Video is now one of the most highly consumed forms of digital media to date. If your business has not yet introduced video to your current marketing campaigns, you’re really falling behind. However, producing and creating videos is only the beginning task. The second and most important step is to optimize that video content. Why? Because not only do videos rank high on search engines, but also without optimization for anything related to your business and its website, nobody will be able to find you online. Ergo, you won’t see or experience any conversions you’ve desired to see happen for your business. While we have gone over SEO in our blog, such as outline black vs. white vs. grey hat SEO, we need to help you learn how to optimize videos no matter whether or not they are featured on your business’s website. Here are a few things you can do.
- Figure out your video’s hosting platform first
Before you go creating videos and optimizing them, you need to address something very important first. For one, do you want more traffic to your website for the videos, or do you want to create brand awareness? For another, where do you want people to watch your business’s videos the most? On your website? On social media? Answering these questions will help you best determine what platform you need to host your videos and support their technology. Where you do need to have them is on YouTube. Where you don’t want them is on Flash (and here’s why). Vimeo is another option for possible hosting. If you want your videos to be featured on your website specifically, that may be trickier to do depending on how old the site is and how up-to-date it is in terms of plugins and software. (If you need to know whether it’s time for an update, check out our post). Wherever you decide to host your videos, make sure the platform being used is a well-known one that won’t go out of date anytime.
- Get your videos optimized for mobile devices
Mobile optimization is no longer an optional SEO task; now it’s the central focus. Mobile video viewing and website browsing has surpassed desktop in terms of ranking highly online and maximizing web traffic, and the numbers are only going to grow as the years pass. While desktop videos are still your key aspect for your website, your video campaign will fail if it’s not optimized it for mobile devices. Doing so isn’t as difficult as it used to be. All you need to do is make sure your website and video player are responsive to mobile watching. YouTube and Vimeo are already automatically optimized for mobile viewing. If you’ve hired us at V3 to help build you a new site, then it’s guaranteed that your site will be responsive across all devices, mobile included.
- Optimize the thumbnails
Thumbnails can’t exactly help you rank higher on Google in terms of its content. However, what they can do is affect how you obtain clicks to your video. That’s because it’s the first thing your potential audience will see of you before they click to access the video. It’s a good idea to focus a little on how you want this thumbnail to appear online. It should reveal what the viewer can expect to see of the video and not be misleading at all. A watermark or logo will show potential viewers that it’s a professionally made video that will guarantee quality content. Other qualities of an engaging thumbnail include colourful, branded, and exciting imagery that tells a story and isn’t heavily click-baity.
- Upload your videos to multiple platforms
Self-hosting your videos is problematic for a lot of reasons. For one, it doesn’t guarantee that everyone will watch your videos simply because you have them up and running. Self-hosting can help with your website’s SEO, certainly, but at the very least you should also upload them to YouTube. Why? Because YouTube is the key to getting videos to rank anywhere on Google. And if you really want to maximize your business’s exposure online via videos, you need to upload them to all of your social media networks and other video hosting platforms like Vimeo. This is for a simple reason: the more places you upload your videos, the more time Google will recognize it as a trusted source, and the better your chances of people finding it and, ultimately, you. This same principle applies to all content related to your website, such as blog posts, infographics, and so on.
- Video title and descriptions matter
Just as you would with blog posts, using various synonym keywords in your video titles and descriptions can improve your chances of ranking highly for keywords you want to target. The variations don’t have to be crazy different; a video described as a “marketing research video” may have more appeal and effectiveness than the description “marketing research”, for example. Creating various titles, descriptions, thumbnails, tags, and so on for your business’s videos can give you a better chance of ranking high on search engines according to the keywords your viewers are using. So long as you follow the basic guidelines of SEO as you would for your website’s title and description tags, you will adhere to using white hat SEO tactics as opposed to the black hat kind (and yes, this all applies to videos too!). While there are a great deal more tips to use in terms of video marketing for your business, a successful campaign boils down to one crucial component: your business’s website. If you don’t have a fully up-to-date site, or it’s in need of an upgrade to a newer and better one, then give us a call at V3 Media. Without a good website, the videos won’t work at all and your marketing efforts will go to waste!