Explainer videos are short and concise videos ideally 60-90 seconds that explain your product or service to the potential customers. They are being rapidly used by businesses in the form of animation to explain a problem and provide a solution to the problems. We want you to know that a good script defines the quality of your video.
Do search engines understand good scripts?
But search engines will not recognize good scripted videos until you incorporate good SEO tactics. And it is no fun when an explainer video with a good script is unable to generate traffic to your website. The whole idea behind creating an explainer video is to create brand awareness and increase conversion rate. Search engines give higher ranking to authentic and quality textual content.
Videos are no different provided they are optimized for search engines. Search engine crawlers can only understand text associated with the video for indexing purpose. There is no room for ignorance as video SEO tactics is a must practice to increase visibility of your video on the web. No wonder that 70% of the top 100 search listings contain a video.
Let me share with you 10 important tips for optimizing your explainer video.
Your titles must look natural. A video title must include your most important keyword. Titles are the first visible piece of information in the search engine results. A good title has to be simple and catchy. YouTube provides a character limit of 100 for video titling. Adding trigger keywords attracts the attention of the viewer and you are most likely to have a higher click-through-rate.
Trigger keywords are supporting words used with your keywords to form a title. Also, prefer to use the keyword in the beginning of the title. For instance, if you are making an explainer video to demonstrate how to operate the application ABC, then you can use the title as “Operating ABC application” or “Learn ABC application” instead of using “How to operate ABC application”
Video description is the longest textual content associated with the video used by search engines to index your information. Write quality and SEO-friendly content with relevant keywords. Your title and description should relate with each other. A good description contains the summary of the video with a link to your website. Place your link both in the beginning and at the end of the description to get a better chance of being viewed.
Place an attractive thumbnail of your video to grab attention of the viewers. Thumbnail is a snapshot of your video that is visible on the result page.
Knowing the most popular set of keywords is important to get higher visibility for your explainer video. You must know what keyword phrases are used by your target audience to search for your product so that you can optimize your title and description accordingly. There are a number of free tools that allow you to do keyword research and note the response received to your website. Doing a check for keywords will tell you if you chose the right keyword.
Type your selected keyword on Google and see if you get any video results on the top page. If you do, then you have chosen the right word. You must also remember not to stuff keywords in your content unnecessarily as it deteriorates the quality of your content and search engines mark it as spam.
Quite similar to keywords, tags are additional keywords that you pick up and place with your video assuming that many people use these tags to search for your product. In other words, tags are keywords with lesser significance. Unlike keywords, tags are not placed strategically in your video title and description. Your keywords should definitely be a part of your tag list but the opposite is not necessary. Tags also help the crawlers to define the category of your video.
After all the hard work of creating an explainer video, you will certainly not like to miss the traffic. Video sitemap is necessary when you have multiple videos on your site but they are hosted by video-hosting websites like YouTube, Vimeo etc and you want the visitors to be directed to your site.
Video sitemap includes detail like category, title, tags, description, published date, duration of your videos etc that guides the search engines to index your videos correctly. A searcher who finds your video will be directed to your site and not to YouTube after you create a video sitemap. Google Webmaster Tools help you to submit a video sitemap.
Video transcription adds value to your content. Search engines index according to the content associated with your video. Finding your video will become easier for search engines when people type content in your transcript in the search bar. Moreover, transcription helps people with impaired hearing and who speak a different language to see what your video say. Transcript content can be easily translated via Google Translate to the language of the viewers’ choice.
A low resolution video with poor clarity often puts off the viewers. Besides that, bad audio and blurred readability makes it hard for the viewers to understand your message. It also affects your brand image. The content of your video can be good enough but a standard video quality is a bare minimum requirement to get more number of hits. And you don’t really need a HD resolution for this.
Your priority should be to host your video on your own website as it gives your website a prominence over video-hosting sites like YouTube. Furthermore, it reflects your brand personality and promotes your brand. And the visitors land directly on your website which allows them to browse further information on your product instantly.
On the contrary, you should also post your video on YouTube and Vimeo as it increases your visibility on the web. They have a capability to make your videos go viral as people actively like and share videos on these platforms.
Social media network is a platform to interact and engage with your customers. Customers feel free to reply and give a genuine feedback. While you post your video on your website and blog, it is equally important to improve your presence across various social media networks. Create a business profile on social networks as most of your target audience is present on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ etc.
Post your video in your profile and share it as much as you can. Customers like and love to share quality and engaging content with their friends. Leverage your presence by requesting them to share it further. Do not forget to add call to action links for sign up and link to your website.
Back links are the links placed on other websites that when clicked direct the visitors to your website. Seek back links from the website and blogs frequented by your target audience. They can be in the form of text or image. Quality and number of back links have a significant influence on search engine ranking of your website.
It does not involve any technical knowledge to build back links. You just have to contact people and build relationship with the owners of the site of your interest. One easy way is to follow a quid-pro-quo approach wherein you provide back links to them in return. And it is easy to get people along when you have a powerful video as it adds credibility to their site as well.
Conclusion
Search engines are not biased towards large business as they follow a complex algorithm to give a chance to every business to appear on the front page. Though there is no sure short way to get higher ranking on SERP but the crawlers are working hard to promote genuine content across the web. You are liable for penalty if you try to manipulate SEO tactics. Follow a thoughtful process backed by proper research. And I am sure these 10 tips will drastically improve your ranking on search engines.
Have you tried implementing these video SEO tactics before? Did it improve your visibility? If not, get in touch with Oomphbox for creating more SEO friendly explainer videos.
