Video Marketing and SEO: Optimizing Your Videos for Brand Visibility and Engagement

Videos and SEO make a deadly combination when used effectively.

A video appearing on search results typically has a higher CTR (41 % greater) than text results on the SERP.

If you’re only focusing on video production, strategy, and quality and overlooking SEO, you’re literally throwing your money down the drain. After all, the idea is to be visible to your target audience and get some actual traffic on your site.

This article walks you through video marketing and SEO basics and shares six tips to optimize your videos for better brand visibility and engagement.

How video and text-based SEO are different

Traditional text-based SEO and video SEO are a bit different in the way they work and impact the SERP.

Your text-based SEO efforts help your text-based content rank on the SERP. The content pieces are often intended to help the audience quickly look up a piece of information or fact on Google, read an in-depth guide or article explaining a topic, or shop online. In this case, the search intent is usually to find quality content pieces to dive deep into about a topic.

Video SEO, on the other hand, focuses on getting a searcher quick information and entertainment on the go. Unlike audiences engaging with textual content, video audiences are particularly interested in finding actionable videos that quickly help them go through the exact steps to do something.

As we searched for “how to make pizza”, we found this video ranking at position zero (featured snippet), followed by textual recipes on some food-based websites.

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That’s how powerful video SEO is—by incorporating the right strategies, and your video can even outrank the most popular websites with high domain ranks.

6 tips for optimizing your videos for SEO

Since we’ve established video SEO doesn’t work like traditional SEO, let’s get you equipped with six best practices to make your videos rank on Google.

However, remember, while the working principle differs for both, the basics of competitor research, keyword research, traffic analysis, and SEO optimization remain the same.

1. Add subtitles to your videos

While videos work great for increasing your brand visibility, your efforts can backfire and ruin the watching experience of your viewers in the following cases:

The audio in the video is muffled
The viewer has a hearing problem
The presenter has a foreign accent
The viewer is in a crowded and loud place

What if you found a way to still make your videos accessible despite the situation the viewers are in?

By adding subtitles to your videos, you can not only improve your video experiences for your viewers but also increase their searchability for SEO. Having text included in your video helps the crawlers index your content for a particular keyword.

We recommend using an online tool to add subtitles to your video, instead of relying on Google to generate subtitles for you. The difference between the former and latter approaches is the accuracy with which the subtitles are produced. Subtitles generated from these tools are accurate and customizable for the text's font, positioning, and size.

Moreover, they help you save hours of manual subtitling and help you generate subtitles for multiple videos at once.

2. Use performance creatives to optimize your videos

Performance creative uses data to shape creative marketing assets and track performance.

Ad design, video production, and blog post writing are examples of these creative tasks.

Data and analytics tools allow you to measure a creative asset's impact on your marketing goals and make data-backed changes to improve performance.

While making your videos searchable for your target audience is your number one priority right now, consider what happens when they click on your YouTube ad or your CTA in a video.

Your video ad can’t be considered successful until it leads the audience to a desired action. Performance creative binds the creative and technology part of the equation and helps you amplify the impact of the creative.

Now, how does this relate to video SEO?

When you incorporate performance creatives in your video ads, your CTR increases, and more visitors land on your landing page. Google observes this success rate of your ad creatives and pushes your video ad to appear on top for relevant keyword searches.

3. Create videos around action-based topics/keywords

As we mentioned earlier, video searchers are more inclined toward getting actionable results on the go. The best way to help them find your video is to incorporate those keywords.

Keep in mind that videos perform differently for Google and YouTube SERP. While YouTube definitely shows video content for an action-verb-based keyword such as “how to bake”, the result on Google is subjective. It depends on a lot of factors and the existing competition.

For example, observe how the SERP varied for the keyword “how to bake” on both platforms.

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Here’s how to make sure your video is optimized enough to rank on both platforms for “action-based” keywords:

Use verbs in your video title and subtitles such as create, make, optimize, install, set up, etc.
Include long-tail search keywords such as “how to install Windows 11 on Mac” in your videos.
Use the main keyword in the intro, and starting a few minutes of the video—make sure it’s heard loud and clear.
Create impactful thumbnails that align with your content and are on point with your branding. To stand out, use contrasting colors.

4. SEO optimize your video content

This part of SEO optimization is almost similar to how you do it conventionally.

Here are some SEO best practices to incorporate while creating video content:

Optimize the meta description of the video. Include the keyword you’re trying to rank for and ensure it aligns with the content.
Optimize the title, video descriptions, and video tags with the SEO keywords as well.
Include video timestamps to help the audience understand what’s inside the video and what timestamp to jump to for accessing a specific section.

5. Self-hosting works wonders

Self-hosted videos are published on the website itself—no YouTube or Vimeo link—so whoever clicks on them will be redirected to your website’s page and not these platforms.

The main benefit of this approach is that you enjoy the traffic on your website and gain traction, which helps make your brand more visible. Remember to make your video appear as a rich snippet on Google—this way, the searcher knows there’s a video inside the SERP result.

Just add schema code to your page and update the XML sitemap for the Google search console to index the page.

6. Embed videos on top-performing pages

One of the best approaches to leverage both text and video SEO and gain an edge over the competition on SERP is by embedding a relevant video in your best pages. In fact, 55% of businesses publish their marketing videos on their blog or website.

The best approach is to place the video on top of the page so it doesn’t get lost in subheaders and text. It will not only get more traffic and engagement to your video but also increase your website authority on SERP.

Key takeaways for video marketers

Video marketing is the end game today, and you must leverage it in your marketing strategy to get the most ROI for your business.

By optimizing your videos for SEO, you’re essentially taking a step toward enhancing the watching experience for your viewers and making yourself searchable in the sea of content.

Invest in Video SEO today.

Author’s Bio

Deepali is an engineer-turned-freelance writer for B2B SaaS, writing actionable long-form content for marketing, Cybersecurity, and HR-Tech companies. When she's not writing, she's engrossed in a cozy murder mystery novel with a cup of hot chocolate!