Ever wondered what SEO for video is and what difference does it make?
Picture this: you’ve had a genius idea for a video to promote your business and grow your customer base. You spent weeks developing your idea, writing the script, recording, and then finally putting it together and editing. Your piece of video art is ready for the world to see after you uploaded it to YouTube… But it turns out that as days, weeks and months go by, your video is not being discovered by as many people as you were expecting, and your customer base is not growing (any faster). Why?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a crucial aspect of any successful digital marketing strategy. This includes developing your SEO for video. Apart from creating your video, you also need to consider which digital platform you will use to upload your video and make publicly available for others to see. We would suggest using YouTube, as it is the most popular digital video platform in the world. YouTube boasts over a billion (!) users worldwide, who watch almost 5 billion videos every day and upload over 300 hours of video every minute.
YouTube is so popular, it means a lot of people will watch my video, right?
Even though YouTube has a huge potential to help you reach new audiences and grow your customer base as it has so many users, it is also a very competitive platform. Making sure your videos are discovered by as many people as possible can be a big challenge. This is why having a strategy to implement SEO for video is so important. Your video might have the best content in the world but if it’s not easily discovered, no one will watch it.
SEO for video, if done well, helps you make sure more people find your video and watch it. To help you understand how SEO for video works, SEO Melbourne team put together a list of our 5 most successful YouTube videos to date. We will share some of the lessons we learnt when implementing SEO for video, and pinpoint what exactly helped make those videos popular.
Top SEO Melbourne video #1: How To SEO Your Facebook Page For Google & Other Search Engines, Facebook SEO
This is our most popular YouTube SEO video to date – since uploading it to YouTube 5 years ago, it accumulated over 14,000 views. The video gives practical tips on how to implement SEO for Facebook pages. This is a topic very relevant to small business owners, as often they run their Facebook and other social media platforms themselves. As small businesses make up a significant part of our customer base, creating a useful video with tips our audience can easily incorporate in their daily business lives proved to be a great idea/address a gap in available information on SEO out there. Â
Why it worked?
Using a relevant topic to our audience and providing value by sharing practical tips and solutions to real-life problems they’re facing. However, as we mentioned earlier, content itself is not enough to make a video successful. To help our video perform, we made sure that it’s as easily discoverable as possible. We did that through optimising our video’s title for the keyword we were targeting, ‘Facebook SEO’. Also, we included a written transcript for our YouTube video, while making sure the keyword we’re targeting is close to the beginning of the text. Promoting the video in an article on our own website helped as well. The article was further optimised for the keyword we were targeting.
What to watch out for?
Even though we provided a written transcript for our video, we didn’t provide a written copy of our video’s text in the YouTube description. This could have actually made our video harder to crawl and rank by Google. To ensure your SEO for video is as effective as possible, remember to include some kind of text with the keyword you’re targeting in the description of your video. This could be just the keyword by itself, a short paragraph or a whole transcript.
How to replicate this success?
Make sure you optimise the SEO for your video to the fullest – include it in the title, description and transcript of the video you’re publishing online. If you can, post the video on your website as well. This will ensure it has even more exposure.
Top SEO Melbourne video #2: Google Analytics The Basics Explained, Google Analytics Traffic & Goal Reporting
This is our second most popular YouTube SEO video to date. It explains the basics of using Google Analytics for tracking website traffic and conversion rates. Being able to use Google Analytics and make sense of its data is a crucial aspect of improving any business’ online presence. This makes it an important skill for business owners, and hence our video by explaining the basics and giving tips provided value to our customer base.
Why it worked?
Again, we made sure that we include the keyword we’re targeting (‘Google Analytics Basics’) in the title of our video on YouTube, and the title of our website article talking about the video. We also used the keyword in the first paragraph of the video script, which was then submitted to YouTube as a transcript, and published in our article as a blog post.
What to watch out for?
When explaining complex topics try to break them down into different levels of difficulty. For example, we made this video with beginners in mind, that’s why we focused it on basics of Google Analytics only. You coud use that strategy to making videos addressing different segments of your audience.
How to replicate this success?
Provide value to your audience by outlining useful tips on how to do something practical and useful in terms of running their businesses. And make sure you implement SEO for video to the max by including your keyword in the title, the first paragraph and throughout your script. Then upload that written script as a description and transcript in YouTube.
