According to Google, there are five major SEO video marketing best practices. This was revealed in a recent Lighting Talks video.
The video by Google places emphasis on why videos need to be optimized for search engines just the same way you would optimize written content.
However, unlike written content, there’s a different approach to handling SEO for videos.
In the recent video shared by Google, the search giant explained how website owners can send signals to communicate exactly what a video is about.
Once the Google Algorithm can understand what a video is about, it will know how to place the video in Search and Discover.
Here’s a quick rundown of Google’s advice for videos.
Video SEO signals the Google Algorithm looks for
Now, when Google’s bot crawls a web page and discovers that it contains a video, it immediately starts looking for signals. These signals help the bot in understanding what that video is about.
As soon as the bot knows what the video entails, it sends a message to Google that allows the video to get surfaced for relevant searches.
Below are the signals used by Google to understand a video:
–Structured data: Markup helps communicate video metadata to Google.
–On-page text: These are the page titles, headings, and captions close to the video.
–Video files: Google crawls the file itself to know more about the visual and audio content.
–Referral links: This refers to signals sent from other sites that link to the video.
–Video SEO: entails including key elements to a web page so that the signals above are clearly communicated to Google.
Top 5 Google-certified SEO Video Marketing Best Practices
1. Set the Video to Public Viewing
One of the first things you should do after uploading your videos is to make sure it is tied to a specific URL and that it is publicly available on the internet.
YouTube makes this an easy thing to do. However, note that YouTube allows you to mark videos as hidden or private.
So, if, for reasons best known to you, you choose to hide your videos, then don’t expect it to rank well on search engine results pages (SERP).
With this in mind, you should make your videos plainly visible on the web page so that anyone with a contemporary browser can access them.
Also, if your site has gimmicks such as requiring visitors to perform certain tasks (for example, downloading an antivirus) before they can watch your video, then it won’t get a good rank.
2. Use Structured Data: It Explains What the Video is About to Crawlers
Structured data is very important in SEO video marketing. It is one of the best practices Google recommends when it comes to video marketing.
For those who don’t know much about it, structured data is a kind of markup that you add to your website. Basically, it gives a lot more information to search engines about your page.
For instance, you can use structured data to tell Google about your business’s name, location, and office hours.
You can make use of the VideoObject markup to release more information about your video.
As a matter of fact, this markup can give search engines comprehensive information about the video content such as:
I. The content size
II. The bitrate
III. The encoding format
IV. The upload date
V. The actors
VI. The music author
VII. The director
VIII. The production company
And much more.
If you put a lot of information about your video into structured data, it helps in ranking it for a variety of search terms.
3. Utilize High-quality Thumbnails for Videos
There’s no denying it – this has to be your SEO video marketing ultimate weapon. For each video URL that Google has access to, be sure to provide a high-quality thumbnail.
This means you can’t just draw up a thumbnail that you cobbled together in Microsoft Paint. In addition, ensure that your thumbnail is easily accessible.
At times, the thumbnail URL might get blocked by robots.txt. When this happens, Google will find it difficult to locate the thumbnail as well as the video. This likely means it won’t rank well.
4. Submit a Video Sitemap
It may sound new but indeed, there is such a thing as a video sitemap.
Now, a video sitemap, according to Google, is a sitemap containing extra details about videos that are hosted on your web pages.
It is a fantastic way to give Google’s bot a lot more information in relation to the video content hosted on your website.
Google has made it known that with a sitemap, it might uncover more details about your video that it may not have discovered using other crawling mechanisms.
However, bear in mind that you can choose to embed a separate sitemap just for your video or opt for embedding a sitemap within an already existing sitemap.
The choice is yours in the end.
5. Video Files must be Accessible
Simply making sure that the web page hosting your video file is accessible to search engines isn’t enough. The video file itself also needs to be accessible.
The reason is that it makes your video eligible for rich results such as key moments as well as video previews.
For video previews, Google will clip a few seconds from your production and utilize it as a preview.
The good thing with this is that that little preview may just be enough to satisfy the appetites of internet users within your target market thus, giving them an incentive to actually visit your website in order to see the entire video.
Conclusion
Now, there you have it – the top five best video marketing practices from Google. Your next course of action should be to identify which of these suggestions you need to convert into an action item first.
Remember that videos are best when it comes to driving engagements. That’s why you need to take SEO video marketing seriously if you plan on reaching your target audience.
If you’re not quite sure how to get started with creating videos for your business, then holler at us today.
