Where To Begin With Video SEO Services

Black Kite has explained how video marketing can help your business. Chief among the video marketing recommendations is to optimize for SEO. Let’s take a deep dive into Video SEO services and how they benefit your marketing strategy.

Video SEO Services: Begin with the Basics

Publishing web video fits within most digital marketing strategies. You can treat it as another piece of content, similar to working with info-graphics or e-books. However, unlike those types of media, web video is dynamic. Given that, it is a great source of amplifying the message you want to deliver to your audience. Web video offers the flexibility to be:

• Embedded directly on your website or shared over your marketing channels, such as social media
• Promotional, as a web commercial, or instructional to off-load service and on-boarding teams
• Professionally planned, shot, and edited or created on-the-fly by you and your team members

To maximize the reach of your video content, let’s look at some essential steps that need to be customized for each of your videos.

Video SEO best practices | Google Search Central

Tell Search Engines How to Find Your Video

There are an ever increasing number of sites and web tools allowing you to distribute video. For these reasons, your video must be easy to discover amid the sea of content options. Up against such fierce competition, search engines are a powerful ally to gaining viewers.

Regardless of how you are distributing your videos’ bits, take the time to draft and publish a dedicated video page for each piece of content. This will generate more traffic to your owned and operated website from new visitors using search engines, alongside returning visitors, app users, or off platform viewers. With your video page in place, apply your regular SEO process, just as you would for any other destination on your site.

The dedicated video page need not be more than a title, the video’s embed code, and a small amount of text with a heading or two. Consider this page an opportunity to target new, long tail keywords with the goal of drawing new, top of funnel visitors.

From a technical perspective, wrap your video content inside proper html tags for dynamic media:

• embed
• video
• iframe

Additionally, to help search engines identify and understand your video content, [provide structured data](link to BKM blog) using schema.org’s video object. Schema is an extensible markup that can provide as much or as little support information about the video itself. In this situation, you want to tell search engines to prioritize your video content to anyone searching for the keyword you are targeting.

Next, make sure the page is publicly accessible to crawlers (not blocked by robots dot text or meta tags). Equally important, the page should not require complex user interactions (login/password).

Lastly, create a video sitemap and submit it to search engines. While this is fundamental if you are hosting the video yourself, it is just as beneficial when using a video hosting site, such as Vimeo or YouTube. You cannot rely on these platforms to drive traffic to your site and it will go a long way to improving your site’s authority.

Apply Existing SEO Strategy

Video content is another channel for your marketing tactics to leverage the effort you’ve already put into keyword research. Use the same keyword approach on each dedicated video page’s:

• title and description meta tags
• headings and subheadings
• url slug and filename

Beyond these technical and keyword based mechanisms, employ all your SEO techniques, both on page and off page.

Grant Search Engines Access to Video Files

An optimization unique to video is a poster image or, more commonly, the thumbnail. Typically a high quality image representative of the content, browsers display this graphic while loading the video player in the background. It will remain onscreen until the page visitor interacts with the player, for example beginning playback. This could default to a frame within the video on some platforms, but it is an opportunity to provide a graphical display with:

• eye catching imagery related to the topic, not necessarily in the video
• your branding, logo, slogan, or even personnel headshots
• the video title, or other support text

Treat it as a “play this video” call-to-action. Specifying this graphic will improve the likelihood of search engines indexing your page and highlighting your video in the results pages quickly.

Both the video sitemap and structured data for the video allow you to link to the specific web video player for your content. Generally, this is the embed code from a video host platform (embedUrl, player_loc). A point often overlooked, if you are hosting the video file, is to instruct search engines where to access the source video file (contentUrl, content_loc).

Similar to your video page, both the thumbnail image and original video file should be accessible to crawlers. Together with good SEO, you may unlock video specific features such as video previews and key moments. Videos may be listed among video results, Google images, or in Google Discover.

Pros: amplify existing reach of organic keywords, new content to rank for gap keywords; used to drive traffic to your owned and operated site or to reduce service tickets for quick to solve issues.

YouTube Video SEO Services

As mentioned previously, there are a variety of ways to get your video to leads, customers, and evangelists. However, the king of them all remains YouTube. Optimizing for the second largest search engine (behind parent company Google) is not only important on its own merits, but straightforward if you follow the steps above.

Beyond the basics, there are a few additional steps you will want to take that are specific for YouTube:

• Channel page. One of the first steps you will want to take is creating your own channel to host videos. While you can certainly start out with guest publishing on an existing channel, once you are comfortable generating content, create your own channel. From there, make sure to customize each area, such as channel name (most likely your brand), banner, and channel description. You should also add links to your website and social media accounts.
• Category. Each video should be classified in the appropriate category, or closest approximation.
• Tags. An additional mechanism to optimize for your target audience. These could be secondary keywords or identifiers to easier navigate your video library.

Pros: turnkey content management system, getting your content in front of existing audience that consumes video

Video Hosts and Third Party Video Players SEO Services

Aside from YouTube, there are many alternative hosting platforms and embedded web video player options. For example, you may choose to host your videos on vimeo or roll your own web video player using video.js. In these cases, you will have a whole set of video SEO opportunities. You will want to optimize for

• filename
• player load time
• interactive experiences

Major hosting platforms, such as vimeo , include many great SEO features, similar to YouTube. At the other end of the spectrum, building a player from frameworks such as video.js will require using plug-ins or manually adding and editing JavaScript code.

Conclusion

Web video is a dynamic source of content that can be distributed across all your marketing channels. To maximize its reach, we recommend applying Video SEO services best practices. These consist of basic SEO and video specific tactics to leverage the effort already put into keyword research.

Are you ready to optimize your video for maximum visibility across search engines? Contact BKM for fundamental SEO tactics on all your web content, including dedicated video pages. And you can also contact HSV Innovations, a web video consulting agency specializing in video SEO services. Happy streaming!