You’ve spent time and money making the perfect product video, but looking at your analytics, you’re underwhelmed by how many people are actually watching it.
Video marketing is a great way to engage your audience in your brand story and distill a complex or technical offering into an easy-to-understand message. But a video strategy only works if your audience sees it.
While you’re likely aware of search engine optimization (SEO) tactics for your website content, you might not know there are best practices specific to videos.
Following, you will find eight tips to improve your video’s search engine results page (SERP) ranking and two tactics to avoid.
Eight tips to improve your video SERP ranking
Here are eight tips to boost your video’s visibility and search engine results page ranking:
- Name your video and include keywords in the title (i.e., don’t name your video “Our Company Video”).
- Include relevant keywords in the meta description of your video.
- Design an engaging thumbnail with a title/short description of the video instead of using the default screenshot.
- Embed the video on a page of your website with relevant content and use the same keywords.
- Make the video the hero of the page, not the afterthought.
- Write and link to a transcript of the video.
- If your video is hosted on YouTube, make sure to complete all the fields, including the description of your channel.
- Also, when uploading to YouTube, be sure to include a link to a relevant page on your website in the video description.
Video SEO “don’ts”
Following are two ways you can potentially hinder your video’s SERP ranking:
- Don’t put the same video on multiple pages of your website unless the content on the page is significantly different. Otherwise, you risk being penalized for duplicate content.
- Don’t place various videos on the same page. While it’s acceptable to have a resources page with all your videos, you don’t want one of your meaty content pages to have numerous videos, especially if they have different messages and target audiences. Remember, your video is the hero.
What’s your video marketing strategy?
Not only does your target audience expect to be able to learn more about your products and services via video, but it’s also a great way to engage them on social media.
Watch how Clarity Quest helps clients define their brand message during uncertain times.