Video SEO: How to optimize your video for search engines

Hi, fellow content makers! Why do you need to optimize your videos? Imagine putting efforts in your content, being excited from posting it and get no results in the end. This would be very tragic, so we've analyzed and picked the best advises for optimizing your video on search engines - from YouTube to Google. Let's check these video SEO advises!

Your content

Your content plays the biggest role in optimization. In other words, if the video is not interesting, who will watch it? First and foremost, you should know who your audience are and what they need. YouTube algorithm is following the audience engagement

Paying attention to these points:

• What people are watching and aren't watching
• How much time they spend on the video
• Their likes and dislikes;
• When they click “Not interested”.

Videos are ranked in search by taking into account several factors including how well the title, description, and video content match the viewer's query. Come up with the right topic, pick suitable keywords, put the best name, thumbnail and timestamps.

Answer these questions:

• What are the things my audience is looking for?
• Am I passionate about creating this type of content?
• What actions should viewers do after watching my video?
• Is picture and sound in my video recorded with good quality?
• Will I watch my own video? Am I explaining the topic fully?
• Is my thumbnail clear, well designed and represents the video content correctly?
• Is my video's name short, vivid, says about the video content and divided in chapters?
• Does my video have A and B roll, transitions, effects and other cuts to keep video dynamic?
• Am I using the best possible keywords?

A lot to think about, but answering these questions will make you not just a better YouTuber, but a professional content creator, with an opinion your audience will follow. We have a very detailed article for creating engaging content on YouTube and we advise you to check it.

Your Optimization

The good news are YouTube, Vimeo and other big players of video platforming already have the working system to help your video get promoted and seen. They are applying metadata, indexability and other SEO specifications by themselves, so the main thing for you to carry about is your content. Still, you can help the search engines to do their job by making your video easy to digest. 

Optimize the metadata

In a few words, metadata means 'an underlying definition or description.' 

The metadata of your video is your title, description and keywords, and just like we said, you have to make sure that they are clear, readable and represent your content. Your video will not only be analyzed by bots, it will be seen by real people and the engine will be checking their interaction.

Add subtitles

Subtitles are needed for search engine bots to read and understand your content. Because of the transcript, search engines will be able to see the interconnection between your video and the search queries and will be able to suggest the viewers your content.This is also an important part for an audience that prefers to watch videos without sound. Videos with subtitles are considered as more engaging videos with the higher watch time.

Increase the watch time

The thing that is really important to the search engines, is the watch time of your video, because it says a lot about it's relevance to the search queries. Engage the audience with CTA, ask them to leave comments and share their opinion of your video. Ask the new audience to hit the notification bell. Pick a dynamic sound, you can choose the one you need from YouTube Music Library, which is free and you won't get any copyright claims.Post regularly, so viewers will be kept updated and search engines will see that you provide platforms with regular content. It works equally for all platforms - from YouTube to TikTok.

Add the video to your website

Access from external links grows the chances for your video to be promoted in the google search.In our practice, we get a lot of traffic to our videos straight from the website and this is quite logical - website serves a crossing point between your social media pages, goods you might sell as a business and your representation. Having several sources of traffic increases your chances to be found by new people.If you will do research, you'll find that many content creators and platforms combine YouTube videos with their brand pages, asking viewers to interact with both and follow the links between the video and the website page:

Surround it with relevant content

On YouTube, use playlists - connect multiple videos together, so your audience can continue watching your content. Playlists with similar content will help engines to group the videos and recommend them viewers, even if the video don't contain needed keywords.On your website, combine the video with article. The written text will do an amazing job, especially next to the video with subtitles. Give a clean answer in your content, so the bots can put it ontop in search:

Promote it across other platforms

Once you've posted a video, you can repost it to your website and blog, Facebook, link it to your newsletter if you have one, share it to your Instagram and TikTok. The more - the better. 

A great way is to collaborate with someone, asking them to refer to your video and add links to it elsewhere. As for us, we give a product announcement to a blogger, audience watches the video, visits our website and watches our own video about a product. The chain of interaction creates a growth of “recommended for you” videos and many of them - our other products.

Track the results

To constantly improve your SEO, you need to track your videos performance all the time. Create related content to your most successful videos and add them to your YouTube Cards, End Screens and Playlists to group them.Use YouTube Analytics to track the performance of your audience.

An interesting point, is that all metrics only depend on one thing - how useful your content is. If your video solves the problem, you will get the engagement you wanted and your audience will grow.

In conclusion

We're sure, that your videos will appear in the first lists of YouTube and Google Search! Put your efforts into content and it's final destination, regularly analyze your viewers and their interests. When you did this, optimize it with right name, keywords, thumbnail and subtitles; promote it on your website and other sourses with similar audience. Keep on tracking results, they will tell you if you're going in the right direction!