Online Video Guide: How to Do SEO for Videos

Your Online Video Guide for Search Engine Optimization

Regardless of how much you already know about SEO for written content, video SEO has a few extra considerations to keep in mind.

1. Great Views Start With Great Content

We can’t emphasize this enough: with such a large cache of videos at their fingertips, viewers won’t settle for poor content. All the SEO in the world won’t give you all-important backlinks if no one else finds your content helpful or entertaining. There are two primary approaches you can take to a high-quality video. First, you can take a content marketing approach. Create videos that are genuinely helpful and informative for your viewers. Avoid getting overly promotional. You can mention your company’s name but focus on the content. The second approach is to make a commercial or a brand awareness video, but it has to be distinctly entertaining. For example, a promotional video FurKids, an animal shelter in the US, went viral last year for its hilarious stunts. While the shelter itself is small, this video has well over 5 million views because it was shared by people all over the world.

2. Experiment With Hosting Options

One of the most common questions about video marketing is whether it’s best to host your videos on your own site or on a third-party site like YouTube. The answer is that there are pros and cons to each, so each company should experiment with both to see what works best. If your video is well-optimized and the content is strong enough that it’s attracting plenty of views organically, hosting on your own site is best. However, if you host the video on YouTube instead, you’ll tend to get more traffic because most people find YouTube videos by going to YouTube directly and searching within the site.

3. Link to Your Site if You Host Elsewhere

This sounds like an obvious step, but it’s often overlooked so be sure to put it on your checklist. If you choose to host your video on YouTube, Vimeo, or another video hosting site, always include a link to your own site. Backlinks are one of the most beneficial aspects of SEO, and this is one you don’t have to work for. Ideally, you should link to content that is relevant to the video’s content so it will interest people who have watched your video.

4. Check Out What Successful Videos in Your Niche Are Doing

You’re not in grade school anymore, so there’s nothing wrong with peeking at your neighbor’s work…as long as you do it right. This applies to content as well as SEO. First, search YouTube for videos relating to your niche. Click “Filters” and sort the results by “View Count” to see the most-viewed videos. Another helpful step is to see what tags your competitors are using. When you’re on an individual video’s page, right-click and select “view page source.” Look through the HTML that appears to find the list of keywords. For a more user-friendly option, you and also download a browser extension that lets you see the tags more easily.

5. Use Search Suggestions

This is another SEO trick for keyword planning that is often overlooked. Go to YouTube or Google and start typing the name of your niche (e.g., “video production”). Google/YouTube will suggest more specific topics as you’re typing because these are terms others have searched for often. In other words, Google and YouTube are handing you the most-searched-for topics in your niche. Use these to guide your content creation as well as your keyword selection.

6. Search for Your Potential Keywords

When you’re fine-tuning that important list of keywords for your video, it’s also a good idea to find out how many videos show up on YouTube for each possible keyword. The fewer videos there are for a given keyword, the more likely the viewer is to click on your video, so use that criterion to narrow down your list. Don’t limit your search to YouTube, though. Another helpful way YouTube videos get views is when Google shows them as search results with thumbnails in their list of search results. Google’s algorithm does this with some keywords more than others, so keep an eye out for these thumbnails as well.

7. Don’t Allow Recommended Videos on Embedded Videos on Your Site

Have you ever watched a video on someone’s site, then clicked on the recommended video that popped up at the end, and kept doing this until you realized half your day was gone? YouTube loves it when this happens, which is it’s their default setting to show recommended videos, even when you embed the video from YouTube onto your site. But sometimes this can lead viewers to your competitors, so be sure to deselect “show recommended videos” when you’re getting the embed link from YouTube.

Making the Most of Your Video Marketing with SEO

Producing a video for your marketing campaign can be expensive if you want a high production value, but it costs the same whether the video gives you 100,000 views or 100 views. Video SEO is one of the most crucial ways to get a return on your investment. The online video guide above can help you work toward successful video marketing. If you want to jumpstart your effort, though, get a quote from our professional video promoters and video SEO experts.