We all know Google is the most popular search engine in the world.
What you don’t know is how to rank your videos on the first page of Google.
Are we spot on?
For offline businesses, a great location is paramount to ensure high foot traffic and strong sales. And the reality is not that different for online businesses. You need prime online real estate if you want your videos to be found.
So, learning how to optimize your videos for search engines is the best way to rank on the first page of Google, drive organic traffic to your video content and boost your engagement.
In this post, we’ll provide you with four technical video SEO tips to improve your search engine rankings.
Ensuring your website has a good CDN
Have you ever run a search on Google or Bing and clicked on a link only to wait for what seemed to be an eternity before the website loaded?
What was your reaction then?
If you’re anything like us, in that situation, you probably tend to lose your patience, rage-click the exit button and try a different link.
Are we right?
That’s ok. We all do it 😉
8 seconds.
That’s the average attention span nowadays. This makes loading speed a top priority for online businesses. In fact, if it takes more than 3 seconds for one of your pages to load, you’ll lose over half of your visitors. That’s when having a good CDN becomes crucial.
But what’s a CDN, you might ask?
A CDN (or content delivery network) is a service you can use to accelerate your content delivery. In other words, it’s a service that makes your website load faster. And it’s especially useful for websites featuring high-resolution videos as they tend to take more time to load.
Now, one of the key ranking factors for search engines is page speed. That’s because a slow website provides a poor user experience.
So, if you want your video to rank high on SERPs, you need to ensure your website is fast. Investing in a good CDN will help reduce load time and speed things up when visitors click your links.
Some of the best CDN providers include Akamai, Cloudflare, and Amazon CloudFront.
Optimizing your web page
Even though we’re talking about ranking your video on search engines, the focus should be both on the video and on the page that hosts the video. That’s because when you upload a video on your website, your page is being ranked, not the video. So, you need to make sure the page featuring your video is optimized for search engines.
Some of the key factors to improve your rankings include:
- Using the target keyword in the page titles, the web copy, the meta descriptions, and URLs. You can look for highly relevant keywords using Google Keywords Everywhere and the search bar on YouTube.
- Adding the word video in the page titles and meta descriptions.
- Using the same tags in your titles, URLs, and meta descriptions.
- Using the target keyword within the first 100 words of your web copy.
- Mentioning the target keyword in your headings.
- Using related keywords in the copy.
- Adding a FAQ at the bottom of the page.
Of course, don’t forget to optimize your video on the video hosting platform too. For instance, if you’re using YouTube, ensure your titles and descriptions are engaging, relevant, and click-worthy and contain your main keywords. Just a note, though; your description should sound natural so avoid keyword stuffing at all costs!
[Ebook] Technical SEO for non-technical thinkers
Building do-follow backlinks linking back to the video on your web page
Do-follow links are important as they can help you improve your search engine rankings directly.
But what’s a do-follow link, you ask?
There are two types of links; do-follow and no-follow links.
Simply put, do-follow links send a signal to Google that you’re linking a specific link because you want the site to rank higher. This means that by using do-follow links, you’re influencing a specific page’s rankings and are passing the ‘’link juice’’ to it. In other words, you’re transferring your SEO strength to another webpage.
Do-follow backlinks are critical as they’re the only type of links that Google uses to rank content. In fact, they’re one of the three most important factors for Google when ranking websites and videos.
Now, the real question is; how to get do-follow backlinks linking to the videos on your website?
Some of the best ways to get do-follow links for your web pages include:
- Guest blogging for reputable blogs or websites. The higher the quality of the website that links to your video content, the higher Google will rank your pages and videos.
- Creating high-quality videos providing viewers with value-added content.
- Promoting your videos through emails and reaching out to reputable and established bloggers for them to mention your content in their copy and videos.
- Reaching out to local media.
The more authoritative websites, blogs, magazines, and other sources link to your webpage, the higher you will rank.
Optimizing your videos for mobile users
‘’75% of viewers watch videos on their mobile phone.’’
If you remember only one thing from this article, this should be it. Optimizing your video content for mobile is critical because that’s where your potential customers will most likely watch your video.
Besides, if you don’t optimize your videos for mobile, you might drastically impact the users’ experience and deter them from watching your videos, let alone purchasing from you.
When a video is not optimized for mobile, the text and imagery might be too small, and the audio not loud enough. And this can give the impression that your brand is not trustworthy.
So, here are some best practices to optimize your videos for mobile:
- Optimize your website to be responsive on mobile. For instance, enable accelerated mobile pages and ensure it has a responsive design.
- For short videos, use an MP4 file format to keep high video quality while maintaining small file sizes.
- Make sure the audio is crisp on mobile, too (the speakers are much smaller than on a laptop or iPad).
- Make a square video (1:1). Square videos perform better than landscape videos on mobile and can result in 100% more engagement.
- Ensure the text is large and easy to read.
- Don’t forget to preview your video on a mobile device.
- Shoot content specifically for a mobile screen. This means that you should use more close-ups and detail shots as they’ll look more engaging than panoramic views.
Following these steps will ensure that your videos make a maximum impact.
Time to roll up your sleeves
We hope this blog post has shed some light on some of the technical aspects of video SEO. Even though SEO can be intimidating, spending time and effort researching the best practices, techniques and tools is the best way to rank in search engines. This means that you’ll inevitably have to go through a trial-and-error process and learn as you go.