7 SEO Tips To Optimize Your Video Marketing Campaigns

Modern internet users are primarily visual thinkers and listeners, which makes video marketing a fairly powerful promotion channel. By reinforcing it with search engine optimization (SEO), you can make the most out of your video marketing strategy and reach out to a large share of interested people – your potential customers. 

Below are proven tips that will help you make your video campaigns SEO-friendly, and thus better-ranked and viewed more frequently. 

7 Tips For Optimizing Your Videos for SEO

1. Ensure Your Video Is Ready for Promotion

Despite the fact that video marketing and SEO make for a powerful team, your strategy won’t work well if your videos don’t match viewers’ preferences and platform requirements. 

Before proceeding with an SEO job, make sure that your video is ready for promotion. Use the following checklist:

• It’s up to 10 minutes in length: Eight to 10 minutes is the perfect video length to achieve your marketing goal. This is long enough to share the core message but short enough that your users won’t get bored.
• The format of your video corresponds to the platform: For example, YouTube isn’t the most suitable place for vertical videos. IGTV will be a better choice in this case and vice versa.
• Your voice-over is clean, and the music corresponds to the mood and the goal of the video: Low-quality voice over and inappropriate music can make your users frustrated and abandon your video very quickly. Also, be sure you don’t violate copyright.
• Your video reflects your brand style and tone of voice: This point is important for making a holistic impression across all your marketing channels.

If some points require improvements, you can also use video editing software to produce a high-quality video that meets commonly accepted standards and is appealing to both your users and search engines. 

2. Come Up With an Optimized but Meaningful Title

The title of your video is equally important for telling viewers about its essence and for letting search algorithms rank it according to users’ search queries. Thus, you should find the perfect balance between SEO and communicating your key message.

In the case of your video title, long-tail keywords will help you with this task. Statistics show that four-word key queries account for 50 percent of all searches, so this is the opportunity to make your title optimized, convey the essence of the video and keep your title within the 60-character recommended limit. 

3. Optimize Your Video Description

Optimizing your video description is another opportunity for your video to be ranked better. However, keep in mind that an SEO-optimized video description isn’t a direct ranking factor. The number of views is what matters for SEO! 

The proven way to improve your video rankings using a description is to motivate people to watch it to the end. Keep in mind that YouTube video description space is limited to 1000 characters (approximately 200 words), while the users see only the first three lines of the text. 

Use these three lines of visible text to talk about the value and the benefits your users will get. You can also place a link to your website in the description to get one more backlink and improve your website rankings.

4. Add a Transcription and Subtitles

Transcribing your video is one of the most efficient SEO strategies for improving video marketing results. Your video’s transcription allows search engines to “read” the content of the video, understand it and find out which of the search queries correspond to its message best. 

What’s more, this approach will allow your users to watch your video in a sound-sensitive environment. Therefore, you will not be losing any customers that might be willing to watch it but, for whatever reason, can’t do it at that moment.

Create your video scripts with SEO in mind. Be guided by the basic rules of SEO writing to make your video script meaningful, and don’t forget about keyword insertion. Use topic-specific keywords naturally and distribute them evenly across the text of your script. 

Finally, add subtitles to allow your users to enjoy your videos in their native language. 

5. Upload a Custom Thumbnail Image

The first visual impression matters for videos. A thumbnail image should make a video visually appealing and intriguing while motivating users to watch it. 

Videos with a custom thumbnail get 30 percent more views compared to the ones without them. So, this is your chance to stand out! Create custom thumbnails for your videos to increase the number of views and positively influence users’ behavior. 

FYI, creating a custom thumbnail image isn’t very difficult. For example, you can use Canva to create a unique thumbnail with its easy-to-customize templates.

6. Use Video-Specific SEO Tools

Google’s and YouTube’s search engines share common algorithms. YouTube is, after all, Google’s product. However, when working on your SEO-empowered video marketing strategy, using YouTube-specific tools makes more sense compared to traditional SEO tools.

For example, you might consider TubeBuddy to manage your video marketing campaigns, pick and use SEO-winning keywords and tags, access your analytics and use promotion features (e.g., scheduling posting for the time when your target audience is most active, according to analytical insights). 

Then, vidIQ will come in handy for researching your competitors on YouTube and managing your YouTube channel. 

By using these tools, you’ll easily boost your number of views, likes and shares, which are the most important YouTube ranking factors. 

7. Add a Compelling CTA

A call to action (CTA) is an essential element for making your videos rank better and motivating your users to perform a target action. Depending on the goal of your video, your CTA will differ. 

Here are some actionable tips:

• For an explainer or demo video, you could add a CTA suggesting your users visit the website to find out more about your solution.
• For an entertaining video, kindly ask your users to like and share it since these are the positive user-behavior signs that will help your channel prosper.
• For a promo video, offer a promo code at the end of the video or share it in the description for viewers to use.

Conclusion

Reinforcing video marketing with SEO may be challenging, but this killer combination allows you to make the most out of both approaches. Get started by applying our simple SEO tips and watch the key performance indicators (KPIs) of your video marketing campaigns skyrocket!