Video marketing SEO has become a critical component of content creation. Even though many of us tend to focus on what we are going to say or present in our videos, we are only focusing on one side of the coin. While content creation is certainly relevant, it is moot if few people are actually watching your videos. Therefore, whether you work for a large or small organization, you must focus on how your audience will find you.

 In other words, it is somewhat naive to adopt an “if you build it, they will come” mentality toward video content. With video “exploding on social media” in 2019, the competition is only getting more intense. We all need to craft a deliberate strategy that will maximize the odds of our target audience viewing our content.

At Dubb, we spend a lot of time working with our clients to help them produce, distribute, and market high-quality video content. As you can guess, one critical component of an effective marketing strategy is strong search engine optimization (“SEO”). If you can obtain strong SEO for your video content, you will discover a constant influx of leads.

Video Marketing SEO: Effective Tactics

But how do you obtain strong video marketing SEO? While we don’t promise to have a flawless strategy, we have discovered a number of effective tactics that can help your videos rise in the search rankings.

High-Quality Video

 To start, one of the best things that you can do to increase the SEO of your video content is to create high-quality video. Yes, things like keyword optimization are important (we will discuss them shortly). But having said this, an effective SEO strategy starts with high-quality, valuable content that users love.

Why you may ask? Ultimately, search engines pay attention to a variety of factors, but some of the more important factors include engagement and the average viewing time. Engagement essentially means that a visitor takes a certain action after viewing your video, as opposed to passively browsing or immediately exiting your video. Average viewing time, quite clearly, shows the average amount of time that viewers are watching your video content.

Simply put, if your videos lead to low engagement or viewers exiting their window within a few seconds, your videos will perform poorly in the search engine rankings. It intuitively makes sense. Google and other search engines rank content that is most valuable to users. They want users to find the best source to answer their questions or solve their problems. Frustrated Google or Bing users will be more likely to leave their platforms, so search engine algorithms prioritize content that will make their users happy.

Understanding all of this, it is quite obvious why you should ensure that you are creating high-quality content. To do this, get into the minds of your target audience. What are their goals or objectives? How are they trying to improve their lives? Once you have stepped into their shoes, create content that provides some value in their lives. The content can be functional (like solving a particular problem in your niche) or it can simply be fun and entertaining.

Just keep in mind that you want to create value in their lives. By following this step, you are one step closer to obtaining strong SEO for your video content. By ignoring this step, you are setting yourself up for failure.

Keyword Research

Assuming that you are set on creating high-quality video content for your audience, you next want to be deliberate about the keywords that you use. This is the foundation of any good SEO practice. By delivering high-quality content for certain keywords that you strategically target, you have a better chance of rising up the search rankings for keywords that are applicable to your business. 

There are countless tutorials and trainings on how to develop an effective keyword strategy. That said, one of the best ways to start is to take advantage of Google’s Keyword Planner. In order to use Keyword Planner, you will first have to sign up for a Google Ads account. But once you have done this, you are able to access a wide range of data on popular (and not-so-popular) Google queries.

Google makes it easy to get started. You can either discover new keywords or obtain search volume and forecasts for your keywords. For instance, if you sell tennis gear and type in the keyword “tennis racquets,” you will see associated keywords, average monthly searches for that keyword, the level of competition for that keyword, and the low and high ranges for the top of page bid. With this data in hand, you can start thinking about targeting keywords that receive high average monthly searches but have low competition.

Google Keyword Planner is just one tool to help you find potential keywords. You can also take advantage of Google Trends to gain more insight into what Google users are searching. However you discover your potential keywords, make sure that you are including those keywords in the title and description of your video. By being smart about your keyword strategy, you can increase the odds of your video rising to the top of Google, Bing, or any other search engine.

Transcriptions

One underrated, yet effective method of achieving great video marketing SEO is to transcribe all of your videos. While it may seem like overkill, transcriptions provide a number of benefits. First, they provide more SEO opportunities through increased engagement. If you post a video and subsequent transcript on your website, for instance, you can increase user engagement and the length of time spent on your website. As we have discussed, these are positive attributes in the minds of search engine algorithms. Along with this, if your transcript contains some of the specific keywords that you are targeting, you can increase your odds of rising up the rankings for those particular keywords. 

But beyond these benefits, a transcription for each of your videos provides another important benefit. It offers another way for your audience to consume your content. While some members of your audience may want to watch each and every video, others may not have as much time. Due to their time restrictions, they may prefer to simply read a transcript. By offering a transcript, you are empowering your audience. You are giving them a choice. You show that you understand their preferences and are willing to cater to them.

If you would like an easy way to obtain transcripts, you can simply upload your video to YouTube or use a third party transcription service (like Otter.Ai).

Mind the Technicals

Finally, to increase your odds of strong video marketing SEO, you need to pay attention to some of the technical aspects of your videos. To start, make sure you are optimizing your video file metadata. Make your title punchy and ensure that you are including keywords. Create a custom thumbnail that generates interest and helps viewers immediately understand what your content is about. Also, include a call to action and reference your business’s website in the video description.

From there, you will also want to submit a video sitemap. By submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console, you provide additional data that Google can use to properly index your videos. When submitting your sitemap, be sure to include the basics (like the video title, description, and raw video file URL), but also include information like video duration, view counts and categories. While this may seem like a monotonous task, putting in this work can increase the chances that your video achieves better SEO.

Finally, ensure that your video is the focus of the relevant page. If users have to scroll down the page in order to find your video, you will inevitably receive lower engagement for that video. Along with this, Google and other search crawlers are less likely to make that extra effort to index a hidden video. Because of this, take that extra step and make sure that your audience can immediately discover your video. This is a quick and easy tactic that you shouldn’t ignore.

The Benefits of Strong SEO

It’s easy to think of SEO as some amorphous, unclear force that is difficult to master. And yes, it can be extremely difficult to obtain the top result for every one of your preferred keywords. But having said that, this reality doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try. In fact, without thinking about and developing an SEO strategy, it becomes extremely difficult for your audience to discover your content—no matter how good it is.

Ultimately, video marketing SEO is a critical task—regardless of the size, shape, or age of your business. It does take time to learn and master. It requires patience. That said, by making these investments now, you will obtain healthy dividends in the future.

At Dubb, we love thinking about SEO and other topics that help video marketers to succeed. To learn more about us and how we can potentially help you, feel free to contact us.