Check out our Video SEO Cape Town Guide
We’ve created the Video SEO Cape Town Guide for you to help your SEO through video links. We’re going to look at the fundamentals in order to ensure that your video ranks on the world’s second largest search engine, YouTube. Grasp these fundamentals in just 8 minutes of your time.
Great Video SEO begins with a great reason for creating the content in the first place. You should never just churn out videos that won’t engage your audience. The video content should work part and parcel with your content strategy underpinned by your SEO strategy.
So why embed your videos from youtube in your site rather than just hosting videos on your server with a different player like Vimeo. Trust an SEO company!
YouTube is owned by Google and is the second largest search engine in the world, it also has a high domain authority (respect in Google’s eyes), and therefore offers a great source of backlinks.
Also, Google tends to rank Youtube videos before other video platforms that work with server-side hosting.
Great ideas for Video SEO Cape Town content:
Influencers sharing their opinion and insights
How-to series for more complex services and products
Pain-point solving day to day challenges related to your industry
Case studies of your success including interviews
all the above should have a blog or piece of content on your site to be placed contextually.
To summarise:
Add value
Answer questions
Help people through expert advice.
What really matters for Video SEO in Cape Town?
The idea is to grasp that you need to foster a community of followers or an audience through your video content, which in turn should be supported by content on your website. You follow the exact same process of content curation s with a content marketing strategy, the video is merely an extension. Follow insights in the Video SEO Cape Town Guide and we will get you there.
Description
A full transcript of the video to help Google figure out what it is about is a clever option. You should have at least 200 words and see it as a mini-blog. It is easier for YouTube to figure out what the video is about if you optimise the description as you would for on-page SEO. Always make it easy for YouTube or Google to know what your content is about.
It is important to keep the link, if you decide to link back to your website, right at the beginning to ensure that it is not hidden by the show more button or tab. Many people never click the show more video, so it helps to leave the link exposed than have it feature later in the description.
Content Frequency and signals
The more videos you churn out regularly allows your content to be noticed and crawled more by Google. This also obviously allows more follows to buy into what you are doing as there is dedication and continuous value. Follows to subscribe to channels where they don’t believe they will receive more content. The idea is to create value and to do it often, on the exact time secluded if possible. Like every Wednesday or every Friday for example. Never create videos just for SEO sake! Always offer value.
The same on-page SEO thinking applies to Video SEO.
Titles
Titles are crucial for video SEO. Ironically the more lengthy the better when it comes to YouTube, but be sure to include the first keyword or keywords in the first three words of the title.
Titles also attract users to begin to watch the video in the first place, and therefore crucially act the titles are compelling.
Use the description to leverage more descriptive copy length. We are getting right down to the finer details in this video SEO Cape Town guide, follow our instructions to the letter. Make you use 200 words or more. Place your backlink in the description, right in the beginning to ensure it is visible above see more.
Its useful to include the keywords earlier on in the description too. Ensure the value proposition is at the top, just next to the backlink.
Category
If you know your SEO, you will know that categories are important for large sites covering a lot of content, they refer to these as content silos. Now imagine how YouTube needs to divide their content too, to give their users a better experience, the category you choose will have an effect on your video’s ranking, especially negatively if irrelevant.
Video SEO Cape Town Tag strategy
Use a strong set of tags. Ensure the first 3 tags are primary keyword rich. Use extra descriptors after primary keywords to ensure a strong signal. Start with major keywords first! Remember this part of the Video SEO Cape Town Guide!
A lot of people use too many tags, hoping that they will somehow rank for more keyword and gain more views. Stay topically relevant and use five keyword phrases maximum I the tags, and make sure these are relevant to each other too. Otherwise, you just confuse Google.
Google has, historically, even for normal search engine ranking, favoured topically (singularly) relevant content for ranking. The more specific you are and the tighter the keywords in your tags are aligned, the more obvious your signal to YouTube is about what your content is relevant to. Google wants an expert opinion for its search queries relative to video SEO and not “jack of all trades”.
A good technique to find topically and semantically relevant keywords is to input the main keyword in Google Search’s query bar and let Google autosuggest what others are searching for. Use these variations after the primary keyword.
Click-through driven thumbnail images
YouTube allows you to select 3 images for video, they usually don’t stand out that much. The idea is to draw the attention of the user, especially when your video is not the top result in the feed or on the side panel of the YouTube page. Other than the Video SEO Cape Town Guide, we’ve discussed this with regards to RankBrain algorithm and machine learning.
Do not use the same same colour palette as YouTube. Use color to stand out among the crowd.
Human’s are mainly visually driven in perception, so it goes without saying that you an communicate more with the image thumbnail. A best practice is to include the text in big bold letters as an overlay on a visually and emotionally stimulated image.
So how is Youtube different?
Ranking factor in You tube is totally time people spend on YouTube that you enable. Confused? Even though Google owns YouTube, it uses a similar but different set of algorithms. A large part of the YouTube Algorithm is designed around on how much viewing time your video enables. So users are tracking for how long they begin a session of viewing from your video, basically what extended viewing time your video enables across various channels.
