Creating High-Quality Video to Boost Your SEO

The key to using video as part of your SEO strategy is to take the time to make high-quality content that’s aimed at a particular goal. After all, video alone isn’t necessarily your website’s saving grace. So here are some tips from Render Perfect Productions, your video marketing experts on creating high-quality video to boost your SEO.

Think of it as a cycle. Video gives you a boost in rankings, which allows more people to see your site, which means more people will click on your link. But they won’t actually stay on your site very long if your on-page content isn’t high quality.

This could be detrimental. Hosting a low-quality video with little or no context will make your rank plummet because the search engine doesn’t want to drive people to a useless page. At the start, more people may see your site in the SERPs, but if your page doesn’t satisfy their intent, they’ll quickly exit your page. This will increase your bounce rate (a metric we revealed earlier than one that Google prioritizes for SEO), telling Google your page isn’t valuable. The result? You’ll lose the ranking you just earned, and you might lose other rankings because your site now lacks authority in the eyes of Google.

None of this is a concern if you put some time and thought into your production strategy. Luckily, we’re experts with video creation and we’ve got some tips for helping you optimize your video marketing efforts. Start ranking on SERPs with the following crucial tips.

Use Videos on Your Website

Creating videos isn’t enough—you need to actually publish your videos on your site. Just make sure that the placement makes sense. A brand video fits nicely into your “About Us” website page or your homepage. A product video is a great asset for your e-commerce platform or your website’s product descriptions. Testimonial videos are especially powerful and can work pretty much anywhere on your site. One bonus tip—while you’re distributing your video content for SEO, you can repurpose the same content elsewhere to supplement the rest of your marketing strategy. Here are 20 places to consider posting your video once it’s finished.

Give Your Video Context

Publishing your video on an otherwise blank page won’t do much. Be sure to embed your video where it makes sense and surround it with other relevant written and visual content. You might even include a transcript of your video to target more keywords and turn any visual graphics used into a downloadable JPEG. The more Google can understand how your video fits into the content on-page, the better your results will be.

Be Sure Your Video Educates

If your potential customer has questions about your brand, services, products, or industry, then answering these questions will educate and empower them when making their purchasing decision. If you answer their questions continuously, you become an authority and gain credibility because of the value you provide. The search engines see this and boost your pages even more. Consider a Q&A video or a demonstration of your products in action for your product pages. You can also use video on educational pages like your blog to provide an alternative to reading long text. (Note the video at the top of the page on this article—we’re doing just that!)

Be Consistent

You can’t go to the gym one time and expect six-pack abs. The same goes for video marketing! Consistency and dedication are key. Work to consistently to provide value, and work at ranking not just for one keyword, but for many relevant keywords that match your customers’ search intent. The good news is that you’ll be motivated to create more content once you see how well it works!

Don’t Forget Technical Details

Uploading your video to a site like YouTube or Vimeo is just the beginning. Don’t forget to enter the right information on the backend so search engine crawlers know how to categorize and prioritize your video.

YouTube uses various information to create your ranking:

• Title tag information
• Audience retention
• Keywords in description tag
• Tags
• Video length
• Number of subscribers after watching
• Comments
• Likes and dislikes

Not every one of these is entirely in your control (like comments and subscribers, for instance), but work on the ones you can control so you know you’ve done everything in your power to help your video rank.

There are a growing number of queries that contain some level of video content in them. The positions occupied by videos in those results are basically not available for regular web pages. This creates a great opportunity for you, where you can compete to get into those SERPs in two different ways: with your regular web pages, and separately with your videos.

However, the first thing to realize is that Google is far more likely to rank videos hosted on YouTube. If you want your videos to rank in Google search, hosting them on YouTube is your best bet.

YouTube is a very large search engine in its own right. You can earn significant traffic to your videos from people that perform searches on YouTube, and while that traffic goes to the video, and not your site, this still offers powerful branding opportunities.

However, Google and YouTube rank videos differently. YouTube uses the metadata (title, description, categories) that you enter for the video to determine relevance and then uses view time-related metrics to determine rank.

To be specific, YouTube looks at the total time spent on YouTube. It doesn’t matter whether all the videos watched are from your account or not. If someone starts with your video and watches videos from other channels, this still accrues to your benefit.

Google uses a much more traditional set of algorithms to rank videos. The metadata you enter still matters here, but so do links to the video itself. To rank well in both search engines, you need to:

• Create interesting videos that people want to watch (ideally to the end) and that are worth linking to.
• Create videos that lead to people wanting more video.
• Leverage playlists that people want to use to guide their viewing. Don’t be afraid to include videos from other channels in your playlist.
• Embed the video on your own site.
• Get people to embed your videos to drive more view time to them.
• Consider paid campaigns to drive more view time into your video.
• Promote the video via multiple channels to drive more view time, and to potentially attract links to the videos.
• And, of course, be very thoughtful about how you implement the metadata for the videos you create.

About Render Perfect Productions:

Render Perfect has been built from the ground up to service growing businesses and help them realize their full visual storytelling and digital marketing potential. We’ve created a service offering and skill-set that spans video production, post-production, motion graphic design, 3D animation, web development, and video marketing strategy. Our insight and experience allow us to help clients make better planning decisions and get more out of their video production effort.