The SEO landscape is always changing. Audience interest shifts naturally over time and that, combined with web-shaking Google updates, mean that you should revise your SEO strategy often. As written content faces more scrutiny under Google’s 2024 guidelines, it may be time to consider honing your video SEO game to keep your competitive edge.
Using Video with Your Business
Photo by Matthew Kwong
Not every business model can make effective use of videos. That said, they are surprisingly versatile with shorts, tutorials, and whole podcasts regularly watched by viewers online. Through those, you can introduce yourself as an entrepreneur and provide information about your product, service, or your industry at large.
Other business models have video content baked into them. For example, the iGaming industry relies on digital slots and other online casino games. Leading providers in that industry also offer live casino blackjack, a video feed that allows players to play the game in real time with a human hosting the action. In that case, the streamed video is a product/service being offered to the customer. For most site owners, video content is great at lending credibility to reviews or tutorials, bringing in new traffic, and providing an SEO boost to the pages it’s embedded in.
Video SEO Best Practices
Video SEO is all about optimizing videos for Google’s search algorithms. Over the past few years, Google has built specific tools that help videos rank over written articles in certain contexts. For example, a cooking tutorial is much more likely to provide a video in the featured snippet. Using these tools, entrepreneurs can build a suite of videos that perform well with SEO. They can attract new audiences if placed on YouTube or social media, and they can be embedded straight into your site for a direct SEO boost.
Before you can optimize content, you’ll have to create it first. A lot of videos can be shot from your smartphone, so it’s easier than ever. You’ll still need to do keyword research and have your finger on the pulse of your industry if you want to choose a topic that performs well with your audience and the algorithm.
Title & Description Optimization
When titling your video, you’ll want to include your main keyword. That’s obvious, but you should also keep it under 60 characters so that the whole title appears on the search engine results page.
Next, you should consider user intent. This is what Google considers when ranking content. If your video answers a question, making that question the title is a great idea. You should also provide a 120-150 character description of the video that catches people’s eyes. YouTube descriptions can be longer and more detailed.
Make Brand-Friendly Thumbnails
You should also create custom, brand-compliant thumbnails for your videos. They should be eye-catching while also having any logos or colors your audience expects from your brand. Making a good thumbnail requires some creative vision, something that’s difficult to train, but there are thumbnail tutorials online.
Use Schema Markup
In all likelihood, some of your videos will be embedded into a page on your site. When that happens, you should use schema markup to inform Google’s crawler bots what the video is. If used effectively, a video with this kind of structured data may be translated into a rich snippet, ranking at position zero for a query.
Video schema isn’t a ranking factor directly, but making your videos crawler-friendly can go a long way. Use resources like VideoObject to learn the basics of schema and then apply HTML tags to the code of your page.
Build Links to Video Pages
Last but certainly not least, you should practice everybody’s favorite SEO tactic – link building. This is a must for video pages too. If your webpage has a video attached to it, you’ll want to highlight the video by providing backlinks. This will make the video, and so the page, perform better and bring new audiences to your work.
This content is a joint venture between our publication and our partner. We do not endorse any product or service in the article.
