Sara Beaudoin is the Marketing Communications Manager for SearchPro Systems.
Many business owners are beginning to understanding the SEO benefits to creating interesting and informative videos about what their business offers. Videos are another way to provide information for internet users, and they are quickly becoming the preferred source of information, as users are more inclined to watch a short video than to read through paragraph after paragraph of text. It is important however, to understand that creating the video and posting it on YouTube is only the beginning. Your video needs to be optimized in order to appear on the first results page of Google, and before it can begin to help your business.
The first step is to create the file name, which you may not tend to put much thought into. Typically, if your company’s name is Valerie’s Closet, you may simply name your video “Valerie’s Closet video,” however, that file name doesn’t provide Google with any information as to what the video is about. If Valerie’s Closet is a fashionable boutique in Maine that sells women’s clothing, and one of your website’s keywords is ‘women’s fashion ME,’ you may want to title your video “Women’s Fashion ME” instead.
The second step is to embed your YouTube videos on your website. Google’s algorithm keeps track of how many times a video is viewed, which increases it search engine ranking, and Google can also tell when an embedded video is viewed. Embedding your videos in multiple locations will make them more visible to viewers and will hopefully prompt more clicks, which will increase ranking. Be aware that there is a downside to embedding from YouTube, however. Viewers will not only see your videos, but they will also see recommended videos, which may even be videos filmed by your competitors . . . not exactly ideal. To avoid this, I recommend using a video management source like VideoBloom instead.
YouTube also asks you to give each video a title, description and tag, within which you should be sure to use keywords. Be sure to be original though, so your video doesn’t get mixed into the sea of “women’s clothing.”
You should also create a video library on your website. This will make it easy for Google to find all of your videos, along with their titles, descriptions and tags.
Finally, embedding your videos into text pages on your site associates the video with the text around it. Google will pull the SEO’d keywords from that page and then understand what type of content is in the video. Not only that, but it makes your video even more visible within your own website, as well as within the internet as a whole.
The more varied (but relevant) locations you can place your videos, the more you’re helping your VSEO efforts, since your videos will be more visible to internet users and they will be more intriguing. Hopefully these efforts will lead to more views, and especially more “likes” and comments so Google will consider your videos to be important content and will list them on the first page of a Google search.
SearchPro Systems
2024