Creating an Effective Video SEO Strategy: The Ultimate Guide

Videos have set the online landscape on fire by sparking unparalleled interest among users of all ages and demographics. This has presented a stellar opportunity for marketers to capitalize on the viral potential of videos to make the popularity of their brands soar high.

Worldwide video ad spending has already exceeded $74.6 billion for targeting a 3.1 billion+ strong digital video viewer population. If you expect that simply posting a video online shall make your brand an overnight sensation, you need to rethink this.

Videos have to be ranked for relevant keywords appearing in search engine queries so that they can be found by your targeted leads. Boosting conversions and driving sales with videos requires creating an effective video SEO strategy.

In this blog, we'll discuss how to build such a fail-safe strategy to facilitate the diversion of qualified organic traffic to your brand’s touchpoint.

You will get actionable insights into the following for confidently deploying a rewarding video SEO strategy:

• Why should you conduct video SEO?
• How to create a functional video SEO strategy?
• Ways to optimize videos to boost your SEO strategy

Let's dive right in.

1. Why Should You Conduct Video SEO?

Consider the time, energy, and money you invest in creating compelling videos. All these will go in vain if your videos are not optimized for better visibility and higher search engine result page (SERP) ranking.

Video SEO helps your video appear on the opening result page of relevant search engine queries. This boosts your brand’s credibility and motivates leads to explore your website.

Video SEO facilitates:

• Discovery of your website or online touchpoints, leading to higher organic traffic
• Prolonged stay of visitors on the website, resulting in reduced bounce rate and better dwell time

Search engines rank your website based on visitors’ dwell time, quality of user experience offered, and engaging content of high relevance.

If your video compels visitors to spend more time on the website, Google assumes that you have successfully fulfilled visitors' quest for actionable information.

Consequently, your site will be accorded a higher SERP ranking. Videos also earn your brand’s website authoritative backlinks that Google sees as a sign of your growing popularity.

2. How To Create A Functional Video SEO Strategy?

Your expertise in developing a robust SEO strategy will grow if you adhere to the steps discussed below.

2.1 Develop Clarity on Your Video SEO Objectives

Why do you want to carry out video SEO in the first place? This is important to answer as your goals are linked to it. Some of the reasons why you want SEO done have been dwelt upon below.

2.1.1 Get A Spot in Rich Snippets

If your video features in Google’s rich snippets on SERPs, its click-through rate probability will grow. Your video will appear with an enriched webpage description for both video and text-based queries.

Drive this SEO strategy by

• Adding ‘schema’ in the HTML code of your website

2.1.2. Drive Higher Lead Conversions

Your best bet to drive conversions is to have a high-quality video(s) on your website’s landing page. You may also use explainer videos to command the attention of leads. Power your SEO by:

• Offering meaningful and direct information to viewers, which inspires them to stay longer on the site.
• Adding a CTA (Call To Action) in the video that guides viewers about the next logical step, which can be to visit the product page, explore other relevant content, etc.

2.1.3. Generate Brand Awareness

A video is a potent tool for communicating to your prospective customers your brand values and vision, why you fare better than your competitors, and how your offerings are equipped with cutting-edge innovation. Strategize your SEO by:

• Conveying ideas in a conversational, interactive way that can evoke emotions and make viewers bond with your brand.
• Offering easy-to-understand insights into your products/services.

2.1.4. Fuel the Building of Backlinks

Your website traffic will increase drastically if your videos feature on authoritative blogs, sites, etc., and if social media users promote them through their pages. You can achieve this SEO strategy by:

• Creating meaningful video content that adds value, like tutorials, explainers, reviews, customer testimonials, etc.
• Adding a link to your website in the video and its description.
• Having a CTA that requests viewers to share or like your video or visit your website.

2.2. Map Your Ideal Audience

Your SEO strategy can become effective only when you have mapped your ideal audience base. This way, you know the user segment you are targeting and how best to cater to them with pertinent videos. To achieve this objective, you can:

• Perform A/B testing wherein different versions of the same thematic video are shown to viewers to assess the one that is highly impactful.
• Conduct polls on social media.
• Rely on the inputs of Google Analytics and other tools.
• Deploy your marketing team to conduct surveys to understand the common problems of customers.

2.3 Select a Strategic Video Host

The choice of a good video host is linked to the success of your video SEO strategy. You can host videos on your website, which can facilitate optimum SERP ranking, more organic traffic, and higher conversions.

