Video SEO – Optimizing Content for an Increasingly-Visual World
Video content is taking over the world.
A recent Cisco white paper has fascinating statistics that every marketer and company should know – by 2019, 85% of online content will be video content. Of consumers who are using mobile data, the majority of that data is being used for audio and video services. Further, mobile audio traffic is now 60% of total mobile data, and it is expected that by 2021, 78% of mobile data will be video, and there is a very high consumption of video content.
YouTube is currently the most significant video venue in the world, with over 1 billion users and 1 billion hours watched daily, mainly by the coveted 18-to-34-year-old demographic. In fact, YouTube boasts that their service reaches more people in the United States than any TV or cable network channel.
But those numbers don’t equate to viewership or subscribers by default. Like any other facet of digital marketing, increased viewership of videos requires a solid strategy and following of best practices, some of which we’ll explain below.
Best Practices for Video SEO
If video content isn’t getting seen, then it’s not bringing anyone close to the mouth of the funnel. There are so many users and so many channels on YouTube.com that getting noticed takes some work. Video is no longer a novelty, and that makes having an actionable strategy for video SEO essential.
Some of the basic checks to be mindful – with regards to video SEO – are:
- Name Your Channel: Aim to have at least 500 subscribers for your channel as soon as possible. Why’s that? Because in order to claim a vanity URL, a channel must have 500 or more subscribers, and the channel must be at least 30 days old. Vanity channels must have an uploaded photo for the channel icon and uploaded a channel banner.
- Use Channel Keywords: The channel keywords element lets marketers place important keywords to drive traffic to the channel’s content. However, marketers beware where the mighty Google band hammer falls just as heavily over here as it does on the search engines. The focus should be on using more YouTube optimized keywords within the search engine’s parameters to ensure the channel gets high rankings on Google.
- Channel Descriptions: Don’t skip over the channel description area. Think about it from a usability point of view – you WANT your audience to know what your channel is about and search engines reward all efforts made towards a seamless user experience. Moreover, your channel descriptions are the perfect space for you to add in your focus keywords intelligently.
Companies that are not optimizing their YouTube channel by using keywords, linking, and branding, are losing out on a valuable opportunity to increase ROI. After all, content creation and marketing may be investments, but correctly tagging, branding and linking on platforms like YouTube costs only a little bit more time and can greatly increase your returns.
Businesses that leave these easy ways to optimize returns out of their marketing strategies have only themselves to blame for sagging bottom lines.
As video viewership continues to grow, optimizing for mobile users, desktop users, and using video SEO is part of an effective video optimization marketing strategy that no business should be without.
Additional Read: YouTube SEO Guide