SEO and video: how to boost your rankings

Every business wants a strong online presence that can be turned into sales. With 34,000 searches conducted on Google every second, it seems odd that many organisations struggle with this - but when you think of the depth of competition, and the number of people searching for ‘funny cat’, it’s not so surprising.

Used in the right way, video can really benefit your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This means that producing video and putting it in the right place can make your organisation more visible to internet users. Search engines love video, and display video results clearly as part of the standard ‘universal search’. In fact, 62% of Google searches return video results, and 40% of Bing search results contain visuals, whether that be images, video or both. With Google, 8 in 10 videos are from YouTube, so it pays for you to have a YouTube channel with lots of high quality videos, which Google will then index.

As part of our work for Sensible Investing TV, we’ve produced a lot of content about low risk, evidence-based investing, which is also known as ‘Passive Investing’. For that search term, nine out of the 20 videos on the first page of YouTube results are ours, so we must be doing something right. Here are four key pointers for achieving good SEO using YouTube:

1. Pick a keyword which applies to your video and include it in the video title, description and tags

2. Make your description fairly long and include your keywords multiple times - A good way to do this is by putting the transcript in the description field

3. Include a link to your website at the top and bottom of the description, as shown below

4. Your tags must give an idea of what your video is about, for example ‘video production’ and ‘broadcast quality’.

But hold on a second - it’s all well and good optimising YouTube videos for searches, but this doesn’t help you get more clicks through to your webpages. So, you also need to put your videos on your own site. Here are some tips for good SEO for videos on your website:

• Give the video a concise written introduction on the page

• Provide the transcript of the video on the page

• Submit your video content to a popular search engine like Google or Bing using a Video Sitemap

• Again, pick keywords which apply to your video and include them in the video title, description and tags

Having text on the page around the video helps Google in particular. Videos aren’t usually seen by their searches unless they’re accompanied by text. Bing is actually better at seeing multimedia content without text, but as Google has around two thirds of the search engine market share, you’d be better off with it.

It goes without saying, you’ll be more visible on the web if you share your videos. Search engines also consider social signals in their rankings, so if your content has been tweeted a lot, been pinned to some Pinterest boards, or received a lot of likes on Facebook, this is particularly good news.

Ultimately, we all want our organisations and businesses to be seen online. So with SEO, it’s important to keep your finger on the pulse. In the past, search engines have changed how they find content, and there’s no reason why they won’t continue to refine their methods. What’s certain is that video will continue to influence people when it comes to deciding which products and services they consume.

Author: Sam Willet

Sam is a Producer and Client Manager at Ember Television. He has worked in online media since graduating with an MA in Film and TV from the University of Birmingham, and loves a good human interest story. You can contact him at [email protected] https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=294919697&authType=name&authToken=k-zK&trk=prof-proj-cc-name https://twitter.com/ember_samw