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How to Create Video Content That is SEO Gold

You’ve heard us talk about how much we love video before—it’s easy to produce, visual, and people love it. There is also great potential to turbo charge your video content for SEO.

In one study, researchers found that videos are 50 times more likely to be found in search than text content. Now, that certainly isn’t going to be true for all search terms—it depends a lot on what your competition is. However, if you have thoroughly optimized videos, you can greatly increase your SEO. This is partially due to the fact that even with the vast number of videos available on YouTube, there is an even vaster pool of text content out there. Even better, most of those videos aren’t optimized for search, which means video content is low-hanging SEO fruit.

Here’s how to get started optimizing your video content and juicing up your SEO.

Find the Right Keywords

The SEO best practices you should use to help your videos be found is quite similar to the process you use when optimizing text content, except you’ll be using your keywords in your video title, tags and video description. Select 5-6 strong keywords using Google AdWords Keyword Tool, and use them as your tags and incorporate some of them into your video description. Your video description should be a clear, concise description of the video, incorporating some of the keywords you want the video to rank for, and your title shoudl

Think Like a  Searcher

YouTube video is generally for two things: amusement (cat videos, people getting hit in the crotch) or instruction (how to tie a tie, how to make your own pizza, how to use a Facebook brand page).  Do you see how all of those “instruction” videos have the same type of titles? How to___________.

Titles and tags that are questions or “How tos” are typically popular in YouTube results. When you pair this thinking with thorough keyword research, you’ll be able to create titles and optimized videos that are successful in search. Choose informative titles that clearly state what the video provides, and that ideally incorporate one of your keywords. (Even YouTube legends have clear titles—Keyboard Cat, anyone? )

Get the Most Out of Your Videos

To max out SEO for video content, you should also post the videos on your website, along with a written transcript of the video (if you prefer, these don’t need to live on your main blog–just placing the videos and text on a designated landing page or video page will help with SEO). Use SEO best practices on this text: include strong keywords, tags, meta descriptions, and h1 titles.  Transcribing the videos can be tedious at first, but it will get much quicker with practice (this is a great argument for thoroughly scripting your videos ahead of time—you’ll be more prepared and you won’t have to do the grunt work of transcribing after the fact!).

To truly get the most out of the videos you’re creating, consider some of these ideas:

–       Share across your social networks. Stagger over a period of days—day one, post on Twitter, day two post on Facebook, day three post on LinkedIn etc., so that you can get more mileage out of the content.

–       Take screengrabs of important moments or tips from the video. You can share these as images on Facebook, or, depending on the format of the video, use them to create a slideshow that you can upload to Slideshare.

–       Think of your videos as part of your sales funnel, just as you do with text content. Include calls to action at the end of your videos and in your video descriptions, and make it easy for people to contact you by including a link or email address in the description.

Vital Design provides comprehensive SEO services, as well as short form video production and editing. We love to talk about all of the above, so get in touch!

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