What Is Video SEO?

Date First Published: 2nd February 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what video SEO is in this article.

Video SEO is the process of optimising videos for a website so that they can be crawled, processed, understood, and indexed by Google, Bing, and other search engines more quickly. Video SEO aims to increase organic traffic to video content. Video SEO has become an important part of SEO over the years with the increasing popularity of video content. There are some optimisation tips to give videos a higher chance of ranking in SERPs, which are explained below.

Tips For Video SEO

Tips for improving video SEO are:

• Use the target keyword on the name of the video file. For example, instead of using a vague file name that does not describe the video (e.g. 00233342.mp4), name the file something like 'seo-tips' if the keyword is 'SEO tips' with the preferred video type (e.g. MP4, MOV, or WMV).
• Optimise the video description. According to Google, the official character limit for YouTube video descriptions is 1000 characters. Although it is okay to write longer descriptions, keep in mind that viewers often go there to watch a video, not read a long essay. When writing longer descriptions, YouTube only displays the first two or three lines of text and viewers have to click 'show more' to see the full description. This is why it is important to put the most important information in the first few sentences of the description.
• Categorise the videos. After uploading a video, it is recommended to categorise it. Categorising is a way of organising videos with similar content on YouTube so that it appears in different playlists and viewers that identify with the audience.
• Upload a relevant thumbnail image. When scrolling through a list of video results, the video thumbnail is the main image that viewers see. This will inform the viewer of the content of the video, which will affect the number of clicks and views that a video receives. Even though one of the auto-generated thumbnail options can always be chosen on YouTube, it is recommended to upload a custom thumbnail image that will grab people's attention and stand out from the search results.
• Ensure that the rest of the page is optimised for SEO. In order to get indexed by search engines, no one can completely rely on optimising a video. It is also important that the page itself is optimised for SEO. If search engines do not crawl the page, then they will not bother to crawl and index the video.
• Be selective with the keywords. SERPs are often extremely competitive. Unless it is possible to compete with very competitive keywords, choose keywords that have a high enough search volume, but are not too competitive.
• Use relevant keywords in the video title. Matching the title to what the video is about is key to getting the video visible in the search results.
• Use video hashtags to help users find content. Hashtags can be added to YouTube video descriptions and titles to help viewers find the video when they search for a specific hashtag.
• Add subtitles and closed captions. The benefit of having these in videos is that they can be picked up by search engines.
• Do not completely rely on SEO to promote videos. The same goes with images, SEO should not be completely relied on to promote videos. Google is constantly changing their algorithms and videos are evolving very quickly. SEO is also hard to control and the ranking of content is prone to fluctuations at any time, so people that want to get more views and clicks should consider investing in paid advertising.

Difference Between YouTube SEO and Google Video SEO

Even though both YouTube and Google are owned by the same company, they both use different algorithms to order the results. The main difference between Google's and YouTube's algorithms is that YouTube considers more factors commonly used in social media algorithms, whilst video content in Google seems to rank by considering the same ranking factors as the normal Google search. YouTube SEO is the process of maximizing the presence on search and related videos within the YouTube platform and is not identical to the process of optimising rankings on Google. Although certain ranking factors have been confirmed, the exact algorithms for both platforms are not disclosed.

Universal Search

Universal search includes results from other search engines within the main SERP of a search engine and videos are a key part of universal search. For Google, this includes Google Images, Google Videos, Google Maps, and Google Shopping results. Universal search was introduced in 2011 and provided more dynamic SERPs that allowed searchers to find what they were looking for more quickly. As videos were included on the main SERP of Google, this makes video SEO even more important. Today, most Google search results include videos, which is why videos are an important source of organic website traffic.

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