According to Statista, about 92% of all internet users regularly watched videos on the web in 2023. And this figure is increasing every year, proving that video content is certainly popular.
But why do some videos gather a huge audience and attract traffic while others remain in a “blankness”? Naturally, the key reasons are quality content and relevance.
However, website improvement from an SEO point of view also plays a significant role.
Today, we want to tell you more about how to boost video for SEO.
Source: Google
Video content is an important element of a website that carries more information (audiovisual), allows you to attract more attention from visitors, effectively presents your product, and demonstrates your expertise.
Here are some important video SEO statistics from Vidico:
It is very important to make videos work properly and not cause you and your customers unnecessary inconvenience.
The fact is that any media content on a website affects the weight of the page and loading speed.
Accordingly, correct video optimization is mandatory to ensure a comfortable user experience.
In addition, video SEO is important to promote engagement of the target audience and increase the number of customers.
Since keywords are a big part of SEO, they must be used for video SEO as well.
You should add relevant keywords to titles and descriptions to bring in more people from search, build traffic, and increase the number of potential customers.
Don't forget about the semantic core of the page itself, as this is also very important for ranking and achieving high positions in Google search results.
Adding captions and transcripts to your video does way more than making videos accessible.
They greatly impact your SEO, helping your video improve its search engine rankings.
It might be due to better keyword optimization, improved UX, or just wider link-building opportunities. Whatever it is, captions and transcripts are extremely important.
Closed captions increase video accessibility. They allow viewers with hearing impairments to watch your content.
In addition, captions in videos add context and fill in gaps in the audio content that users may miss.
According to a survey by Kapwing, 80% of people are more likely to watch a video if captions are available.
Closed captions allow you to introduce important keywords that web crawlers can easily pick up on.
You can add them manually by uploading a text transcript. There is also a direct text input option that allows you to automatically synchronise captions with the timing of your video.
Source: RealSimple
Using captions and transcripts, you also attract visitors who prefer reading instead of hearing.
This benefits your website to get more audience, but it also has an impact on SEO as search engines take into account excellent user experience.
Video transcriptions and captions also impact other UX metrics: dwelling time, bounce rate, etc.
Since you give users enough options to get the information they might want, you give flexibility, thus making people stay longer on your web page.
Such viewing increases dwell time and decrease bounce rates, as the consumer will be less likely to leave the page without finding what he or she is looking for. Also, video transcripts make locating particular details much easier for users.
These improved UX metrics act as a cue for search engines that your content is useful and relevant, thus improving SEO performance for your website.
Another value of captions and transcripts is keyword optimization. Search engines give great importance to content that contains relevant keywords.
However, avoid overusing keywords as, at the same time, text must be readable and easy to perceive.
By embedding your primary keywords in the first few sentences of your caption and transcript, your video will have a higher chance of ranking for those terms.
Source: GoodFood
For example, if your video is about "How to Make Pizza", guarantee that keywords like "pizza recipe" and "homemade pizza" appear at the beginning of your video transcript or closed captions.
Additionally, including related keywords like “best dough recipe” or “pizza oven tips” increases the semantic relevance of your content. It will likely rank for a wider array of search queries.
Knowing exactly what keywords will bring the biggest view to your videos is important. Using a tool for keyword research can help identify those terms that have high traffic and high volume.
Such tools will also give you related topic suggestions that could help you pick better themes for future video content.
Put differently, good video transcripts and captions highly optimize the video for better visibility in search results and increase organic traffic.
Backlinks from authoritative sites are some of the strongest search ranking factors.
The more accurate your captions and transcripts, the easier it is to cite your video content by other creators or websites.
For example, a full transcript might be referenced and quoted in an article, leading to a backlink from a trusted source.
Source: Digital Accessibility
By making your text so easily accessible, you make linking to your video much more comfortable for others.
Captions and transcripts make your content way easier to cite in research or in-depth articles, which increases your chances of getting that link from a reputable website.
This means that when trusted sites link back to your video, it basically sends a signal to the search engines that your content is indeed authoritative and relevant.
Consequently, your search ranking improves as a result of this action. The more useful your video proves to others, the higher the chances it will create backlinks, further improving your SEO.
The underrated benefits of closed captions are that they can actually be in multiple languages, increasing the appeal of your video to a global audience.
By providing translations, you will grant foreign viewers access to your content and expose new opportunities regarding foreign search results.
Source: Gather Voices
For instance, a video could be produced in English and later have Spanish or Mandarin captions added to that same video.
This would enable videos to turn up in searches for those languages, with great facilitation of reach, increasing the chance of international visibility.
By translating your captions, you will be sure your video is optimised in foreign search engines like the Chinese Baidu or the Indian version of Yahoo.
Localised SEO may enable one to rank in the non-English markets, hence increasing your viewership and boosting your video's search ranking.
Search bots can't "see" a video, but they can crawl and index the text accompanying it.
The caption and transcript provide a written representation of your video content to spiders and ensure that it would be crawled much more easily.
Source: Digital Accessibility
In the absence of these text-based elements, search engines have to rely entirely on video titles, tags, and descriptions to understand what exactly your video content is all about.
Closed captions and transcripts provide more context and details that will, no doubt, make it most likely for your video to be appropriately indexed and come up for relevant search queries.
The more text available for crawling, the greater the likelihood that your video will be fully indexed by search engines and begin to appear in their search results.
If you have decided to use videos on your website, you should approach their optimization as comprehensively as possible. It's important to take your time and make sure you've completed all the steps we'll list below.
This is the first place to insert the keyword before you upload the video to your website.
Google crawlers cannot “watch” a video to determine its relevance to the target keyword.
However, it can read the video's file name and other related code. When uploading a video, replace “SEO_002.mp4” with “why_do_you_need_video_SEO.mp4”.
Having said that, it is very important that your titles and meta tags are not just optimised but also appealing to viewers. Original titles will help to more effectively motivate people to watch your video.
But remember that excessive creativity can be out of place. Do without clickbait, and make sure that the title accurately reflects the content of the video. The optimal length is 5-6 words, along with keywords.
75% of viewers watch video content on the Internet without sound. Obviously, this fact should be taken into account, and text transcripts (subtitles) should be added.
This is also an important part of video SEO that should not be forgotten. Otherwise, the depth of viewing will be very low – viewers simply will not watch content that they can not normally perceive.
You can use auto generation of subtitles, but it doesn't always work correctly and may not recognize words and phrases correctly. That's why we recommend manually transcribing video. Or, as a last resort, edit what the automatic generator creates.
Don't leave the transcript sitting in limbo. Get it in your video description. Add extra text for the search engines to crawl and give your video more relevance on keyword searches.
For instance, if your video is titled "Best Practices for Remote Work", pasting the transcript in the description will help it rank for terms related to "work-from-home tips" or "remote productivity". Just make sure to format it cleanly so that it is easy for users to read.
Take that transcript and embed it into a related blog post or article. If your video is about a pretty in-depth topic, embedding the transcript into an associated article adds that much more value to your audience.
For example, a video tutorial for "SEO for Small Businesses" could be embedded into a blog posting that delves into SEO strategies in more depth.
The transcript will also be useful for those visitors who prefer reading and enhance the dwell time of your website accordingly.
Video SEO is an important stage if you plan to publish videos on your website. And to make your SEO efforts effective, stick to the fundamentals that we discussed in this article:
If you follow our guidelines, your content will be useful for the audience and can help your brand widen its horizon.
It will also contribute to more effective SERP rankings that can firmly establish your brand perception in the long run.