If your website has videos on it, you’ll want to continue reading (if your website doesn’t have videos on it yet, what are you waiting for?)… So, why is it so important to continue reading this blog if you have videos? Because you’ll want to see how you can take advantage of your videos to drive even more traffic to your site. Intrigued? Good.
How can you leverage your online videos? Try Video Search Engine Optimization, or VSEO. It’s simply taking SEO optimization concepts and applying them to your videos. What you’ll basically be doing is helping the search engines figure out what your videos are all about (because they can’t watch and listen to your videos just yet) by optimizing the videos for keyword phrases that pertain to the video. Just as if you were optimizing a webpage, you can apply the same concepts to your video for rank for top keyword phrases, thus driving traffic to your site.
So what are these steps that you can take to optimize your videos for the search engines? There are a number of them, but here are a few that should get you started:
- Provide a descriptive title and description for both the page your video resides on and the video itself (a good place for keyword phrases you are targeting)
- Make sure the content and HTML that is around the video is related to the video
- Provide schema markup for the video
- Provide a transcript of the video
- Have only one video per page
- Develop an XML video sitemap and submit to Google
- Link back to your video page (both on and off site), and be sure to use descriptive anchor text for the link
- Optimize the file names for the pages your videos are on
Of course, being found is only part of the equation… You need to make sure that your videos are effective as well. What does that mean? Well, you want to make sure that your videos provide something relevant to the person who is watching it, and does so in a way that gets them further down the path that you want them to go. So if you sell products, does the video get them further down the sales funnel? If you offer a service, does the video get your potential buyer to call you, or at least think of you when they’re in need of a service? Some tips to keep in mind when producing your videos are:
- Provide a descriptive title and description for both the page your video resides on and the video itself (a good place for keyword phrases you are targeting)
- Keep it short (5 minutes or less – we typically recommend 2 minutes; if you need more time break the video up into smaller ones, each focused on a defined topic)
- Keep it relevant
- Have call to action on video thumbnail and as the closing frames
- Make sure the video speaks to the type of company you are
- Make it unique
Now that you know a bit more about making videos and getting them found, go out and make some more! And if you’ve had success with your website videos, please share with us some of your tips.
