How to Improve Your SEO Using Video Content

We’ve spoken at length about the benefits of healthy search optimization practices on your website. This goes for everything—your web copy, your images, and believe it or not, your videos. Let’s review how you can help optimize the video content on your website so that it draws the attention of the search engines.

Will Optimizing My Videos for SEO Really Make a Difference?

Yes, very much so. Just as you want your website and its content to register positively with the search engines so your MSP’s marketing gets a boost, you want your videos to also give searchers a reason to stay on your website.

Let’s dive into how to configure your videos to attract the attention of search engines.

How to Optimize Your Video for Search

There are a few simple things you can do to make your video content more attractive to search engines. For instance:

Don’t Shortchange Your Metadata

Google and the other search options out there treat video content in much the same way they treat written content, in that things like the title and description matter. While keywords can be helpful, when was the last time you confidently clicked a video with eight or nine keywords crammed into the title, or the description was just a list of keywords and their variations?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Google tries to focus on the same things that your audience will as it's ranking these things. Making your title and description as informative and engaging as possible is the play here.

Insert a Transcript into All Applicable Video Content

Adding a transcript to your video offers some significant benefits in terms of its SEO, largely because it checks quite a few boxes. More text on the page for the search engine’s crawlers to explore, for one, as well as increased accessibility—something that many search engines are paying more attention to.

Give Your Video Top Billing on Your Page

Here’s a bit of old newspaper terminology that’s bled into computing: traditionally, a newspaper is formatted to be a vertical rectangle, folded in half into a convenient square for transport and distribution. When that newspaper is folded, any print that appears on the bottom half of the page (tucked away and hidden from view) is called “below the fold” and isn’t expected to get much attention.

In website design, the same term is used to describe any content that the user has to scroll to see. The further your visitor (or the search engine crawler) has to scroll to view the video, the less likely they’ll actually do so. Much like the headline that will sell papers, you want your video presented proudly above the fold, visible and engaging.

Let’s be clear though, don’t stress out about scrolling on your website. There’s also a huge myth that any scrolling is bad, and that everything needs to be above the fold. This was true about 15 years ago, but today every single user on the Internet is completely aware that they typically need to scroll down on a page to continue reading content. Don’t put too much emphasis on above-the-fold content because otherwise, users will just ignore it.

Instead, simply make sure videos stand out. It should be clear that there is a video, and it should be large enough to watch comfortably from within your website, but not so large that users can’t do other things on your site while they listen.

Make Sure the Page and Video Match, in Topic and Quality

Regardless of how good your video is or how well-optimized it is for search, it’s only going to draw as much attention as the page it’s embedded on will. Make sure you do everything you can to optimize the page itself, and crucially, that it is relevant to what the video discusses. Let’s say you went to a website about peaches, and on a page that shared some recipes, the video discussed the germination process of the fruit. It wouldn’t make sense, so Google is going to dock it. The same goes for your website—make sure your embedded videos’ topics are in line with those of the pages they appear on.

Customize Your Thumbnail Image

Put yourself in the shoes of your target: if you were searching Google for a video related to your IT—or anything, really—would you be more likely to click on a video with a thumbnail that had something to do with your topic of interest, or of someone standing in a nondescript room?

Exactly! You’d pick the one with the engaging and relevant thumbnail…and Google knows it. Adding a thumbnail image related to your video that looks good and depicts what the video is about will not only entice people to click it and watch (by about 30%, mind you), it will make it more likely to appear to them in the first place.

Finally, Don’t Assume that SEO Alone Will Get Your Video Seen

The way Google changes its algorithms, trying to play the search engine optimization game is less inside baseball, and more inside Calvinball (a fictional game where the rules change each time you play, while you play it). Relying on any set rules to get your video out there is almost certain to have less of an impact than you’re looking for. 

So, what are you to do? Promote it everywhere you can, that’s what. 

Paid social media ads are a great place to use video content, as you have a better guarantee that your video will get in front of the eyes that should see it. The same goes for your other marketing efforts—link them back to the page where you share that video.

Remember, the whole reason you would make a video is to help explain a product or service in a way that is easy to understand. If your video doesn’t do a good job, it’s not going to serve you well in any means. If you want some great MSP-related videos, check out MSP.Video. There are animated videos and a free ConnectWise Customer Portal video, as well as video recording services for talking head videos!

We can help you do all of the above, from the creation of an impactful video to getting it seen by those who need to see it. Give us a call at 888-546-4384 to learn more.