You may also host videos on YouTube or similar third-party platforms to drive brand awareness and viewer engagement.

It is important to deploy videos on all prominent online touchpoints to facilitate their discovery by the targeted audience. Post videos on social media pages and through promotional emails.

3. Ways to Optimize Videos to Boost Your SEO Strategy

Even a good video SEO strategy can fall flat on its face if you don’t optimize your videos to complement the requirements of SEO.

Let's discuss proven ways to steer your efforts to make videos SEO-friendly. With the help of an online video editor, you can easily edit your high-quality videos to optimize them for better search engine visibility. Using the right tools and strategies, you can create more engaging and popular videos with viewers.

3.1. Use a Visually Tempting Thumbnail

Video SEO is all about persuading leads to click on your video. An interest-sparking thumbnail can facilitate this.

If your video appears on the first page of search engine results, a thumbnail and a concise description will represent it. There will be other videos too on the result page that will vie for people’s attention.

For stealing the march over others, your video’s thumbnail should create an irresistible attraction for searchers.

A good thumbnail should be:

• Curiosity-arousing, visually pleasing, and unique
• Able to correctly depict the video content’s theme
• Created from high-quality images, preferably with a human subject
• Not just a snapshot of the video

Remember, the attention span of searchers is low, and the thumbnail should be powerful enough to make them make a decision in your video’s favor.

3.2. Use Subtitles in Your Video

The purpose of your video is to engage audiences optimally to inspire them to watch it till the end. The more time a visitor spends watching your video, the better will be its SEO prospects. For this, consider adding subtitles to your video.

Subtitles boost engagement by allowing viewers:

• To make sense of the content even if they can’t follow your accent
• To watch the video on mute in crowded places

Search engine bots will also find it easier to index your video as the subtitle text offers them additional info about your content.

3.3. Create Impactful Video Titles

Once your video features in rich snippets or is hosted on a popular online platform, you need to accompany it with an attention-grabbing title. The title subliminally inspires viewers to click on the video.

You need to create a positive impression on the potential viewer with your video’s title. For this, the title must:

• Communicate clearly how the video would add value to viewers’ time
• Convey the central theme of video content
• Be concise and crisp
• Have numbers like Top 10 Benefits, etc.
• Contain some interesting statistics that can make people take notice

Always optimize the title with targeted keywords to help the video appear high in relevant SERP rankings. Search engine bots would decipher the title to make sense of the video and align it to related queries. You can analyze the efficacy of titles with a tool that can suggest the pertinence of your title from an SEO standpoint.

3.4. Highlight the Salient Points of the Video in its Description

Video SEO can get a positive boost with meaningful video descriptions as search engine bots can clearly figure out the main message of your video. The SERP ranking improves further when you incorporate relevant keywords in the description.

Video descriptions offer you the scope to integrate primary, secondary and long-tail keywords for optimum search ranking. You can also motivate viewers to explore more content on your brand page.

The description should describe how the viewers stand to benefit from watching the video. The initial lines of the description need to be striking enough as they appear in search results. Make your videos more engaging by adding time stamps for longer ones.

3.5. Refrain from Having Multiple Videos on Your Webpage

Google bots index only one video on every webpage while crawling. Hence, you must embed only the best videos on your webpage to engage page visitors. Avoid having different, irrelevant videos on the same page.

If circumstances demand having multiple videos on the same page, embed the best video so that the search bot can index it properly for SERP ranking. Never use the same video on different pages of your website.

3.6. Make Your Videos Mobile Responsive

You must optimize your videos for mobile devices if you are hosting them on your site or on host platforms that don’t auto-optimize videos. If the video is not mobile responsive, i.e., it can’t adapt intuitively to the dimensions of the viewer’s mobile screen, your SEO efforts might suffer.

Conclusion

An effective video SEO strategy can only deliver if you have

• Identified your SEO goal
• Mapped the ideal audience
• Chosen a strategic, mobile responsive host
• Created alluring video thumbnails
• Cross-promoted on social media and other authorized platforms
• Involved influencers to promote your video
• Created an impactful title and provided subtitles
• Optimized the video description
• Placed only one and the best video on the webpage

You can create laser-targeted and successful marketing strategies to promote your brand with relevant ad persuasive videos by using this guide as a reference. Good luck!