They say a picture is worth a thousand words. A video must be worth 100,000 or more words by that rate. Video is a powerful medium that lets your business tell a story. Consumers respond to video. Google reports that watch time for shopping-related videos grew by 5X over two years. A Google-commissioned study found that “YouTube reaches more 18 to 49 year-olds in an average week than all cable TV networks combined.” Video can be an important part of your content strategy. But it needs some support with written content. Meaningful, keyword-rich text descriptions can help increase viewership and sharing for your online videos.
How Video Content Impacts SEO
Uploading a video to your site isn’t going to boost your search rankings overnight. But a high-quality video that engages your audience can help your rankings in a few ways.
- Users spend time watching video, which means that they are spending time on the page. Longer sessions equate to trustworthiness, which ranks your page higher.
- By watching videos, users don’t bounce from your page.
- Users love to share video, which gets you backlinks.
- Google My Business lets you add videos about your business in the GMB listing. This can help you get click-throughs.
Optimize Videos for Users and Search Engines
The first step is to create compelling video with engaging scripts. Once your have the video, you have to create compelling descriptions for users and search engines. This makes your video indexable for search and provides the user information about why they should click on your video. Posting a video on its own isn’t going to entice watchers.
Here are simple tips for writing descriptions to optimize your video.
- Use one or two keywords that describe your video. Use each keyword once or twice only. Find complementary keywords if you need more. Incorporate keywords in sentences that sound natural.
- Write in a language your audience will understand. Ditch the jargon and lingo of your industry. Pretend you’re writing for an eighth grader who is going to roll their eyeballs when you lapse into ineffective prose.
- Tell your audience what to expect. No clickbait titles or keywords that are irrelevant. Many video users want to learn to do something. Write descriptions that appeal to the user and clearly outline what your video is about.
- Offer the user good value. Give the user a reason to click on your video.
- Don’t forget the call-to-action. You need to include a CTA in the video and in the description. Tell your viewer what step to take next, such as:
- Like
- Comment
- Share
- Subscribe
- Read more, watch more
- Include links to other related content.
- Preview your descriptions on different platforms, mobile, laptop and tablets.
- Use hashtags but do it the right way. YouTube ignores hashtags if you use more than 15. Other platforms may have different guidelines. Make sure your hashtags are relevant to the user.
- Credit your sources. It builds relationships and it’s fair to those who helped you.
Get your message across with high-quality videos that show off your brand, demonstrate your product highlights and give insights into your industry. Let the best SEO writers with MintCopy take your video and create compelling descriptions that make your audience want to watch. Contact us today.
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Resources:
- https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/advertising-channels/video/video-streaming-trends/
- https://storage.googleapis.com/think/docs/think-with-google-2019-research-review.pdf
- https://optinmonster.com/video-marketing-statistics-what-you-must-know/
- https://blog.hootsuite.com/youtube-descriptions/
- https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/06/02/video-seo