluttered world of branding, do you know how to make sure your video content rises to the top through SEO?
Here are seven strategies for optimizing video for search.
Know the basics. Be On YouTube or Vimeo. For brand awareness, these are the two best options. YouTube, the world’s largest video platform, has 1 billion users watching 1 billion hours of video content per day. Start a channel, name it and use an iconic image.
Use meta tags. Use meta tags for both channel keywords and video keywords. Remember they are different and distinct—channel tags help rank your channel, and video tags help rank a particular video. Search engines use the tags to further refine the topic and, in turn, rank your video accordingly.
Think quality first. YouTube’s core viewing audience is between 18 and 34 years of age—the perfect wheelhouse demographic for businesses. And that demo demands high-quality videos.
Integrate and cross-pollinate. Create a new platform for your videos by integrating them into your content or blog products. This not only adds another dimension for users and further context for the user, but it can also drive more traffic.
Live social video. If you’re looking for a great strategy to optimize video SEO, live video can be a great asset. Through platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitch, live video has proven to be quite successful—to the point where live video are generating an average of 600 percent more Facebook interactions than recorded video.
Create a video site map. Google is king, and the king is demanding a site map if you create a good amount of video content. The site map tells Google which of your pages have video, and in turn helps the search engine better rank those pages.
Use video transcription. This is not only helpful to the reader, but creates a huge surge for your SEO ranking. Search engine crawlers aren’t sophisticated enough yet to deduce video content, so captions and content surrounding the video help crawlers determine what the content is about. Think of transcripts just as you would regular written copy.