We had this crazy idea… to make a vlog – about video.
To be a little more specific, it’s a bunch of top tips on how to optimise your videos when you’re uploading them onto the interwebz. As a London SEO agency, we know a fair few things about optimising videos for search engines like YouTube.
Without further ado, you can check out the finished article below!
Video transcript:
UWP Group
SEO for video – our top tips.
We’ve put together some great tips to get more people watching your videos. Let’s get started:-
Pay attention to what your audience can’t see. Just like web pages, YouTube videos contain metadata that guides search results.
Make sure your tags use relevant keywords to describe your videos.
Be sure to create relevant titles and descriptions that explain your content clearly and concisely.
Subtitles and transcripts aren’t just for the hard of hearing, they also provide text that can be crawled by popular search engines.
A relevant backlink to your site in the video description also won’t go amiss, creating inbound traffic to your site.
If you are a card-carrying SEO. geek, you can add structured data to your site to help those crafty search engine bots interpret your on-page video content.
Don’t skimp on the window-dressing, a punchy, informative thumbnail will grab your audience’s attention and make your video more clickable.
Now let’s compare two videos we created and see how they performed.
The first was a spoof of a hit video on YouTube.
This graph shows the total time it was watched – 6721 minutes – 92% of which was in the first two weeks.
It piggy backed on the success of the original viral hit – and when the buzz fizzled out the viewing time dropped too.
Facebook is all about sharing so that’s another great platform to promote your videos –
and being a bitesize 42 seconds, this one was tailor made for fast-changing Facebook feeds.
Let’s compare this with a different example, an ambitious 3D animated video.
Unlike the previous video, it has retained an audience over time – gaining an average of 10 minutes viewing a day over the last two years.
At 2 minutes 33 seconds it’s also a fair bit longer.
YouTube is the perfect platform for this example as people are actively looking for video and are willing to watch for longer.
What’s more, the search terms have remained relevant so people have kept finding it.
To sum up, the main takeaways are:-
-Make sure your videos are optimised,
-Use keywords, tags and add transcripts,
-Create thumbnails people want to click, and
-Focus your efforts on the most relevant platform for your video.
That’s all for now folks, hope it helped. If it did, leave a like, subscribe to us below for future updates and follow us on Twitter at @UWPgroup!