How To Get Started With Video SEO?

Videos are the most passive form of content consumption. With videos, the viewer need not make an effort to read or try to grasp concepts. Everything is presented in a neat audio-visual format that is easy to understand. This has made videos to emerge as the most popular form of content on the internet. Search Engines and Social Media companies are all pushing towards making the viewer watch videos because the earning potential from a Video Ad is much higher than from a simple text or image ad. This means that as content creators, we should also embrace this shift towards video and start creating more and more engaging video content for our visitors to enjoy.

However, Video SEO is a completely different ball game as compared to regular SEO – check out the tracking company. This is due to the fact that almost 95% of all videos on the Internet are uploaded to YouTube and its algorithm is slightly different from that of Google. 

In normal SEO, Google can look at metrics such as the number of backlinks to a website and thereby determine its authority. However, with Videos, they have no such luxury. Hence, they rely on something called viewer retention. This is an ingenious way to see if people who do watch your video do like it or not. They can determine this by calculating the average percentage of your video that is watched. For example, if your video is 10 minutes long and so far, 10 people have watched it fully from start to finish, then the viewer retention rate would be 100%. 

What this tells us, is that video content is extremely important to be able to rank your videos. If your video even appears to be slightly boring or dragging, then you can be sure that viewers will press the back button or go to another video and this will cause your retention rate to drop. Just like with E-Commerce SEO, the titles and description of the video are extremely important because this is the smallest amount of information that Google and Youtube have to figure out what your video is all about.

In addition to these two factors, Viewer engagement is another very important aspect of Video SEO. When a viewer, after watching your video, likes or comments or even Subscribes to your channel, then this gives a signal to Google and Youtube that your video is extremely good and gives it a boost in the search result rankings. Hence, a simple line asking your customers to subscribe to your channel at the end of your video can actually work wonders.