How to Empower your Video SEO

Video SEO is not as difficult to master as you may feel it is.

The Internet is no longer a text and image world alone.  The evolution of Internet now includes massive video adoption.  Conduct a search in any major search engine and you will find considerable video content in the results, where just a few years ago there was none.  Look at your social media accounts and consider how many videos you are seeing compared with images or text.  It is fairly obvious that video isn’t going anywhere.   In fact, according to a recent Cisco study user-generated video usage will account for roughly 80-90% of internet traffic by 2019.

With the impressive growth rate of video you may be surprised to hear that there is still a very important role for content remaining in this new world.  It’s this role that we want to focus on today. Driving users to your video through successful video SEO depends on how well your video content is composed and discovered.

When we are referring to video content, we are speaking specifically about transcripts, subtitles, translations and/or captions.  These are all created directly from your video media data.  There are a number of reasons why this content is so vital to the success of your video.

• Content makes it possible for the hard of hearing to consume video content.
• It’s now proven that video content assists students, instructors and ESL learners  improve academic outcomes.
• Closed captions are federally mandated  for educational and news related video.
• Finally SEO.  Search engines ‘crawl’ video content rather than ‘watch’ a video.  For Video SEO quality video content makes all the difference!

How you can optimize your video content Video SEO using transcripts.

Did you know that engagement level is one of the most important metrics for determining the quality of content for video?  Google uses Google’s “Time Watched” algorithm that rewards videos which have longer watch time.  Using video transcripts increase completion rate of videos by 40 to 80 percent, thus increasing the Time-Watched algorithm.  According to research conducted by PLYmedia, a video technology provider; they found that videos which contained captions were watched 91 percent to completion compared with 66 percent to completion for videos without subtitles or captions.

There are a couple of easy ways to optimize transcript usage.  Most video platforms such as YouTube have a description box where you can write a few words about your video.  Stick to the most user relevant summary to set content expectations for a positive viewing experience.  There is also a section that allows you to upload the transcript file.

That’s all for now.  There is more to come on this subject, but go ahead and optimize your video media data into quality content to empower your video SEO.  If you have questions about your video transcripts, feel free to reach out to our team.

Caption Accessibility Links:

1. National Association of the Deaf
2. National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
3. Section 508 Compliance Overview
4. Summary of 508 Compliance Standards
5. Section 508 Guide for E-learning and Multimedia Technology
6. GSA Tutorials, Guidance and Checklists for multimedia
7. Alliance for Technology Access 
8. ADA, Title III Regulations
9. Equal Access: Design of Distance Education Learning Programs