Top SEO Melbourne video #3: What’s The Difference Between Exit and Bounce Rates In Google Analytics?
Video content can be effectively used to compare and explain two different concepts. This SEO Melbourne explains the difference between the exit and bounce rates in Google Analytics. The two often get mixed up, while understanding how they differ is important for any business owner. This is because understanding how these two differ is crucial to be able to analyse and improve website performance, a feat important to many business owners.
Why it worked?
Talking about a topic useful to our customer base, while keeping it short and straight to the point. Once again, we made sure we identified and used a relevant keyword in the video title, first paragraph and in the body of the script. Posting the video on our website boosted its visibility further.
What to watch out for?
The text of this video script is less than 300 words, which makes it harder for a blog post to rank well. However, in terms of video, being succinct can actually increase audience retention. Next time we would probably try to add another hundred words or so just to make sure the text is long enough to be crawled by Google.
Bonus tip: you can upload a whole script to your website and treat it as a longer blog post, while keeping your video content short and sweet o maximise the audience retention rates and make sure YouTube promotes your video to other users.
How to replicate this success?
Identify topics and keywords relevant to your audience. Make sure your videos provide the people who watch your content with value. And to boost SEO for videos you make and boost their visibility, utilise the keywords you identified by incorporating them in your video scripts and titles.
Top SEO Melbourne video #4: What Is Remarketing? How Does Google Remarketing work?
Every business owner knows what digital marketing is (or they definitely should!), but what about remarketing? In this video, SEO Melbourne explains what remarketing is and how it works. By providing a real-life example, our video is a practical educational piece, making remarketing easy to understand, even for people only entering their marketing journey.
Why it worked?
Finding out what educational gaps your audience is looking to fill will help you create content people want to consume. This is what we’ve done when creating this video. We looked at keywords related to marketing our customer demographic was potentially interested in finding out more about. Performing this research and identifying the keywords will not only give you ideas for content, but also will make it easier for you to know how to implement SEO for video you’re creating. Include the keywords you chose in the video title, script and transcript.
What to watch out for?
Again, this video is quite short which is good for SEO for video, but can be bad for website SEO. Short text could make it hard to achieve the right visibility on Google if you’re trying to promote your video through your website. We suggest to try to make the written content published on your site longer than the actual video script. Who said you can’t have both! Â
How to replicate this success?
Follow our video creation process: (1) identify educational gaps among your customer base -> (2) identify relevant keywords -> (3) come up with a great content idea -> (4) create a script while incorporating keywords and implementing strategic SEO for video you’re working on -> (5) execute!
Top SEO Melbourne video #5: Why SEO Is Important? & 10 Best Reasons To SEO Your Website For Search Engines
This video is one of our favourites. The importance of SEO is quite obvious to us here at SEO Melbourne but to many business owners the opportunities great SEO delivers are not immediately obvious. This is why we decided to address this knowledge gap by providing a useful and straightforward list of 10 reasons why SEO should be an important aspect of any business.
Why it worked?
In the video title, we combined the keyword we were targeting (‘why SEO is important’) with an enticing promise: 10 best reasons explaining why. People love lists of any kind, especially if they provide value. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to compile a round up of reasons, examples, questions in your content, both video and written (see what we did in this article? ;)). Moreover, using long tail keywords (keywords using more than one or two words), is increasingly effective with the advent of voice search. Using longer keywords in the title and script body is a great way to boost the SEO for video you’ve created.
What to watch out for?
Make sure that when compiling video scripts with lists, you keep the content conversational and don’t jump from one example to the next too abruptly. This will help you make sure the video flows well and that it doesn’t seem too robotic.
How to replicate this success?
Research topics relevant to your audience and think about communicating them as interesting lists. When developing your video content try to make sure your lists include the keyword you’re targeting while still having a conversational tone.
So how to make sure you do SEO for video well?
To develop and implement great SEO for video, follow the process we use at SEO Melbourne: keyword and audience research, planning and effective implementation. Also, make sure you’re including your keywords in your video titles, script and transcript when uploading to platforms such as YouTube. Boost your video’s visibility further by publishing it on your website and complimenting it with a great article.
By following the above steps, your videos will have much bigger chances of being discovered by more people and growing your customer base. If you would like further assistance, feel free to check out SEO Company Melbourne for tips, advice and our expert SEO services
