Six Neglected Parts of Video SEO

Liz Pratt is the Marketing Communications Manager for SearchPro Systems. She can be contacted at liz@searchprosystems.com.

Last month, we met with a potential client and spoke at length on the importance of video SEO as a part of any marketing package and plan to gain higher Universal Search rankings. We convinced the client, but unfortunately, they decided to go ahead and do their own VSEO work without hiring any company to assist them along the way. We came across their VSEO content on YouTube, and lo and behold: no views, and very little VSEO value.

How could this be? If VSEO is so vital, why didn’t putting video on YouTube work? Put simply, if you’ve set out to do your own VSEO campaign, you need to do quite a lot of research and quite a lot of work. That doesn’t mean, of course, that you can’t do it yourself, just make sure you can budget the time and energy for doing VSEO right.

I’ve outlined five of the most important things non-professionals leave out when taking care of their own VSEO projects, in hopes that no more small businesses will make the same mistakes.

Speech: Google and YouTube index any words spoken in your video, even if there’s no subtitles or captions. Make sure when writing the script for your VSEO content that you optimize it just as you would any text content for your website or blog. Keep your keywords in mind and use them wisely and often.

Title: You might be temped to title your VSEO content with a descriptive phrase, but make sure you also include a keyword, or even two, that you want to optimize. “Great Pizza Deal At Frank’s” might grab attention, but what do people look for? Since many of our clients are local to New England, we would suggest something like “Cheap Pizza in Boston, MA.”

Captions: By using the closed captions offered by video sharing sites, you can reach a whole new group of users that may not have watched your video before. This includes not only the hearing impaired, but those who do not have speakers on their computers, like many office workers. Consider making sure all of your VSEO content has captions that the user can turn on if they want to.

Description: The description of your video is a fantastic opportunity for more optimization, so think again about those keywords. Also make sure that you provide potential clients with ways to contact you, such as your website, phone number, and address. You can even link your Facebook and Twitter accounts.