Video SEO success in 2018

With video marketing expanding every day, marketers must stay on top of the best tactics for video SEO. While producing quality videos is must, getting those videos seen is the end goal — and that’s where advanced metadata comes in.

This hidden data in your video content can communicate with search engines, resulting in higher search rankings and more traffic. Let’s look at how exactly this works.

Video SEO & Advanced Metadata

To explain the term advanced metadata in regards to video SEO, we must first look at its predecessor – metadata.

Metadata is information about data; it is the direct line of communication between your site and search engines. It includes human-entered data like the title tag, description tag, and alt tag. Without metadata, search engines can’t index information about videos, websites, blogs, or anything else on the web. Metadata is essential and remains a critical aspect of SEO, but the future of SEO and Video SEO lies in what we call advanced metadata.nico

Advanced metadata is the entire data intelligence from your video in text form, including transcripts, topics, keywords, subjects, and AdWords.

Advanced metadata allows search engines and viewers alike to access the entire database of your video in any way you want. Better communication with search engines means higher rankings and more visitors viewing your content. Think of it this way:

• Metadata is the “About” section on your Facebook page.
• Advanced metadata is the whole shebang — your profile, posts, pictures, and list of likes and every other scrap of information.

Without advanced metadata, search engines only have a very small view of what the video is about. So advanced metadata sounds important – but how does it translate to improved video performance? The glaring advantage of advanced metadata is the role plays in SEO.

How does it relate to Video SEO?

Video SEO is a leading component of any online marketing campaign. Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average (visualize them here), which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.

For web page SEO to be optimized effectively, web pages must first be crawled and then entered into a search engine’s index. Only once a web page is indexed, can it be found through a Google search. In the case of online videos, search engines are unable to crawl the actual video content, because only the text and not spoken word, is visible to them. This means that search engines, such as YouTube, only index videos based on alt tags and descriptions – aka metadata.

Businesses can overcome this indexing obstacle and enable successful video SEO by leveraging advanced metadata techniques. This tactic creates a textual representation of the spoken content in videos, allowing search engines to crawl all of your video’s content and subject matter, and index the video accurately.

Without media intelligence, video SEO can only rely on human entered tags, but with advanced metadata and transcripts, search engines can read a wider range of terms and topics. Research has shown this to be a successful video SEO plan of action, with video web pages significantly benefiting after adding transcripts.

The idea here is that the more quality metadata that can be ranked within the different verticals in Google, such as image search, organic search, and video search, the more traffic you can drive to your site.

5-Step Guide to Formatting Video SEO

Video transcriptions are critical for successful video SEO. During this year, 74% of all search traffic will be for video, and this percentage will only rise for next year.

While you may think you are ready to go after getting an accurate video transcription, there are a few SEO techniques and strategies that you must implement.

We have broken these down into five easy steps so you can start knocking your video SEO out of the park.

Step 1: Video Name & Keywords

By default, many video programs will export your videos with names like “sequence 1” or other generic titles that have no SEO value. To optimize your video title, use the keywords that you have chosen for the video.

Step 2: Transcript

Once you have an accurate video transcript, paste it into the description section on YouTube and within the body of your video’s landing page. This is something that both Google and YouTube will crawl and use to form your SEO ranking.

Step 3: Format Transcript

You will want to create titles, headlines, and subheadings in the transcript for optimal SEO success. You should include your keywords in:

• Page titles
• H1 and H2 tags
• Meta description
• Alt text
• On-page content
• URL

Along with this, you will want to ensure that:

• The video Sitemap matches on-page SEO elements
• Do not include the <no script> tags, as this may slow the loading time of the page
• Use in-script links, relevant links to other pages on your site, and external links

Step 4: Landing Page

Each video should have its own landing page. This page will help your viewers go directly to the content and video they want to watch and lets search engines like Google know where to properly categorize the webpage for better rankings.

With the optimized transcript on the page, Google will see the contents of the video and the page and index it into search results. This 1-2 punch will improve your total SEO ranking.

Step 5: Embed Video

Embed your video onto the corresponding landing page or blog post. This will allow Google to see that there is an association between your video, your website, and your YouTube channel.

Bonus: Repurposing Videos

Video transcriptions offer excellent opportunities for repurposing your video into other types of content. Using the transcript, you can easily create blog posts, infographics, product descriptions, eBooks, and more.

To learn more about how you can use video transcriptions, check out our post: 4 Clever Ways to Use Video Transcripts in Business and Education.

Where Can I Get Advanced Metadata to Improve Video SEO?

Getting complete and high-quality advanced metadata is not easy, but cielo24 can provide you with advanced metadata according to your needs. In some instances, clients may only need basic metadata, but in most cases, they will need much more, including captions and transcripts. To be fully prepared for the future of SEO, companies should begin to consider using the full media intelligence repertoire, beyond just captions and transcripts.

As a media intelligence provider, cielo24 specializes in creating custom solutions depending on our clients’ needs. We can advise and work out a plan that will best meet your company’s goals, whether it is high-quality captions and transcripts, or all of the advanced metadata that can be gleaned from your videos.

Summary

Captions and transcripts are becoming more popular as people become more aware of the federal accessibility requirements and added benefits that captions and transcripts provide. But this is not the only data that can be pulled from your videos. The whole of advanced metadata is very powerful for video SEO and is yet to be utilized by marketers. Pursuing Video SEO sets you above the competition of today and prepares you tomorrow.