As much as video SEO does share some similarities with normal SEO – it has significant differences as well. In other words you need to be specifically improving your video SEO if you want your videos to rank well on search engines
While there are many areas that you could potentially work on to improve your video SEO, some definitely play a more significant role than others.
Publish the Video’s Transcript
A video transcript is basically a text version of the video’s audio. While there are tools that can automatically transcribe videos, writing a manual transcription tends to be more accurate.
By publishing the transcript (preferably directly below the video), you will provide search engines with additional context about the video and its content. In other words it can act as the page copy, and give search engines text that they can scrape and use to index your video.
If you feel that a transcript won’t fit into your web design or will look out of place, you could consider placing it in a collapsible element so that it is only visible when clicked.
Choose a Thumbnail that Attracts Clicks
Increasingly search engines are paying close attention to metrics that are indicative of a good user experience – and one of them is the click-through rate.
For videos the thumbnail has a crucial part to play in the number of clicks that it is able to attract. It must be relevant to the video’s title and content, and at the same time be able to grab the attention of viewers.
Research has shown that thumbnails containing people in them tend to get more clicks too.
In any case, you should carefully select the thumbnail and use a video sitemap or structured data to let search engines know to use it.
Add a Video Sitemap or Use Structured Data
As was just noted, a video sitemap or structured data will let you specify a custom thumbnail for your videos – but there is much more to them than that.
Both of these options will provide you with ways that you can supply additional information to search engines regarding your videos. Of the two, structured data is better at that role – and will let you add information such as the name, description, duration, rating, transcript, video file URL, and more.
Right now it doesn’t hurt to use both a video sitemap and structured data if you want to cover all your bases. Just make sure the information they contain is consistent.
Only One Video Per Page
If there’s one rule that you should always remember it is to only publish a single video on any given webpage.
While technically there’s nothing stopping you from publishing more than one video – search engines will generally only list the first video that they see when crawling a webpage. That will mean that any other videos published on that page won’t be listed, and you probably don’t want that.
On top of that having multiple videos on a webpage can affect its page speed – which will not be good for its rankings either.
Final Words
In addition to the tips listed above, you should be aware that search engines are constantly looking to improve their rankings based on how users respond to listings. That is why aside from directly improving the video SEO, you should focus on creating videos that people want to watch.
Simply put you should plan, record, and use a video editor to create polished and impressive videos. For example you can use Movavi Video Editor to cut and produce professional-looking videos with relative ease.
By creating better videos that people genuinely respond to, you will start to rank better on search engines in a very natural way. And if you couple that with the video SEO tips listed above – you should have no problem scaling all the way to the top of search engine results.
