The presentation on video SEO (search engine optimisation) from Rachael Dines at the April 2016 Brighton SEO Conference. Rachael is Director of Marketing and PR for Shake It Up Creative Ltd.
2. The hours people spend watching
videos onYouTube, year-on-year
Video – it’s serious
60%
3. How video aids marketing &
SEO
• Videos rank; blended search results
• A video search result has a 41% higher CTR than plain text
• On-site video increases dwell time by avg 2 minutes
• Video; easily digested, useful, leads to more links
“If a picture is worth a thousand words, and
video shoots at 30 frames per second, then a
60-second video really does contain the
equivalent of 1.8 million words!”
Dr. James McQuivey, Forrester Study
Better
SERPS
Better
CTR
Lower
Bounce
More
Backlinks
4. Finding the
goal
Choose the right type of video:
Tutorial, webinar, product demo, humorous how-to?
Example goals:
Increase site visitors by 1000 within six months
Double my database within six months
Take £500 more in revenue per month within six months
I want to
relax/laugh/watch
crazy cats
I need to find an
answer
Why people
watch videos /
visit
5. Search engine happiness
The search engines like:
• Video content optimised with video
keywords
• A title at least 5 words long, keyword at
the beginning
• A video hosted on your own domain in
addition to sharing sites
• An optimised description
• Keyword within the video’s filename
• Transcripts
• Schema.org meta data
6. Keywords & Tagging
Tags aren’t the most important thing
Include related keywords, remember, spiders can’t watch
videos
Select an appropriate category
Helps you get here…
8. And, a site map
You need the RAW video player link - where the original video
file is located
Check out https://moz.com/blog/video-sitemap-guide-for-
vimeo-and-youtube
9. UX metrics
YouTube determines the
quality of your video by:
• Video retention
• Comments
• Shares
• Thumbs up/down
• Subscribes
• Add to playlist
10. Schema.org
• Improves rich snippets
• Use the schema.org/VideoObject type to
describe videos
• Ensure that video and markup is visible
without executing any JavaScript or Flash
• Add the markup properties directly to the
HTML of the page with your video/s on
• Test it at:
https://developers.google.com/structured-
data/testing-tool/
12. Marketing tips
Keep videos professional but friendly
Promote promote promote!...
Using the word "video" in an email subject line
boosts open rates by a whopping 19% (HighQ /
Hubspot)
Ask viewers to share, subscribe, comment, vote
More real views=higher rankings
OneLoad distribution – 20 different platforms, analytics
I’m sure you’re here because you already know video should be a key part of your marketing strategy and I’m sure you all know that YouTube is the world’s second biggest search engine. Social video is exploding and according to Cisco, video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic by this time next year.
Youtube is king with 400 hours worth of video uploaded every single minute, but other platforms are getting a look in. Some prefer Vimeo as there’s no ads and your own domain can be used (just on pro)Instagram has increased its video ad length & view counts have been added.
(Instagram said, in the last 6 months user video watching time increased by more than 40%)
And, Facebook Live is now available, up to 90 minutes live video to your followers.
Videos rank – we have blended search results now and since Hummingbird, video is rewarded for being truly quality content with a higher SERP.
(Study done by aimClear in US)
Higher CTR is mainly due to rich-video-snippets standing out amongst the text results. If you can’t rank for text content, you might be able to for video content.
Dwell time is the metric Google uses to monitor how long users stay on a site after click-through and therefore contributes to gauging how relevant that content is. In fact, comScore found that on retail sites, visitors that watch video stay 2 minutes longer and are 64% more likely to make a purchase.
People like video!
Video has been proven to generate more backlinks, better SERPS, lower bounce rates and better CTRs.
And, a final marketing point “A video is worth 1.8 million words,”
People visit YouTube for one of two reasons:
To find the answer to a problem or to relax/laugh/watch crazy cats.
As a professional business, you’ll be providing answers/ the solutions.
As with any marketing you need to identify your goals and your audience and video should be a part of your marketing plan.
See which competitor YouTube channels are the most popular with your target audience and decide which type of video might be most appreciated by your audience – a tutorial, a webinar, a product demo or funny how-to? Do lots of research, but if in doubt, ask your audience what they want to see!
Optimised with video keywords
Title at least 5 words long, start using keyword at the beginning
Google considers a hosted video (on your own domain) more credible.
Description – is where Google and YouTube determine the video’s content. Should ideally be at least 250 words long, include keyword in first 25 words and then further inclusions within, have your link at the top.
Use keyword within the video’s filename.
Utilise transcripts and schema microdata. I’ll go through these things in a bit more detail now.
Video keywords – diff to normal keywords – look for search volume, phrases that get at least 300 searches per month in Google and have at least one other video result in Google – the aim is to target keywords that already have YouTube results on the 1st page. This is because it will bring traffic from Google’s first page AND from within YouTube.
To identify the best tags you can look at competitor videos and use the auto-suggest tool.
Help state what your video is about and put it in the most relevant category.
Tags help you rank for your target keywords but when someone watches a video with a similar tag to yours, you get added to the sidebar and hopefully get more views.
Transcripts: On-page indexable html copy
Can do this within the YouTube video manager - Add Captions section, select Transcripts
Transcript & Set Timings and your video will automatically pause as you type
OR
Upload a text file
If you use the auto-transcript option, absolutely check & edit or you could end up with gobbledegook…
And if you want to view a video’s transcript, click on the …More link under a video and select Transcript.
XML video sitemap will help you achieve a thumbnail image in the search result.
You need the RAW video player link - where the original video file is.
Create a new file or if you’re not a techy, use a sitemap tool to generate the file, Google Search Console will help with this.
Image and practical advice if you’re coding your sitemap from scratch, see this Moz article, few years old but still helpful.
Use keywords in the anchor text that links to your videos featured on the sitemap. See Google Developers for required url entry elements.
mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .m4v, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv, .swf. All files must be accessible via HTTP.
Metafiles that require a download of the source via streaming protocols are not supported.
Video retention: how much of your video viewers actually stick around to watch, obvs the more the better
Comments mean people are not only watching but engaging with you and your video
Shares – someone really enjoyed it or really thought it was useful to someone else to go to the trouble of sharing it.
Thumbs are simple evaluation tool.
Subscribes
Favourites
This is a shot from one of my clients’ YouTube analytics page, Stephanie makes a lot of videos and has 127 in her channel.
See average view duration is not the full video and more females watched this video.
Playlist stats can now be found in the Videos in Playlists report.
Full spec at schema.org
Example of what it looks like compared to regular embed code, courtesy of Koozai.
Market the videos like crazy! Everywhere you can.
In fact, research has found that including the word video in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19%
Promote in email footers, via social media, embed in blog posts, use in email campaigns, talk about it!
Ask viewers to rate your video, share it and comment on it. If you are producing a series of videos, create a standard outro with these requests.
Don’t buy views, the more real views you have, the higher the rankings your video will get.
You can share it quickly and easily via One Load, which has a free plan available and auto-transcodes the files for each platform.
But remember, a five-figure view count isn’t enough if half those people are down-voting your video before they leave.