Video is a powerful way to communicate your brand story and build relationships with your existing and potential customers. At a time when 33% of the people’s time spent on the internet is allocated to watching videos. Businesses cannot afford to ignore video marketing. Moreover, 84% of consumers cite video as a convincing factor in the purchase they have made. It is clear that video is a great way to create engagement and drive sales. However, ensuring that the video ranks well for search and is seen by the target audience can be a challenge. Every day, around 3.7 million new videos are uploaded to YouTube. It is easy for your videos to get lost in this sea of videos. Thankfully, there are some easy steps you can take to optimize a video for search. Here we go:
Five easy steps that will help you optimize a video for search
Choose the right video hosting platform
Free video hosting sites such as YouTube remain the preferred distribution avenue for marketers. Besides the price, their engagement rate is very high. Some other popular free video hosting platforms include Dailymotion, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can upload your videos to your accounts on these platforms and share the links. However, these platforms are not the right choice if you are looking to boost website engagement. The traffic doesn’t necessarily get diverted to your website. Having said that, YouTube remains the number 1 video marketing platform. With the right techniques you can make your video content rank high.
Create your videos with a clear goal in mind
Before you create your video, you should understand why you want to create the video and who your primary audience is. For example, if you want to create a makeup tutorial video for promoting certain makeup products, make sure the product name is used in the video title and description. Although it is a basic step, there are many video channels that miss this step and this is why their videos don’t rank well on search results.
Include keyword in video file name and description
The simplest way to optimize a video is to include your target keyword in the file name you are uploading. Another important ranking factor for YouTube SEO is ensuring that you optimized a video by paying attention to all other video elements such as subtitles, video thumbnails, and closed captions.
Optimize a video by using related hashtags
Using the right hashtags (#) in your video’s title and description can help your target audience find your video when they search for a topic or product. Once you add a hashtag in the description, it will be shown above the title of the video and become hyperlinked. Also, make sure you do not use too many hashtags-you will just end up overcrowding the description and YouTube will possibly ignore the hashtags if there are more than 15 of them.
Thumbnails
Customizing your thumbnail images can help your videos immensely. When someone looks at YouTube search results, a good thumbnail can grab attention and lead to a higher watch time. This can have a positive impact on the rankings. Ensure that the thumbnail is eye-catching and unique.
Conceptualizing, creating, and then marketing a video takes a lot of skill and effort. You need an expert to take care of all aspects of your video marketing right from creating the video, optimizing it for search, uploading it, and then monitoring the analytics. Get in touch with our team to know more about how we can help.
If you need a hand creating a video and getting it found on the internet, contact us. We produce engaging and affordable videos perfect for any project.