How did I Learn Video SEO?

Berna Bakır here! After having 8 years of experience in performing art, I started applying my know-how for YouTube videos to increase videos’ views and audience retention. Over the past few months, I decided to go one step further and commenced a pleasant journey. Learning Video SEO!

It all started with me being a part of the SEO Team at BoostROAS, and they took me into the Digital Marketing Trainee (DMT) process.

Taking notes while learning video SEO is important.

I’ve had a systematic schedule that is organized with related topics. First weeks of my DMT program passed with learning how Google Algorithms work and how videos can appear on Google Search.

And then, it deepened… Every time in this process, I was obsessed with finding some examples to contemplate for my future projects. After all, I presented everything that I learned with my team and discussed them together.

What is Video SEO? 

Video SEO is a way to rank the website or webpage on Google by creating video content. Optimizing Video content is also helpful to increase conversion rate and brand awareness because of many reasons. Such as:

• Videos are a good way to tell brands’ niches and stories;
• Videos are a good way to speak with audiences;
• On social platforms, videos are more engaging with users; 
• When the visitors see products video on e-commerce websites, they are more likely to shop, and also as video provides an extra view from the product, returning products may decrease;
• Having a video on a website may decrease the bounce rate and increase users’ time spent. 

How does Video Marketing help for SEO?

Today, if an age group still avoids shopping online, I am unsure which age group it would be. However, I am sure that there are still many abstainers on online shopping, despite companies and marketers racing about making them their customers. Marketers are already ready to convince people to visit their websites or social platforms using images, customer reviews, discounts, blogging…

But what else?

On YouTube or websites, videos aren’t only a great way to show a product in 360 degrees, but they can also tell a brand’s history and reveal the brand’s niche. Besides, it resonates with customer senses which is helpful both for awareness and action.

It sounds all good for visitors.

Furthermore, videos are creating a power to appear on Google Search Result (SERP). Videos can be a part of the Google Knowledge Panel on Google Search, appear on Google Images and Video Search Results, or Google Discover.

It sounds irresistible for SEO.

You’ve read the conclusion part of my potential blog post. I would end my blog post just like that if I were writing about “Why Video SEO” rather than “How I learned Video SEO.”

Let’s start then… 

First Thing First, Getting Know How Google Crawls Videos, Indexes, and Ranks 

I was on zero-point about how Google works; thus, I started with Google’s SEO Guide to learn basic and essential tips. Then, the second zero point came up with a question: Text provides some keywords, images can be readable by Google, but what about Video and Audio? 

Video Best Practice taught me to be crawled, indexed, and shown by Google, and I have to support my video with technical SEO components.

Creating video sitemap and adding a transcript to video, implementing structured data, etc. On the other hand, some things also matter a lot when representing my video.

When It Comes to Video, The Game is Changing!

On-site optimization and video content optimization are crucial for both visitors and Google. 

Having a good thumbnail can be very effective, but there is no particular rule on what makes it best. Large size images, ¾ rule, and telling something about a topic would do good experiments, but visitors get the final word if the thumbnail is successful or not. 

How about the quality of video content? Where should I locate my video on a webpage?  Video counts as rich media content, so do my video affect my page load? What will I do to reduce the bandwidth on my server? 

The quality of video content has many variable criteria, but creativity seems a keyword to be successful. The video should be visible on the page, but I might do A/B testing to discover the best result. I might also use lazy loading videos to take some of the video loadings away from the initial page load or use a third-party hosting service such as youtube and embed my video from there instead of embedding large video files directly onto my website*.

*What are Core Web Vitals? 6 Ways to Optimize Your Website for the Page Experience Update [10.08.2021]

Video SEO & YouTube Optimization

Two platforms host videos; on websites and on video hosting platforms such as YouTube (there are many video platforms, but I choose to focus on YouTube as it is the second largest search engine) therefore I became a seeker of what Google likes and what YouTube likes and what the audience likes. However, being a seeker is not the only challenge that I have to deal with!

Although YouTube is the 2nd biggest Search Engine, it is more of a discovery engine than regular search engines. Youtube aims to get users to watch more videos; thus, more and more ads will appear. Therefore, if a video has many views and audience retention, YouTube would love it! Also, when the video is shared a lot, it will be trending!

Grabbing How to create a Good Quality of Content

If I am uploading videos on Youtube, I am on track where the competition looks fierce.

YouTube is such a perfect platform to create awareness and engage with visitors If you are doing good. I have been hand in hand with YouTube Creator Academy since I’ve started, but nothing is more important than resonating with your audience! Following this, I watched many videos on YouTube to see others’ experiments and discover which works. For instance, Mark Rober, Vsauce, MrBeast, Matt D’avella, and SmarterEveryDay are good examples of video content creators. They kinda create their “best practice” with their thumbnail, title, content, and so on. Also, LEGO’s YouTube Channel is a good example since it is one of the most successful brand channels.

Additionally, these are the three tools I love a lot! Since it has already been discussed that quality is a key factor on YouTube, I would recommend using Google Trends to find video topics. Second, VidIQ is a beneficial browser extension that provides data for YouTube. And last but not least, SocialBlade helps to see other YouTube creator’s channel data. 

Team Power – Team is a Power!

Every week, I had a presentation with my colleagues. Not only did I share my weekly experiments, but we also discussed some specific cases to think deeply and consider different approaches to practice. We discussed various questions together, and as many as I asked myself, they asked me to do so.

Overall, technical SEO components for videos were my biggest challenge as I’ve never been into that kind of job, but my colleagues were always behind me, bearing a hand. So thanks to my team, I faced challenges without ever feeling alone.