As you’re probably aware search engines list video content in their search results – both in the video section as well as the main results. But for your website’s video content to be listed and rank well on search engines, you need to make sure that your video SEO is up to scratch.
Although there is a certain amount of overlap between video SEO and normal SEO – there are some areas that are unique. A good place to start is with the following easy tips that can help you to specifically boost your website’s video SEO:
Start to add structured data to your videos
Structured data is additional information that is added to your HTML code in the form of Schema markup. It will provide useful details that search engines can use to list your video more effectively.
Some of the important parameters that you’ll want to add to your video using structured data are the title, description, duration, and thumbnail URL. Aside from that you can also supply information such as the number of views, upload date, and more.
By using structured data your video could be displayed as a rich snippet in search results – which will normally result in more clicks.
Stick to publishing one video per page
One important rule to follow if you want your videos to perform well on search engines is to only publish one video on any given webpage.
If you publish more than one video only the first video that search engines see when they crawl the webpage will be listed. The other videos will not be – which will mean that they don’t even get the chance to rank in search results.
Publish the transcript of the video
Because search engines can’t actually ‘watch’ your video and ‘see’ its content they rely on other information to list and rank it. Transcribing your video and publishing the transcript right next to it can help provide them with that information.
The transcript of your video will naturally contain the keywords that you want your video to be listed in and will let search engines know what it is about.
Overall it shouldn’t be too difficult to transcribe the video, and there are several transcription methods that you can use. If you use any automated transcription tools you should make it a point to proofread the transcription – as there will often be some errors in it.
Check and optimize the page speed
Videos will affect the page speed of your webpages, which in turn can affect their SEO. In fact page speed has started to become an increasingly important ranking factor for search engines.
With that in mind you should use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check your page speed. It will provide you with a list of potential improvements that you can make in order to optimize it and improve your SEO.
In addition to optimizing the video SEO, you should also make sure you upload videos in the right format.
If you want you can use Online Video Converter to switch your video files into the format that you require before you upload them. Because it is web-based it is convenient to use, and will let you convert your videos between any formats you need by following the steps at https://www.videoconverter.com/how-to-convert-mp4-to-flv.html.
It may take a while before your video SEO improvements start to translate into visible results. Initially you may notice that new videos that you publish are listed more quickly in search results, and from there you should start to see their rankings improve gradually too.