Video SEO: How to Optimize Your Videos for Search - SharpSpring

Start small and simple and enhance your tactics going forward:

• Create explainer videos using tools like Zoom
• Create video animations using tools like Animatron
• Put together video slideshows using tools like PlayPlay

In fact, there are lots of tools that can make it easy for anyone to create useful and professional videos. These include iMovie, VideoLeap, etc. None of those tools requires any serious training or money investments.

Youtube is where video marketing should start (and in many niches, end).

• Youtube is a discovery platform of its own. If you do your job right (more on this below), Youtube will start suggesting your videos to people who want similar content or like similar topics. This way, your products have a chance to be discovered by someone who never knew they needed you. This is powerful because Youtube is an insanely popular platform.
• Youtube ranks well! I don’t have any official stats to support this but from my own observations, 90% of videos in those video carousels come from Youtube.

Google has got much better at indexing video content and understanding what the video is about.

Yet, textual context still matters for organic rankings, as even Googlers admit that text content is still important for the algorithm to rank pages:

• Focus your video title around the keyword you identified in the very first step of this article
• Don’t forget to add your URL on top of your description to make it visible before the click
• Add hashtags to the video description to help Youtube categorize your video
• Create a clickable table of contents using Youtube timestamps.

While text is important, backlinks are still key to ranking anything in organic search. While those backlinks will hardly help a video rank inside the Youtube platform, they are crucial to getting your video ranked inside organic search carousels, and those views will help it do better inside Youtube as well.

• If you are losing the point, let me make it simple for you:
• You need backlinks to rank your videos in Google’s search
• Google will send views to your video
• Those highly-targeted views will help your video gain more visibility on Youtube as well.

Engagement is crucial for Youtube visibility as the platform wants to surface content that provokes discussions and shares. So what you really need for your video success is engagement in the form of likes and comments. But the next step is engaging back. You need to be regularly there to reply to comments and share your videos again.

Video optimization is an important part of any SEO strategy, and it is also one of the most doable ones. You don’t need huge budgets to launch a video strategy for your brand, and the smart SEO-focused approach it will yield solid results within a couple of months.