7 tips for your video SEO, or Vseo

A very powerful marketing tool, video has become almost unavoidable when you want to generate an audience online. That said, it isn’t enough to just create this type of content and put it online for it to be seen. In this article, we share a few keys to boost the visibility of your videos and help you meet your goals.

1 – How do you properly rank a video on Google YouTube, a platform with impressive audience numbers? (SEO on YouTube)

With its gargantuan audience (more than 2.2 billion users worldwide), YouTube, owned by Google, is an essential environment for content creators, whatever their goals (branding, attracting new prospects, building loyalty, and so on).

However, with 500 hours of video published on the platform every minute, competition there is fierce too! And yet not all users optimize the podcasts, shows and other content they put online, so they don’t tap their full potential, no matter how good the content is in itself.

The first best practice to put in place is quite simply to take care of your video’s description and to carefully fill in the various fields on YouTube before publishing.

It’s essential to choose relevant keywords (the tags on YouTube), which help contextualize the content. Keep in mind that these are the very keywords through which users are likely to find you!

Writing an impactful video title and using an eye-catching thumbnail also remain crucial. Indeed, it has been shown that these two elements influence the click-through rate, which is itself a search engine optimization (SEO) criterion and thus helps you rank well when it’s high.

Among the other tips and optimization advice to follow on YouTube:

• Encourage users to comment or give a thumbs up if they liked the content,
• Prompt users to subscribe and share the video,
• Create themed playlists,
• Add chapters to medium- and long-form videos to improve the user experience.

2 – Making the most of motion design: the viral SEO video type par excellence

Watch time carries considerable weight in how videos rank, as any qualified VSEO (Video Search Engine Optimization) specialist will confirm.

What’s more, it’s essential to see users – whether popular influencers or everyday viewers – take ownership of the content and share it on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

Indeed, search engines, Google first and foremost, treat these as positive signals and give more visibility to content that users take an interest in. And among the video types in vogue that are both viral and boast high average watch times, you’ll find motion design videos.

With their 2D / 3D animations, they stand out from conventional videos and give the companies behind them a dynamic image. Just as importantly, they contribute to the overall user experience and help guide users when they’re at the heart of the marketing strategy of a store or a showcase site.

In this way, motion design videos help lower the bounce rate… an important factor if ever there was one for SEO.

3 – The importance of choosing the right platforms to host and rank your video

While YouTube is by far the most popular video host, you can perfectly well favor other platforms instead, depending on the nature of your content and, therefore, the targets you aspire to reach.

As a generalist alternative, Dailymotion stands out, with the advantage of having been created in France!

Then there’s Vimeo, a favorite of companies from a variety of sectors that publish particularly polished videos.

We’re of course thinking of Twitch, whose rise has been meteoric in recent years. After initially drawing the attention of video game enthusiasts alone, it’s now used by video content creators in sectors such as travel, cooking, wellness, and more.

If it’s specifically, or even exclusively, a young audience you want to engage, being present on TikTok is a must, though it requires you to post short, dynamic videos.

Pinterest serves as yet another solution for generating traffic with videos, bearing in mind that this social network is very predominantly favored by female users and that native videos there can’t exceed 15 minutes.

4 – Embedding video on your website to improve your SEO

Do you have your own digital showcase? You might as well make the most of it and publish your video on your website. If it embodies a fundamental part of your marketing strategy, give it a prominent place on the homepage or spotlight it on a landing page or blog post that already enjoys excellent search engine rankings.

Work on the page’s semantic context as much as you can, with a description that’s far more developed than the one you may have written on YouTube, for example, and ideally, include the video within the text to contextualize it.

Plan for a paragraph of at least 300 words presenting the video and including the targeted keywords. Of course, if you have a multilingual website, you’d be well advised to offer subtitles. Another benefit of this approach is being able to analyze the audience statistics for that page, and thereby understand user behavior.

To go further, you could even opt for transcribing the video. Excellent video transcription software exists on the market. The Authôt application (a French speech recognition technology) helps make multimedia content more accessible and visible.

Be careful: to avoid degrading your website’s display performance, don’t host videos directly on your site. Prefer displaying the video via YouTube (or another video platform).

In addition, don’t forget to link from the video platform to your website, choosing the anchor yourself, an excellent way to rank the video for certain keywords. And if you have several videos on your YouTube channel, don’t hesitate to link between videos that belong to the same theme, the algorithm will appreciate it!

5- Optimizing the video’s page on your site and boosting the visibility of results on Google

Once your page is ready, there are still a few steps to take so that your content is visible both to search engines and to users! This means including structured data. This is information placed in the source code that will help Google properly understand your content, but also display special features in Google search results (rich snippets).

Different structured data tags exist for videos:

• VideoObject: information about the description, thumbnail URL, upload date, duration, and so on
• BroadcastEvent: tag videos broadcast live so a “Live” badge can be displayed (influencers, sporting events, etc.)
• Itemlist: tag pages containing a list of videos to enable a host video carousel
• Clip: manually mark the important segments of your video to help users quickly jump to specific points
• SeekToAction: enable key moments by explaining to Google how your URL structure works so it can automatically identify highlights and send users to those specific points in the video.

6 – Earning hard links to improve and optimize your video’s SEO

Many unaware professionals wrongly believe that their video’s ranking is essentially tied to their ability to turn it into viral content on social media.

Yet you only need to look at how Google’s algorithm works to understand that it ranks its search results (videos included) based on many other factors, including the number of backlinks (or hyperlinks / return links).

These elements are indeed considered positive signals; they act, for the engine, as relevant recommendations from users. For this reason, we encourage you to earn backlinks to your videos on a wide range of websites (directories, blogs, news sites, and so on).

7 – Getting support from an agency of SEO specialists

Ranking a video isn’t a task to take lightly! To support you in optimizing the visibility of your video content, you can turn to Semji.

Our team of SEO experts will give you all the keys to gain positions whatever the format of your content, along with support tailored to your needs to help you exceed your goals.

Whatever your challenges (visibility, traffic, conversions, and so on), you benefit from cutting-edge SEO expertise paired with an innovative platform to meet the expectations of your audience and of Google. Ask us for a demo!