A Beginner's Guide to Video SEO

Video is a great tool to teach your customers about your product or service's competitive advantage, but it can also be used as a tool to help your potential customers find you. Below are some tips to help improve your exposure in search results using video shares.

1. Use keywords in your video title: This is probably the most important factor influencing placement in search results. If you want more customers to find your video, use relevant keywords - such as your business type and location - in the title rather than just your business name.
2. Use keywords in your description text and tags: Like the video title, descriptions and tags also factor in search results. After the title, users will read the description in search results. Above all else, the description should make sense and accurately describe the video, so focus on readability over keyword stuffing. If needed, place your excess keywords in the tag field.
3. Caption your video: As discussed in a prior post, Google is rolling out a feature that will automatically caption YouTube videos, helping your SEO by making it easier for search engines to read your content. Until then, there are a few easy options to caption videos. Use CaptionTube to manually add text and easily time it to your video. Or you can use Google Voice's technology to automatically time your captions using an uploaded transcript.
4. Post to multiple shares: Although YouTube is by far the most popular, each video share has a different audience. Posting to multiple shares will help you capture the most audience. This could also be an opportunity to test different title, description, and tag text.
5. Share with your friends and encourage comments: As we move to real-time search, it is more important to make sure users are continuing to engage with your content. Share with your family and friends. Pass your videos along to potential customers. Use the comment section to engage with viewers and encourage conversation.

Before you try to reach new customers through video SEO, make sure that your content is professionally shot and edited. A poorly executed and produced video will not portray credibility to the viewer. As part of our baseline production package, Martini Media optimizes our client's video content by performing steps 1 through 4 above. We leave the fun part up to you - sharing with your friends and customers!