Business Bullets - Marketing

Video Search Engine Optimisation (VSEO) is a way of optimising your videos to help search engines find them online. If you want your video to appear in front of your target audience when they search online, you’ll need to use the tools provided by search engines to help them display your content to the right audiences.

Why utilise VSEO?

You won’t get much benefit from your video if no one watches it. If you’ve spent time and money producing video content, make sure it reaches your intended audience.

It’s worth remembering that by 2017, it’s estimated that video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic. When people search for information online, it is becoming more common for audiences to consume this information by video. And small businesses which fail to provide video as part of their digital marketing strategy will fall behind other businesses which do so.

How to utilise VSEO - a few tips

1 - Focus on quality
Of course, there’s not much point helping audiences find your videos online if the videos themselves are no good. But poor quality videos will also rank badly too. High quality videos which offer engaging and relevant content are much more likely to be ranked higher in search engine results. When creating videos, focus on offering the answers, information or advice that your audiences are actually looking for.

On YouTube, for example, user engagement is one of the most important factors in determining its ranking. A poor video which doesn’t inspire much interest won’t appear in a search, no matter how well optimised it is.

2 - Create an effective thumbnail
When videos are displayed in a search listing, it’s usually the thumbnail that viewers will click on, rather than the text. And when a list of videos are displayed, the video most likely to be viewed is the one with the most appealing thumbnail. Furthermore, the more user clicks you receive, the higher your video will appear in the search rankings. So it really makes sense to create the best thumbnail you can.

3 - Describe your video
Search engines can’t scan videos for information like they do with text. This means that in order for search engines to list your video when users search for relevant keywords, you’ll need to let them know what it’s about.

Make sure to describe your video as much as you can. You can provide textual information about your video in titles, descriptions, tags etc. Use relevant keywords when doing this, but be sure to find out what keywords people are actually using to search for businesses like yours. The more specific and relevant those keywords are the better.

It’s also helpful to use keywords for other data about your video which isn’t displayed on the page, such as filenames.

There’s a lot of information available about optimising your videos for VSEO, and it’s worth spending a little bit of time to understand how to do this effectively so that you can maximise the impact of your video. But I hope the above helps you to get started.