How Video SEO can Transform your Business’s Web Presence

How Exactly Do Videos Help SEO?

If you've been paying attention to how the search engines work, you'll notice that Google returns a wide variety of results from news pages, social media posts, videos, to regular content. If you take a close look, popular videos on YouTube (and other platforms) often rank well in their search results. By creating a high quality video that addresses the search query and the audience, you'll often be able to get past the hurdle of trying outranking websites that have a larger backlink profile and authority. But video SEO goes beyond creating links and traffic for your website. Videos, especially ones hosted on YouTube, have a high shareability. If you create a great video and it goes viral, you'll be able to get the word out about your business and brand faster than you'd ever thought possible. And since you're aiming for links anyway, it makes sense to create videos as part of your content marketing plan. Posting content on different platforms and creating different types of content should already be in your SEO best practices checklist.

Four Video SEO Best Practices

Now that you understand how beneficial video SEO can be to your overall SEO strategy, here are some video SEO best practices that you should adhere to: 1. Optimize to address both the search engines and the users Before you do anything else, figure out who your video is addressing as well as the search queries you're aiming to target. This will allow you to build a title around keywords that are relevant to your audience as well as the search engines. You can increase the engagement and targeting more by using the description to describe your video and embed other relevant keywords or phrases naturally. Remember to make your words count and avoid over-optimizing. 2. Focus on delivering great content At the end of the day, it's all about great content. You need to deliver value to potential prospects if you hope to turn them into customers one day. If users feel like they've gotten great value, they'll be more likely to like and share your video which will increase its search engine visibility. So whether your video is meant to entertain, educate, connect or inform the user, make sure you do a great job on the content. 3. Take advantage of transcriptions Transcripts are a great way to improve the user experience. If you're hosting the video on your website, you can add transcripts to make the content easier to understand. If you're hosting it on YouTube, you can add captions which will help improve the video's rankings on the YouTube results as well as the search engine results. 4. Use rich snippets Rich snippets are indicators that help distinguish different types of content in the search results. A video listing will have a play button, a display that shows how long the video is, and a thumbnail of the video. Because the thumbnail is the most obvious visual indicator, you want to create one that is attractive to the user while also giving the user a good preview of what to expect.

How to Move Forward with this Information

These are just some basic video SEO tips that will help you get off the ground. Obviously, there are other challenges of using video from creating a high quality video, editing, marketing the video, to growing a video channel. It's up to you to decide how to integrate videos in your SEO campaign. You may want to focus on the marketing aspect of videos and hire a freelancer to help create and produce the videos. Or you may want to take on the creative aspects of producing and get help for the marketing. But if you really want to take full advantage of video, you may want to look into hiring video SEO companies. These companies specialize in video marketing services for SEO and understand all the complexities from producing a video to getting videos to rank in the top positions in the search engines.