For years, we’ve been told that the use of multimedia can be an effective way to rank highly in the SERPs. Both SMBs and massive corporations rely on healthy doses of video marketing to proliferate their messages nowadays.
In the video marketing realm, YouTube is the undisputed king. As such, it’s important to focus a considerable amount of effort on YouTube-specific SEO. The following SEO best practices will ensure high rankings for your videos.
Create Sitemaps for Embedded Videos
Obviously, videos hosted on YouTube will already be highly visible to Google and Bing. The same can’t be said for instances of said videos embedded in other sites. No matter where your multimedia content ends up, you’ll want the sites that they land on to have properly configured sitemaps for videos. It only takes a minute and it can have a positive impact on SEO.
Optimize Video Description Keywords
No matter what happens with SEO in the future, keywords will always be a major determinant of which pieces of content rank well for specific queries. When uploading your content to YouTube, you need to carefully consider what to include in the description and tag fields. Titles are particularly important as well since they’re the first thing that viewers see. Use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to guide your keyword efforts.
Use Annotations to Add Value
Businesses of all kinds can greatly boost the effectiveness of video content through the use of in-screen annotations. Adding annotations to your videos is simple and can accomplish a variety of goals. For one thing, annotations can clarify material presented within videos. They can also be used to refer viewers to related YouTube clips. Finally, annotations can increase traffic to your primary website or to your social media profiles.
Improve User Experience
One of the best ways to boost the SEO clout of YouTube videos and by extension your brand’s reputation online is by improving user experience. Consider adding transcripts and possibly captions that scroll to your video posts. Furthermore, you’ll want to pay close attention to the length of videos based on their intended purpose. Finally, be sure to optimize your videos for mobile users to reach wider audiences.
Add Geotags to Clips
Thanks to the increasing popularity of mobile hardware like smartphones and tablets, location awareness is becoming a big part of good SEO nowadays. Geotagging your videos so that they reference physical locations is a must. For SMBs that derive the bulk of their revenue from local traffic, geotagging can seriously turbocharge sales and conversions on the ground. You’re just leaving money on the table by ignoring the potential of geotagging.
Getting More Mileage from Your Videos
In many ways, video is the future of online content marketing. For many businesses, a heavy YouTube presence is the best way to maximize marketing ROI. As such, getting your video marketing blasts to rank highly in the SERPs is of paramount importance whether you’re an established business or a struggling startup. The SEO pointers outlined here should go a long way in making that happen.
