7 Strategies to Optimize Video Content for SEO | SEO Video Optimization

Creating good video content can be a challenge, and it takes some expertise and some talent to develop something compelling that people will want to watch. But generating great content is only half of the battle. You must optimize your video content to ensure it gets in front of as many people as possible.

Once you have a great video in hand, implement these seven steps to optimizing your video for SEO to get as many eyeballs on your message as possible.

Whether you’re posting to YouTube or Vimeo or some other video hosting site, you’ll need to create a title and a description by default. This is an excellent opportunity to be creative, think like your audience, and come up with something accurate and interesting. What is the purpose of your video? What does it show and what will people learn from it? A descriptive title is best because it helps browsers and people searching to understand what’s in the video.

In the description, you can be as detailed as you want. Don’t worry about spoiler alerts here … tell the full story of what to expect in the video and make it easy for Google and YouTube algorithms to place your video in front of the right people. You can include a boilerplate here too to give some background on your company and your solutions, and you can provide a link to a relevant page on your website where people can learn more. If you have the capability to do keyword research, here is where your keyword-rich copy will go.

There’s plenty of space in the description section of YouTube to include a transcription of your video. This is especially helpful if you have complex terms that you want people to find you with. An interview-style video can include the full transcript too, but don’t forget to include the full name and title of the person speaking in the video. This will help you appear for more terms and get you seen by more people.

So, you’ve optimized your video for YouTube or Vimeo. That’s great! What is even better is if you can drive the traffic to a page on your site where the video is embedded. Here you can control the experience more closely than you can with a video viewed on YouTube. After your prospect is done watching the video, they’re surrounded by your branding, your CTAs, and your messaging. If possible, embed your SEO optimized video on your site and promote the page to drive traffic to your website.

When uploading your video, be sure to make it public so anyone can view it and a notification gets delivered to your subscribers. It can be tempting to make everything you create as “unlisted” so you can be sure to control the experience for your prospects, but if you make it “public,” then it’s easier to gather residual views after posting. It’ll also help if you’ve created really compelling content that someone wants to find later—they can’t search YouTube for an “unlisted” or “private” video.

Even if your file management system requires you to save video files as “company_video_version_8_with_audio” or something similar, choose instead to upload a version of the video with a more descriptive name. This makes no difference to the appearance of the video on a hosting platform because the name of the video is what shows up. But it can be invaluable meta data that gets your video seen by people searching. It’s always worth the extra 60 seconds to come up with something rich and descriptive.

As far as technical considerations go, this is perhaps one of the most important. If your video ratio means 4k and 1080p are indistinguishable because of the window size, choose to use 1080p for the sake of loading speed. Another consideration is to export your video at an adaptive low bitrate instead of an adaptive high bitrate—if the difference is non-existent, then you’ll save yourself about two-thirds of the file size. It’s always best to have your video play in the format it looks best in, but if at all possible, shrinking the size of your file will make for a better user experience.

Here is another chance to be creative and make your video worthy of a click. Is there a still from the video that encapsulates the whole concept? Could you create a thumbnail in Photoshop or Illustrator that makes the content seem more intriguing or exciting? Thumbnails are the user’s first impression of the video; make it count and tell as much of the story as you can in that little window.

Video content is compelling and engaging and increasing in popularity among marketers both in house and at agencies across the country. When it comes time to produce your next video, make sure that optimizing it for as many views as possible is not an afterthought but part of the strategic plan behind that piece of content.

ADVAN Design optimizes content for SEO, including multimedia content like video. Contact us today and discover how we can help you with your next video project.