Video SEO

Video SEO is meant to make a website rank better on search engine results list and increase its reach. For this purpose, videos are integrated on the website. Alternatively, videos can be published on another video platform and link to the website from there.

Definition

The term Video SEO or Video Optimization describes the many different approaches to make websites better found through video offers. The term video SEO can refer to all websites, the central application area of video SEO techniques today is mainly YouTube.

Videos are offered on websites as part of OnPage optimization primarily to improve user dwell time – which is an important Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for search engine algorithms. Videos on YouTube often serve as part of an off-page strategy to attract more users to a site and to leverage the platform’s reach for your own website.

What are the benefits of videos on websites?

The brain processes impressions from images and sound much faster than text and remembers information absorbed in this way more easily. What’s more, videos are much easier for website visitors to use than text – it’s not for nothing that videos are increasingly being included in marketing strategies.

Website operators can take advantage of this by offering videos on their pages. In this way, the site can be more user-friendly and thus appears more attractive to the visitor.

Optimize videos

From an SEO perspective, there are other rules to follow than the general rules for video production. First and foremost, an OnPage SEO strategy should be aimed at the visitor to the page – so the video must add value to the user and complement the rest of the page’s content or offer further information.

The video itself should correspond to the recording technique, the sound and the style of the page and the target group of the page. If the site otherwise maintains a casual, upbeat demeanor, the video should match that image – and not be made official.

Information must be stored for the search engine crawler so that it can capture the content of the video file. Unlike human users, the bots of Google, Bing & Co can of course not watch videos – therefore appropriate, semantically optimized meta information, ALT tags and mark-ups must be assigned, which reflect the content of the video and thematically integrate it into the context of the page.

If the video is to be used on the website and not on YouTube to increase reach, it is very worthwhile to designate the video as a rich snippet. If the video content on the page is tagged as a Rich Snippet, Google may display the video on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Experience shows that proportionally more people click on videos in the SERPs than mere search hits.

Conclusion

With video SEO, the reach of the site can be significantly increased either through better visibility in SERPs and through outreach via YouTube or other social networks. In addition, having a video – even if it’s not viewed in its entirety by the audience – improves the amount of time users spend on a page.

It is therefore worthwhile to offer videos as part of a holistic SEO strategy, which complement the information offered on a page. The videos should fit the site and can take on a wide variety of formats (product advertising, image films or guides).