How You Can Optimize Video For Seo

In today’s digital world, video can play an important role in your company's marketing. While it can be an important aspect of a marketing strategy, you may be missing key parts in having video be a successful part of your strategy.

When considering video as part of your marketing strategy, it may be worth it to spend the money on a professional production team to guarantee high quality results. This is not always a viable option as video production can be quite costly. In other instances when the video is aimed for social media like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, the use of something as simple as an iPhone is all you need to create quality video content. If you are choosing to shoot it yourself be sure to utilize proper lighting, keep the microphone close to the subject to ensure clear audio, and never underestimate the usefulness of a tripod to maintain a stable shot throughout filming.

Below we will dive into more tips to help you better optimize your own promotional videos for Search Engine Optimization(SEO) and ways to have a more successful video marketing strategy.

What Platform Should You Choose?

Choosing the right platform to post on is the first step for marketing a video. Something you need to decide on when choosing a platform is what you are looking to achieve from the video. Are you looking to get more traffic to your website? Or are you more focused on sending a message to your audience to boost brand awareness through engagement?

YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google making it the best choice for growing brand awareness. Since it is owned by Google, the videos are more likely to get their own traffic rather than drive people from the video to your website.

For embedding your video to your website, Vimeo or Wistia may be a better choice since the video can be viewed without the distractions that come with YouTube such as suggested video, up next, and ads.

Your budget may also influence your decision as all accounts on YouTube are free whereas Vimeo or Wistia usually require a paid account for certain features.

Thumbnails Matter

Having a good thumbnail for your video is important for driving views. It is the first thing people will see when choosing to watch your video or skip to the next one. The thumbnail for your video needs to be engaging and eye catching. You shouldn’t allow it to be automatically generated by the platform as it will take a random clip out of the video and will not be as nice to look at for users.

Creating an eye-catching custom thumbnail can increase your credibility and boost play rate, as it will draw users to your video in the sea of others.

Titles & Descriptions

Like website pages and blog posts, videos need to have a solid title and description to draw people into watching them. Keyword research may be necessary for developing quality titles and descriptions that will help your video rank in the top spots for the keywords that you want to show up for. That doesn’t mean to stuff as many keywords as possible into every place you possibly can as that will look and sound unnatural. Your titles need to be intriguing to users and be “clickable” to be successful.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

While SEO is important for promoting your video, it is important to realize that Google’s algorithms are constantly changing, so relying solely on organic views may result in your video being under-viewed and underutilized. Social media is a huge hub for video today and you should be taking advantage of that. Sharing your video on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is a great way to get eyes on your content whether it be organic traffic or through paid sponsored posts.

If you are looking for help on how you can optimize your company videos, contact us today!

Lynne Motkoski, Digital Marketing Consultant

Specialty: Digital Marketing Strategies
Education: MA Communications & Technology, BComm [U Alberta]

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Lynne is known for her strategic approach to marketing communications, technologies, and lead generation. She has a passion for education, keeping up with current marketing trends and practices, and helping clients keep ahead of their competition.

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