What Are Video SEO Strategies?

Video search engine optimization (SEO) strategies are strategies that enable businesses to get more organic traffic by publishing and sharing their videos online. With so many businesses investing in video marketing, it’s worth it to find new ways to reach more viewers and potential customers.

In this guide, we uncover a few strategies to help you create, publish, and market amazing videos that will attract more traffic to your business. Read on to discover how video SEO can help your business grow!

Why Video SEO Matters for Businesses

Based on a recent study by insivia.com, we know that video marketing is huge when it comes to generating more traffic and sales for businesses. The study found that 51% of marketers name video as the #1 type of content in terms of generating the best return on their marketing investment.

Video is a highly engaging medium that grabs users’ attention and entices them to click through to your website. With videos popping up in the Google search results and an abundance of platforms like YouTube for video marketing, you can generate a lot of traffic and leads through video SEO.

Top Video SEO Strategies to Get More Traffic

Whether you’re just getting started with video marketing or are already ahead of the curve, you can use video SEO strategies to generate more traffic with your videos. Video SEO works by optimizing your video for organic searches in search engines like Google and YouTube, so your video gets shown to more viewers.

Use these video SEO strategies to increase your video rankings, attract more traffic, and turn viewers into paying customers.

Conduct Keyword Research for Your Videos

Video keyword research tools like TubeBuddy and KeywordTool.io allow you to research popular terms people use to find videos online. You can use these tools to come up with new topics for your videos based on which keywords get the highest number of searches with the lowest amount of competition.

You want to find keywords that users are actively searching for but don’t have a ton of sites/videos already ranking for those terms. That way, you have a better chance of ranking high and attracting traffic. You can use your chosen keyword in the video title and in the description of your video.

Invest in Great Video Editing

There is enough evidence to show that high-quality videos get more clicks than grainy, poorly-edited videos. The good news is that you don’t have to be a professional videographer to make great videos.

You can record videos on your smartphone using a cheap ($20) tripod and then edit the video on your desktop. Or, you can record the video using your computer’s camera. Video editing software like iMovie makes it easy to pull in your clips, trim your videos, add captions, change the color saturation, and more.

If you don’t have the patience to edit the videos yourself, consider hiring a video editor to do it for you. You can find editors on LinkedIn, Upwork, and Fiverr at affordable rates.

Add Tags to Your Videos

When you upload a video to YouTube, you have the opportunity to add tags that tell users what your video is about. If you use great tags that include your focus keyword and related keywords, you can rank for a variety of terms in Google and on YouTube.

Tools like TubeBuddy allow you to find these key terms and will even make recommendations for which tags to add to your video. Use as many relevant tags as possible to increase your traffic-generating potential.

Create Click-Worthy Thumbnails

A thumbnail is an image that’s displayed on top of your video before a user clicks “play”. Adding a click-worthy thumbnail is a way for you to tell users what the video is about and entice them to click on it instead of your competitors’ videos.

You can use a free tool called Canva to create custom thumbnails. Canva has a wide variety of templates, colors, images, and fonts. We recommend including a shortened title of the video and an eye-catching background image. Then, upload the thumbnail when you upload your video to YouTube.

Optimize for Mobile Devices

Mobile SEO is important for websites as well as videos, so many of the same best practices apply. Just make sure your video player (and the platform it is hosted on) is responsive on mobile devices. Most platforms (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) have this built-in, so it may not be a significant concern.

Share Your Videos Across Multiple Platforms

Don’t let your video just sit there once you hit “publish”; market your video across multiple platforms in order to generate as much traffic as possible.

While video SEO will help you gain organic traffic over time, you can market your videos on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, your email list, and beyond in order to attract even more viewers. The more views you get on your channel, the better your overall video SEO.

Add Videos to Your Blog

One of our favorite video SEO strategies is to add videos to blog posts. If you optimize the blog post for your target keyword, you can get the article to rank and therefore direct more viewers to your video. In reverse, you can market your video and direct viewers to the blog post linked in the description of your video.

It’s also a good idea to take the audio from your video and turn it into text that you can then restructure as a blog post. You can do this manually or hire a transcriber to do it for you.

Include Captions on Your Videos

Adding captions to your videos makes them more accessible to users across multiple platforms. Those with limited hearing can still engage with your videos, and people don’t have to actually turn on the volume in order to watch and share your video. Consider that many people browse on-the-go and may not want to play the audio out loud, so this allows them to watch your video and share it with friends and family.

Ask Your Audience for Feedback

You won’t be perfect at video marketing right away, so ask for feedback from your audience on how to improve your videos. They may give you more ideas for possible topics, ask for you to include additional resources in your video descriptions, or have tips for how to create more high-quality vids.

Are you ready to get started with video SEO? Start implementing these video SEO strategies to generate more views, traffic, and customers.