Why brands shouldn’t neglect video optimisation

Over the past few years video content has become a much bigger business – with brands looking for new, exciting ways to stand out from the competition. This is aided by the fact that there are so many more channels for potential customers to engage with your content; whether it’s directly on site, on a video hosting platform such as YouTube or Vimeo, or social media.

And there’s a good reason for this. As the old adage goes: a picture paints a thousand words. But a moving picture? Well that can say more about your brand in seconds than reams and reams of content ever could!

However, there is a snag. With the digital landscape becoming more saturated with video content, and with more brands investing in video production or becoming literate with basic editing software, it’s harder to stand out in search. That’s why it’s important to optimise your videos like you would with any other type of content – giving it the best chance of being seen and engaging your audience.

Why Optimisation is Important

It’s no real secret that the Google algorithm has put more emphasis on video content in recent years – and with YouTube becoming ever more present in search, the need for optimisation should be obvious. If you want your video content to be seen by your audience and become a proper marketing tool, you need to ensure that everything you produce and upload is fully optimised. Not only will this give it a better chance of appearing in the SERPs – Google can and does feature video content associated with specific search terms in the results if it’s relevant – it can better match the intent of your audience and assist in driving traffic to your site.

For example, if you run a washing machine repair business, and you know your audience often searches ‘how to fix a washing machine’, producing an optimised video that matches their intent could boost your search traffic.

In essence, video should be treated like any other piece of marketing content. You wouldn’t write a piece of on-site content and actively not optimise it, would you?

How to Optimise Video Content

Like traditional SEO, there are literally hundreds of little things that you can do to optimise your video content, and every publication will have something different to say regarding best practice.

That said, there are a few things we can all agree on:

Content with Purpose

Fundamentally, it’s important that the content you produce has a purpose and answers a need of the audience it’s created for. This requires appropriate planning and strategy before the camera even goes on. At the end of the day, any marketer can film something on their phone and call it content, but if it isn’t thought out properly, it just won’t be as effective.

Use Keywords

As with other elements of SEO, you need to utilise data to increase your chances of being seen. Therefore, it’s important that you don’t forget about keywords in your video titles and descriptions – whether the content is being created separately to your site or to complement it. By targeting specific keywords with volumes, you’ll increase the chances of it being seen by your desired audience.  

Content with Quality

It should go without saying that content that matches intent, is visually interesting, and high-quality is more likely to be seen by your audience. That doesn’t mean that all brand content should look like it was shot by Martin Scorsese, but neither should it look like it was filmed on a potato.

As long as you have a clear idea about what you want to convey, have a half-decent DSLR and someone who is semi-literate in filmmaking you should be alright. Alternatively, you can also hire a video production agency to do the work for you! But if that’s not in the budget, you’ll be surprised what you can produce on your own.

Closed Captions

Something that often gets neglected in video content is closed captions. These are optional subtitles that can appear in a variety of ways depending on the hosting platform, and they are very important for optimisation. Not only are they a great tool for audience accessibility, they are often trawled and acknowledged by Google, so can be a good place to add in keywords or brand content. While YouTube has an automatic caption feature, which uses speech recognition to create subtitles, it’s always better to do this yourself, as the tech is prone to mistakes.

Furthermore, captions are vital for optimising your video content for social channels. In most cases, videos in-channel do not use sound, so if you have a video with a lot of dialogue, you don’t want your audience to just scroll past. Using subtitles in your social videos allows the audience to watch passively – without having to full-screen or leave the app – ensuring that your message gets across. 

On-site Transcripts

Optimisation works best when you can make use of multiple channels. So while you should absolutely focus on optimising video content for hosting platforms such as Youtube or Vimeo (other video platforms are available), you can also create content for your site which makes use of the same content. A great way of doing this is to expand the video into a transcript; a short blog which summarises the main points of, and sits alongside, the video. This way you can create fresh, engaging content from one source – benefiting your brand on and off-site.

Creative, Informative Thumbnails

It may sound strange, but your thumbnail choice is an important part of video optimisation. On video hosting platforms, it’s the first thing that your potential audience will see, so it needs to be instantly interesting, encouraging them to click through. It should complement the title and content of your video with information and graphics – a simple screen grab from the footage just isn’t good enough!

Link Building

Videos can also be a useful tool in building new backlinks to your site. Whilst they don’t carry tremendous amounts of value, it’s always a good idea to utilise the description section of your hosting platform to send a link back to your site, especially if your video is demonstrating a product or service! You should also consider using multiple video platforms to gain more links, rather than just relying on one.

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Overall, it’s important that we treat video content with the same amount of care as traditional, written content – ensuring we’re getting the most out of it. By properly optimising video, both on-site and on other platforms, we can boost the chance of it being seen, engaging with audiences and increasing traffic. What more could you ask for?

Ben is a Content Strategist at Better Agency, with years of experience developing creative, optimised content for a variety of brands.