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How Video Content Can Improve Your SEO

Articles - Jun 14 2023

Video consumption around the world continues to increase each year. Over 500 million people watch Facebook videos every day. Your company needs to be leveraging video content to increase your visibility and generate more leads.

How does one do that? You need to focus on video SEO. That means you should optimize your video content for the best performance on search engines like Google. You can use many strategies to give your video content a higher place in the search engine results.

Video content is taking social media by storm. Learn how ULTIM Marketing can help you elevate your marketing strategy to include video content.

Google is increasingly prioritizing pages that have video content. You must do everything you can to get your business to appear on the first page of search results. Before you focus on the SEO of your video content, you need to make sure you’re creating content people want to see. You can find out more about our video strategies here.

This blog will share the best SEO secrets and provide you with our best practices for video content. Video content continues to adapt, and you need to keep up with the latest trends in video marketing if you want your business to stay relevant.

Benefits of Optimizing Video Content

While most businesses place priority on SEO for written content, people often neglect their video content. There are many benefits that optimizing video content provides your business, including:

Increase visibility in search results
Generate more leads
Drive more organic traffic
Improve your conversion rate
Boost ROI

Effective SEO is crucial to get your video content in front of new audiences. If you appear first in search results, you will receive more web traffic and, most importantly, more leads. In the long run, optimizing your video content will boost your sales and improve your business.

Once on your website, people will most likely browse more than just the video they came to see. If your website is designed well and offers the viewer valuable information, they are more likely to convert into a customer. You can use video content to attract people to your website through search results and ultimately drive your sales.

New Resources For Video SEO

While there are many tips relevant to SEO, we focus on the tips Google recently shared in this blog. They revealed new resources to help you optimize your videos for Google Search, which include:

Help Google find your videos
Ensure your videos can be indexed
Allow Google to fetch your video content files
Enable specific video features
Remove, restrict, or update your videos as needed

You should follow these five best practices when optimizing video content for search results. We will dive into the highlights of these best practices below.

Make Sure Your Videos Are Visible

The key to helping Google locate your videos is to make them public. They need to be readily available to everyone on the web. In other words, the video needs to have a corresponding web page with a URL so Google can access it.

Make sure the web page doesn’t require any complex user actions to load. Google could penalize you for it. All videos need to be visible and easy to find on the page to appear at the top of search results.

Make all your videos visible so your audience can view your content. Making your content visible and accessible will keep your content online.

Use High-Quality Thumbnails

The quality of your thumbnail image makes a difference. If you block the file with robots.txt or a login requirement, Google won’t have access to your video. If you can’t provide a thumbnail in the proper, accepted formats, you can allow Google to fetch your video content files and generate a thumbnail for you.

Provide Structured Data

Google Search works hard to understand the content on your page. Structured data is a format for providing information about a page so that Google can categorize the page content.

You need to provide structured data to help Google find and understand your videos. This data is coded using in-page markup that should include things like the video title, description, thumbnail, and more. Make sure the information you provide is in line with the content of the video.

Make Your Video Files Accessible

Google needs to be able to find your video file to understand its content. This helps enable features such as video previews. There are a few best practices you need to follow to help with this:

Use structured data
Don’t block Google from the video file
Make the video file available at a stable URL
The host page and the server streaming the video must have the bandwidth to be crawled

Enable Certain Video Features

For Google to properly rank your video content in search results, you need to enable specific video features: video previews and key moments.

Video Previews

Google grabs a few seconds of your video to use for their video preview feature in search results. It provides more engagement than a static image. To be eligible for those, you need to let Google access your video content files.

You need to specify the max-video-preview directive to let Google know which preview you want to show. If not, Google will choose a random snippet for you.

Key Moments

Google also has a key moments feature for video content. It distinguishes different moments of your video so that users can jump right to the part they want in search results, like chapters in a book.

You can identify the sections you want Google to show and give them descriptions. If you’re using YouTube to host your video, you can set up this feature by adding timestamps in the video description.

Use key moments to help views find the content that is relevant to their needs.

Need More Help With Video SEO?

Google provided many helpful tips for optimizing your video content, but there is still a lot you can learn. Trying to implement SEO strategies on your own without any experience can be a frustrating experience. We can help.

Our SEO experts have experience helping businesses like yours improve their video content among Google Search results. We will help you understand the best strategies for your business so you can boost your online visibility and improve your sales.

Do you need help optimizing your video content? At ULTIM Marketing we can help. Contact us today to schedule a free consultation.

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