High-quality online videos are generally well received by users as well as search engines. If the upload to video sharing sites such as YouTube or Vimeo is intelligently linked to the own website, good synergies in SEO can be generated:
- Traffic increase: Websites that incorporate videos into their content strategy, generally have significantly more traffic than websites that depict just pure text.
- Trust elements: Videos that answer questions such as e.g. "What do other buyers think about the product? What service does the business offer? etc.”, can have a positive impact on the branding of a company.
- Residence time: The embedding of experience-, product-, and instructional videos can have a positive effect on the residence time. By integrating a video, users are animated to take a closer look at the content, so that the dwell time increases and the bounce rate decreases.
- Social commitment: Videos are particularly well received on social networks, like Facebook or Instagram, where they get shared, commented and liked, giving positive social signals that search engines appreciate. Not to mention the wide reach, as particularly on Facebook more users can be reached with video content than with purely editorial posts.
The correct upload on the video portal, the journalistic aspects, the optimal tagging and correct embedding into your own site, all these efforts will have a positive impact on the findability in search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo.
According to the ‘Universal Search Study 2015 of Searchmetrics, the importance of video for search engines like Google continues to grow. The study takes on all media and snippets that Google displays in addition to all organic search results pages (SERPs) - particularly videos that are provided on YouTube and are frequently shown. You are most probably aware that YouTube is a subsidiary of Google already for 10 years now, and is the driving force in video optimization.
That makes it the more important to tag the video content optimally for users and search engines, which is why you should take a look at the following tips:
- Create a comprehensive keyword concept for your video content that takes into consideration metrics regarding the search volume of a keyword as well as the competitive situation. Often it is useful to tackle 2- or 3-word combinations as well and ideally the keyword concept is ready prior to the video creation.
- In the ideal case, the selected keyword should come first in the title of the video. An optimal title comprises of about 60 characters including spaces, as longer titles are cut off by the search engine ("...").
- The description field should preferably contain a detailed text with around 1000 characters, describing the content of the video. Make sure that the selected keyword appears in the text as well as theme-relevant terminology. A reference to the website, for example to a related subpage, also gives a positive signal. Keywords, related to the video, should be lodged behind tags. In addition, general tags should be deposited, which describe the company. It is recommended to have 5-6 tags that cater to the content of the video, and 4-5 business-related tags.
- Always write a transcript for videos with speaker, as it can be used as a subtitle to the video and bring the video barrier-free in line.
More practical tip:
- Crosslinking between the business channel, the video, and the website is indispensable, if you want to use the positive signals from the YouTube optimization for the Website, too. Just make sure to have a structured approach when doing so: For instance, in order to be able to set direct links from the videos, the corporate channel must be formally linked to the website. And as mentioned earlier, you should enter a direct link in the description field of the video. If the URL is short, it is worth to do that at the beginning of the text, because then the link is already clickable in the video overview of the search result page of YouTube.
- Labelling of videos with schema.org is advisable. The use of so-called microdata helps the search engine in addition to better understand and classify the content of the website, as they tag rich snippets, including thumbnails of videos in the SERPs. If microdata is on a page, it is generally easier for the search engine bot to identify important content and as such interpret them better. If videos are embedded on the website, e.g. on product subpages or in a guide area, the moving picture should be tagged accordingly. Google itself supports and recommends the ‘onpage-markup’ of schema.org, where numerous data of the video can be stored, starting from thumbnail up to the duration and description.
- A fast indexing is ensured by setting up a video sitemap, which means the list of the video content that’s integrated into the site. In this XML file all metadata, such as title, description, length and source, are listed. After the successful implementation on the website, it should be submitted as well to Google Search Console, the free service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site's presence in Google search results.
Since the popularity of video has spread to advertising and marketing, there is really no time to lose. Get started!
By Daniela La Marca