Incorporating videos in one’s SEO strategy is a formidable best practice in online marketing as it gives businesses a competitive edge in an increasingly cut-throat online market. In general videos tend to boost search engine results, increase site traffic and improve conversion rates. Smart videos grant businesses the opportunity to reach more consumers and easily and explicitly inform them what they offer. It gives them a platform to engage, inform and entertain their clients. This is good for business!
As more people access smartphones and as the cost of bandwidth continues to fall, video will continue being the fastest growing online content format. This further stresses the need for companies to implement an effective video SEO strategy in order to reap the benefits from these market trends. To start with, webmasters should enhance the quality of their videos and make them more accessible to site visitors and optimize them to be search engine friendly. All the efforts of a video SEO should be geared towards providing information about the videos and intricately embedding them in manner that search engine crawlers and bots can understand.
Define the Goal
As with any other marketing task, the first step should involve defining the goal of the video. Other salient factors that should be considered at this stage include target audience, type of hosting and the strategy to achieve the goal. It is important that the video should match the goals outlined and audience demographic tastes and preferences.
Strength in Numbers
Contrary to popular opinion, posting many videos does not affect ones video/site rankings; rather it increases the chances of your site being discovered. Instead of posting videos of your fast moving products alone, studies show availing videos of other products leads to more site traffic and directly results in increase in sales of other products.
Update to remain Relevant
To optimize on your video SEO efforts, the videos should be periodically updated and refreshed. New content attracts new site visitors and increases number of referrals – which is a great idea especially in a social media driven world. A solution to keep your content always fresh is to adopt automatic online video solutions that assist in editing video content.
On-site Video
Though posting videos on YouTube channels can be an effective way of reaching a larger audience, posting videos on-site can result in higher rewards. In case it is necessary to post the videos via YouTube, ensure that the video features a link that redirects audiences to your site.
SEO Friendly Video URLs
As with any other web content, SEO guidelines should be followed to reap rewards for your SEO efforts. For videos, they should have ‘clean’ or SEO friendly URLs. In addition, it is recommended to include the file extension format, such as.AVI, .FLV, .WMV e.tc.
Video Metadata
Search engine bots and crawlers not only rely on video contextual information to rank videos but also metadata. The metadata should offer information on video length, video thumbnail, video dimension, and video transcript.
Synchronize Web Content
To recoup meaningful returns from video SEO efforts it is imperative that the content on the video matches the content on the landing page it’s embedded. Therefore the video description should tally with the micro-description of the web content to show consistency. Additionally, the keywords of the content of the webpage and the video should be the same.
Conclusion
Implementing an effective video SEO strategy offers numerous benefits ranging from improved site traffic, brand awareness, to increased conversion rates. All in all creating video content that attracts, engages, and entertains the audience forms the bedrock of an effective video SEO strategy.
