4 Ways to Improve Video SEO on Your Small Business Website
Publishing videos on your small business website can help you to attract and engage more visitors. However, they must first be able to find your website and the video content that you’re publishing – and that requires you optimize it for search engines.
In many ways, video SEO shares similarities with conventional SEO and both keywords as well as backlinks play an important role in it. However in some regards it is very different, and there are specific ways that you should try to improve the video SEO on your small business website:
Start using video schema markup.
Think of video schema markup as a way to explain your video content to search engines. It will let you provide various details such as the video’s title, description, duration, upload date, thumbnail URL and number of views.
Search engines can take advantage of the data that you provide in numerous ways to list your video more effectively. In some cases they may even display it as a rich snippet or enhanced listing.
In short video schema can help you to list your video more effectively, improve its ranking and get more traffic.
Add a transcription of the video in proximity to it.
Search engines can’t ‘watch’ the videos that you publish on your small business website. However, the next best thing is to publish a transcription of the video’s dialogue so that they can see what it is about.
Think of the transcription as part of the webpage’s content that search engines can crawl to extract keywords and other relevant information. If you’re worried that it will stand out like a sore thumb on your website’s layout, you can add it to a collapsible element.
Check the page speed and optimize it.
The one downside of publishing videos is that it can increase the time that it takes to load your website. That is not ideal from an SEO standpoint, and could impact your ranking.
As a rule you should check your page speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It is a useful tool that will not only let you know if there is an issue, but also suggest ways that you can improve it.
Be sure to follow its recommendations, and on top of that you may want to steer clear of ‘autoplaying’ your videos – as that can drag down your page speed.
Only publish one video per page.
Do not make the mistake of publishing more than one video on a webpage. As you can imagine it will slow it down, and more importantly Google will only index the first video that appears on the page.
In short if you publish more than one video on a page, the rest won’t be listed or rank on search engines.
Rather than risking that, you should publish each video on its own webpage – even if it is part of a series of videos. A list of links to the other episodes in the series can be published below the video.
Nowadays it is easier than ever for small businesses to produce video content, and you should take advantage of that fact. If you want you can even create video from photos and it could rank quite well if optimized properly.
Keep in mind that the ways to improve your video SEO that are listed above are by no means the sum total of what you need to do. Instead they can provide you with a foundation that you can build on by acquiring backlinks, social signals, and other positive ranking factors.
