How to Start Improving the Video SEO for your Website

You started publishing video content on your website. But have you optimized it for search engines? Without proper optimization, your videos won’t rank well in searches. Videos are different than text-based content, as search engines can’t watch videos to see what they contain (yet). Therefore, you need to provide as much information as possible.

That is why video SEO is so important. In some ways it is similar to conventional SEO, but there are significant differences as well. Let’s see what the ingredients for great Video SEO are:

1. Identify the Right Keywords

Just like with conventional SEO, the first step you need to take is to identify the keywords that you want to target. Ideally, there should be a mix of both short and long-tail keywords.

The more thorough your keyword research, the better. Nowadays, there are lots of resources that can help you out, including the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

2. Use Video Schema Markup

When you add videos to your website, you should use video schema markup. This will let you provide additional information about your video that search engines find useful. On top of that, using schema markup will allow your video to be listed as a rich snippet in search results – which will help it get more clicks.

While there are lots of tags that you can add to your video using schema markup, some of the more important are the title, description, duration, thumbnail URL, and transcript. The keywords that you want to target should be sprinkled throughout the markup.

It should be noted that schema markup overlaps with video sitemaps – which provide an avenue for you to add the same type of data. If you want you can use both, but you should make sure the information they contain is consistent.

3. Publish the Video Transcript

Ideally, you should transcribe every piece of video content, and publish that transcript alongside the video on the webpage. The video transcript will act as written content that search engines can read when they crawl your website, and will give lots of useful information. On top of that, the keywords that occur naturally in it will help you rank better, in a more specific way.

If you are worried that adding a long transcript will interfere with your web design and layout – add it in a collapsible element. That way, visitors can click to access it, and it will be present on the page and give you a nice SEO boost.

Note that although you can add the transcript to the schema markup, it won’t have the same impact as if you’d actually publish it on your webpage.

4. Only Publish One Video per Webpage

Always remember that you should only publish a single video on any given webpage. The reason for that is simple: search engines only list the first video that they encounter when they crawl a webpage. In short, if you publish multiple videos on a particular page, only the first one will be listed. The rest will be ignored, which is clearly not what you want.

5. Keep Tabs on the Page Speed

Search engines have started to use page speed more frequently as a factor when ranking websites. Unfortunately, videos can affect it, which is why you should track it and make sure your webpages aren’t taking too long to load.

If your page speed is too slow, you should take steps to improve it. That can include compressing your CSS and HTML files, reducing redirects, using a CDN, optimizing images, and so on.

6. Make Sure it is Mobile-Friendly

Mobile optimization is crucial if you want to rank better on search engines. To be perfectly honest it’s highly important, as more people are browsing the internet on mobile devices, and you want to give them a good viewing experience. At a bare minimum you should make sure that both your web design and video player are responsive and will scale and adapt based on the screen size of the devices that view it.

On top of that it would help if your video is created with mobile devices in mind and does not have elements that are too small. For example, if you’re using screen recording Mac you should zoom in on smaller menus or icons that may be difficult to see on a small screen.

Conclusion

The steps described above should help you to improve your video SEO significantly and help your content to rank better. However, there are lots of other factors that can influence its ranking as well, including backlinks, social signals, dwell time, and so on. These improvements are a foundation for your video SEO and using them, you can build your video content and strategy successfully.

Author bio: Mahendra Bajiya is a blogger who enjoys creating and publishing video content. He has made it a point to optimize the video SEO on his blog to ensure that his content ranks well on search engines.

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