There are several factors that will determine whether your video content will impact your business positively, such as the quantity and quality of traffic. When you optimize your video properly, the number of views from search engines will increase. A well-optimized video will be visible to many people, giving you the opportunity to convert them to customers or clients – and who wouldn’t want that?
While it feels good to have anyone watching your videos online, if it is not reaching your target audience your videos are not reaching their full potential. At worst, your efforts could be costing you time, potential revenue, and more.
The quality of the videos you publish along with the quality of the audience it attracts holds equal importance. As a lead generation tool, you need to use video effectively to get not only maximum viewership but also to convince your audience to buy into your product/service.
5 Ways to Actually Increase your Video Rankings
Include a video transcript
A transcript basically converts the audio version of your video into text. Whether you make use of speech recognition software or a human transcriptionist, your chosen text should match the audio in your video. Transcription boosts user experience and also SEO for Google search results.
Pick topics and write titles that gain traction
Topics and titles can incite emotion at first glance, and will definitely increase the chances of your videos ranking better on Google. As you pick out topics and titles for your videos, make sure they have high traffic potential, and you can determine that through a little research on the keywords you pick. Tools like SEM Rush or Google Suggestion are great ways to generate ideas.
Use an engaging thumbnail
When someone gets search results, your video thumbnail and the title will be the first thing they will see when they come across your video in the results. Be sure to use a thumbnail that captures their attention and encourages them to click and watch your video. Use a custom thumbnail and use a custom picture, not a still image from your video. This ensures your video can be indexed and retrieved quickly as a search result. Vimeo now has a great GIF generator we recommend.
Optimize the title and description of the video
Make sure that each video you create has a title and description that are optimized. Having this feature plays a role in helping your video rank fairly among others. Take advantage of keyword search to guide you into your choice of words.
Position your video strategically to appear on the first page
Did you know that search engines usually stop crawling the page for videos after the first video? If you have the video that you prefer to appear most in searches, embed it to rank first on the page. The best position on the page to embed the video is above the fold (the upper half of the page visible before scrolling) so that visitors to the page don’t have to scroll all the way down before they get to the video. As you embed it, make sure it is relevant or tallies with the rest of the content on that page.
Video Best Practices
Practices that Google recommends, to ensure your video is at optimal performance.
Help Google find your videos
Each of your videos should be available on a public web page where users can watch it easily. Be sure to confirm that the page hosting your video isn’t blocked by robots.txt or noindex metadata to make it possible for Google to find and index your page. Submitting a video sitemap and having an appropriate HTML tag around your video, e.g. <video>, <embed>, <iframe>, or <object> also allows Google to identify a video on your page more easily.
Allow Google to fetch your video content files
Make sure that the page hosting the video and the server streaming the actual video must have the bandwidth to be crawled to allow Google to fetch your video content files easily. In addition, employ the use of structured data to offer the content URL value in a supported file format. Check that Google is not blocked from fetching the video’s streaming file bytes e.g., do not block the video content URL or domain with the noindex tag or robots.txt file.
Enable specific video features
There are a few features that you can enable to give your video content a better chance at visibility, including video previews and key moments.
Video previews: Google picks out a few seconds from your video to display a moving preview ideally to help users better understand what to expect in your video. For this to work easily for you, allow Google to fetch your video content files and set the maximum duration for each video preview using the max-video-preview robots meta tag.
Key moments: This feature helps users to navigate video segments like they would chapters in a book, enabling them to engage more deeply with your content. Google Search may automatically detect the segments in your video and show key moments to users, or you could manually tell Google about the important points of your video; either through structured data or by marking timestamps through YouTube description.
The Quality of the Video is Important
High-quality storytelling and video production is the edge that many brands use to build trust, credibility, and hold retention. And like we mentioned at the start, the quality of the videos you publish along with the quality of the audience it attracts holds equal importance. With the help of professionals, you don’t have to leave your message up to chance. Our corporate video production company focuses on telling humorous, and heartfelt stories bringing companies, products, and passion to light. Meet our award-winning Front Runner Films team.
We have found that there is a heartbeat behind every company, and identifying it and capturing yours will play a game-changing role in your marketing strategy and overall business identity. Check out the work we love to do that takes our client’s stories and businesses to the next level.
