Make Your Videos SEO Friendly
When you include videos in your content marketing strategy, you improve the odds of reaching your customers and engaging them in your material. For videos to work this magic, however, you have to make sure the material is found by Google and the other search engines in the first place.
Since spiders crawling the web cannot ‘watch’ a video, it is up to you to make sure your videos are SEO friendly and ready for indexing. Here are 4 easy steps to make your videos more ready for search.
INCLUDE TRANSCRIPTS WITH YOUR VIDEOS
This is particularly helpful on YouTube. When you include a transcript, you make it easier for your customers watching the video to get everything possible out of the clip. It also makes it easier for the YouTube algorithms and the Google spiders to know exactly what your video is about so they know where to rank it.
CREATE A VIDEO SITEMAP ON YOUR WEBSITE
A video sitemap will make it easier for Google to index your content and will ensure that your content is shown when people search using media-centric queries. The sitemap helps Google index your metadata so that they know which videos will be most applicable for the audience.
The video sitemap works similarly to a regular sitemap in its attempt to understand the content available. The key difference is that a video sitemap stores that information for media based searches. Including such a sitemap will enhance the exposure of your material.
USE METADATA
Metadata is another great opportunity for letting the search engines know the message of the video. Rather than quickly filling in the metadata with little thought, use it as an opportunity to include strategic long-tail keywords that might be otherwise hard to include naturally.
ALWAYS ANALYZE AND ADJUST AS NECESSARY
Like any other type of content, it is important to always stay on top of your SEO progress and results. It can be easy to neglect analyzing videos to and instead just blasting them out while hoping for success.
Instead, take the time to determine your applicable metrics and what can be used to measure them. Are you looking to increase traffic through the videos? Leads? Know what you are looking for, measure it and make adjustments to the rest of your SEO strategy as needed.
Videos are a fantastic content marketing tool and can help you improve engagement– but only if they are found by the intended audience. To help search engine spiders understand your content and show it to the applicable customers, you need to make sure you maximize your SEO strategy.
Use the above four tips to get started and witness your ROI improve as you increase your exposure.
