Major brands control video content on YouTube and Facebook. But even there, it can be a struggle, and progress plays a decisive role. Using SEO in your video marketing strategy can multiply the success of the campaign.
In this article, we’ll give you some tips to help your videos rank higher on YouTube, and then we’ll add some general guidelines.
9 Important SEO Tips for Video Marketing
Pronounce keywords in the video
Upload videos to multiple platforms
Ranking by suggested videos
Crackerjack rank tracker
Analyze Data via YouTube Analytics Statistics
Know your audience like the back of your hand
Optimize video title & description
Optimize videos for Google’s featured snippets
Don’t forget about optimizing your site pages
1. Pronounce keywords in the video
As a rule of thumb, YouTube has a closed captioning function. By default, YouTube analyzes each video and generates subtitles based on what is said in it. So there is every reason to believe that YouTube judges a book not only by its cover.
Therefore, mention the keyword or phrase in your videos at least once throughout the video. The same rule applies to written blogs. This is the basic rule of SEO optimization – using keywords and doing it properly. If the keyword choice is wise, you can easily rank for the query.
Don’t overcrowd the speech with key phrases, though, and try to maintain an understandable structure of the text.
2. Upload videos to multiple platforms
You will most likely choose or have already chosen YouTube as your video hosting site, but it’s not the only option on the Internet. There are a lot of similar services, and each of them has its own audience. Maybe some of them are more suitable for posting your content. Besides, YouTube is not the best in all areas: Users share videos from Facebook 10 times more often than from YouTube. Experiment with different platforms and find the ones that will promote your content best.
By finding the right platforms for your audience, you’ll get closer to achieving your SEO goals and boosting online visibility.
3. Ranking by suggested videos
Here’s the trick. Youtube SEO is more than just SERP rankings. You can get many views if your video is seen as similar to others.
A suggested video is when your video appears next to the video you are watching in the right sidebar. So if your video appears next to a trendy one, you will steal some of its views. The best way to do this is to use the same tags.
Plus, you’ll get to the target audience more quickly, which will help your SEO strategy work better.
4. Crackerjack rank tracker
To promote videos on YouTube, it’s important to analyze how certain actions on video content affect the rise or fall of views, engagement, and interaction with the video.
Analysis of video positions in YouTube search results is an integral part of video promotion analytics. People come to YouTube to watch video content, but they search and land on YouTube’s search results page before they watch it. You do need to pay attention to the proper rank tracker. If you want to have a successful project and see the rankings of your channel, then you need to examine and analyze your project with the aid of the SE Ranking rank tracker.
An accurate tool that can monitor rankings in real-time can become very useful. SE Ranking rank tracker shows you results up to the TOP-200 for the query you’re analyzing. You can check ranks for Google Ads and across five search engines. Besides, you can monitor not only the ranking but also the search volume, relative traffic forecast, number of results, and suggested bids by Google and the level of competition.
By monitoring rankings, you can clearly see your competitors and analyze what you can do to beat them in the race.
5. Analyze Data via YouTube Analytics Statistics
YouTube Analytics is a tool from YouTube that allows you to track a channel’s performance and specific videos. Go to Creative Studio and select YouTube Analytics. A page with information about the video for the last 28 days will open. If you want to promote a video, it must be exciting and unique. For deeper insights across multiple social media platforms, consider using these social media analytics tools to enhance your strategy further.
YouTube Analytics allows you to find out the number of views, likes/dislikes, shares, additions to the playlist, and the average watch time. You can also identify the top 10 most-watched videos and get information about playback locations, traffic sources, regions where videos are most often viewed, and the gender of users who have watched the video the most.
Using this data, you can create new videos according to the ‘best-working formula,’ ranking for more queries or optimize existing videos to increase their visibility.
6. Know your audience like the back of your hand
This advice may seem obvious, but audience research should be part of the video creation process. You need to know the interests of potential buyers to grab their attention. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your audience and ask, “What’s useful about this brand’s video? Will I learn something new and interesting?”
You can do the market research yourself. Here are some tips:
- Interview people in person or through social media pages.
- Conduct online surveys.
- Use Google Search to collect additional audience information from free, trusted sources.
For example, Hootsuite releases annual reports about the Global State of Digital. That can give many helpful insights about YouTube social media and video convent in general.
Knowing your audience will help you choose the right SEO and marketing strategies based on their location, language, needs, online behavior, and even the web sources they use.
7. Optimize video title & description
If a video’s title is humdrum and long-winded, your audience will most likely not watch it. You must not fool your audience by suggesting a video that does not match the title. If you do this dishonestly, your ratings will drop over time.
It’s best to place your keywords at the beginning of the title to get a video higher in search rankings.
With the descriptions for the video, not everything is so simple. Many turn them into a full-fledged mini-blog, while others make it the way it was intended initially – short and informative. Which choice is more correct?
In terms of length, a 200+ word description is fine for YouTube, while a Facebook video description is about 84 characters.
On some platforms, you can also add tags to your video. Do not neglect this. Also, add a few wider and more popular tags, but don’t stray too far from your topic.
In terms of your SEO goals, a properly constructed meta title and description will help drive traffic to the page as it shows up in results. They will encourage people to click on the video, indirectly improving your ranking, as well as the click-through rate (CTR).
8. Optimize videos for Google’s featured snippets
A featured snippet is the most relevant piece of content that is shown in Google SERPs before the main results. You get a special place on the page by being chosen for the featured snippet. Needless to say, such results get more clicks than the others.
But how to optimize for featured snippets to appear at the top of Google’s search results? Here are a couple of tips for you:
- Choose high-volume long-tail keywords.
Keyword popularity and length matter because such queries usually get the featured spinnet feature. - Give information concisely.
Concise answers usually get featured in such snippets since the format requires the essence relayed in just several sentences. - Use trigger words.
Words like ‘explanation’ or ‘example’ tend to make the concise answer you write more applicable to the format of featured snippets.
9. Don’t forget about optimizing your site pages
Placing content on an optimized page increases the chances of a video making it to the top. Remember to include targeted keywords in the title, tags, and text content of the page where the video will be embedded.
Don’t use the same video on different pages. This will worsen your SEO results. Search engines will treat duplicate videos as duplicate content.
Conclusion
Optimizing your video content can take it to a whole new level. Of course, well-designed videos will gain views and ratings, but video optimization alone isn’t enough. It should be part of an entire marketing strategy that will redirect traffic from certain platforms to different locations and increase reach. Just keep this in mind and diversify your content.