If they watch the whole of your video it is obviously also very important signal as to how valuable your content was found, thus satisfying Googles value proposition to its searchers.
Now taking the above into consideration the next question is how do we enable more viewing across other videos?
The idea is really about total view time and this is where the twist comes in. For years we have been told that Google Ads does not affect rankings of the search but with YouTube, there is evidence that it does due to the concept of total view time.
When you use paid promotion on your videos you are driving up total view time and in turn driving or enabling more view time across youtube and thus positively affecting your ranking according to the YouTube Algorithm. The social engagement is directly relevant to the total view times and enabling more view time across other videos as we discussed above.
Let’s look at Google Search and YouTube as separate for a moment. The model of Google Search and Google Ads, is a query-solution-fast-driven model, people look for a product or service or seek an informational and then answered with relative ad results above organic listings. Type in the restaurant on your mobile on Google search and you will know what I mean.
Youtube, although owned by Google, has a different ad model. That is to extend viewing time as long as possible in order to show as many ads. The route to revenue is different and thus the ranking algorithm is different.
It really does pay to promote your videos. In a study conducted by Brian Dean, where he analysed 1 millions ibises, there was a strong correlation between engagement and ranking of the youtube video.
Comments in the same study were seen to be the strongest. correlating factor with high ranking videos, even more than likes. Comments are a strong signal of engagement.
How to drive engagement?
A great way is to actually ask your audience what their opinion is” “Comment below if you agree or what a better way might be?” The idea is to begin a dialogue that other viewers can then jump on.
The idea is to be specific, and not just say the eugenic “leave a comment below or subscribe”, you want to challenge your viewers, and in doing so lure other viewers to comment on the viewer’s comments who commented.
The ultimate idea is to become such an expert in your field that you are considered an influencer. The challenge is, how do you reach influencer status from the lonely beginning?
First of all ad value to the current influencers. This can be as simple as just commenting on their videos intelligently. Add an interesting tidbit or angle to the conversation.
Ensure your comments and points are based on actual facts. Even if the influencer disagrees with you, that’s ok, just ask them to then explain. As long as you are genuinely knowledgeable and offer value on the topic the influencer would enjoy the interaction.
The great news is influencer’s also want the engagement to help their videos or web pages rank. They often ask their audience questions or to comment on what they are talking about.
How long should your video be?
That depends. What is the engagement strategy of your videos. Are you, looking to save a pain point, then ideally they should be as short or as long as necessary too succinctly deal with the solution.
Mostly, people have busy lives and even if they intend watching your videos, their attention span is limited to he bombardment of their everyday work or personal lives. Keep your videos to the point, comfortable.
Rather have a battery of highly targeted techniques for certain search queries, that succinctly deliver value than a long drawn out seminar if not completely expected or necessary. Time is of the essence, use it wisely to deliver your value, especially for general pain-point or how to videos.
Longer videos are acceptable for where they are expected. Maybe you might have an entire walkthrough of. Certain product or service as you find its requested often, then by all means.
Ok so we’ve discussed how to rank your videos on Youtube but …
How do we rank Youtube videos on Google Search?
A video is ranked by Google Search by two major factors, the relevance of the video to the query (on-page SEO) and whether or not the video has attracted any links.
The concept is now a normal SEO challenge. Each time someone embeds the video, essentially it is a backlink, and Google counts it as such. The more embeds the better, as thus is Avery strong signal to Google that they video offers value.
How do we get people to embeds our video?
One sure way is the Guest post techniques used in usual SEO anyway, you embed the video in your guest post on a high authoritative site. You only want your YouTube to be embedded where Google would see it as a topically relevant site contextually.
Another way is to ask influencer’s to review the video, not heir high authority blogs and therefore embed it. Of course, this means that your content must offer a ton of value to be considered and be very relevant to their current content.
You could also invite a highly authoritative guest to be featured live or through an online Skype meeting, with screencasts such as what they do with Google Hangouts. Webinars that address industry issues with a few influencers brought together is a great way too.
Data-driven videos receive high engagement and many links. The idea is to reach out to journalists and give them the findings under embargo, then you plan when to publish together. Their audiences are then put in front of your content with the idea of building your own as some them begin to follow you.
It is just very important to make sure your facts are right! Nothing worse than being embedded for the wrong reasons. Even if your research turns out not to have an outcome as what you predicted, that is even better as long as you let the data speak, not your pre-conceived notions.
The ultimate setup is to embed the video into your blog, share your blog through your social media channels and then create double value for both your site and your youtube channel, and the video itself. The video will enrich the blog content and help with on-page rankings, and also attract links because the content is of high quality but also Google will measure engagement through the video being embedded.
Again, the title and the description as discussed earlier plays a large role too. Here we can be very to clear to Google what the video is about. But if we are embedding the video in our blog post, should the title for the blog post match the title of the video?
The answer is no. The blog post should usually have more than just the transcript of the video right?. From a user experience and value point of view, it should have more. The video should enhance certain aspects of the value you are trying to communicate in the post but not just be the video version.