video marketing seo tipsThe video is the newest bride in online content marketing, and it’s going to be so for a long time. There are several reasons for this which include the increasing trend of short attention span – 8 seconds according to research by Microsoft – the deep penetration of smartphones – which means more people can consume video contents -; and the improvement in the quality and cheaper data prices.

No wonder, search engines are beginning to give preference to video contents than ever before – and if you would like to go back in history to understand why this is so, watch this SEO Film.

Hence, the question becomes, how do you leverage video contents to improve your site ranking? The thing is, no matter how valuable your video is if it can’t be found then it is useless. I guess you know this, that’s why you’re here to learn how to boost your SEO.

So, are some proven tips you can implement to enhance the search ranking of your site.

Define Your Goal

Just as with each of your other contents defining what purpose you aim to achieve with your video set the right context on which to produce. It means you’d have to answer the question of who the content is for; what action do you expect them to take; and what results you’re expecting.

Are you targeting backlinks, or building brand awareness, or convince your audience to make a purchase? Answering these questions sets the tone of the video.

Give Value

There’s no shortcut here, it’s either you provide value or go home – that’s the unwritten rule of content marketing. Make your video so valuable – whether through entertaining, being informational, or outright weird – that viewers will have no choice than to either share, link to it, or talk about it on their site and link back to you and all these impacts your SEO positively.

Integrate Interactive Video Elements

Make it easy for viewers to interact with your content either by integrating in-video quizzes, links, surveys, forms, and so on. The aim is to move the viewers from being passive to engage with the video actively. The more time spent viewing and interacting with your content signals to the search engines your content is valuable, and they will be inclined to show more of it.

Also, integrated social media buttons on your content to encourage viewers to share the video.

Self-host Your Videos

Get your videos hosted on the server as your site. The reason is simple you don’t want your traffic redirected to other a third party site.

Of course there’re situations when hosting your videos on other sites makes sense especially if you’re trying to build awareness; in this case, uploading videos to YouTube and linking back to your website is acceptable.

Include Transcriptions of Your Videos

Transcribing your video contents is a great way to add unique contents to your site and when optimized with the right keywords enhance your SEO efforts. The transcribed contents also make it easier for indexing of the content by search engines.

Google advises that new videos should be uploaded to new pages speed up the process for indexation by the crawlers.

Create Relevant Metadata

An essential part of optimizing videos for SEO is ensuring that the Meta information is related to the keyword you’re optimizing for. Take note to provide information for the title, descriptions, and file name. All these indicate to the search engine the relevancy of the video.

Create Video Sitemap

The sitemap acts as another means of presenting the video metadata and providing a clearer context on the relevancy of the video.