When it comes to video SEO marketing, there’s a ton to learn and a lot of strategies you can go after. For now, I just want to give you a crash course in getting started. First off, you need to know the fastest and easiest way to find video SEO topics. Then, we’ll cover using video content vs blog content. Finally, we’ll touch on how to actually use the video content by posting it to your site and YouTube.
How to Find SEO-Friendly Keywords for Video Content
To find good topics and keywords for SEO video content, we’ll start by doing some keyword research in the SEO tool of your choosing. I’m using Ahrefs. Head to the Keywords Explorer. I decided to be meta for this example, so I’m looking into “video SEO” as my keyword. It is a fairly difficult keyword.
For “video SEO” there are 2,090 different keywords that fall under this topic. We want to narrow that down, so we will exclude everything unless it has a video block on the SERP. So this is going to basically tell us which keywords have the opportunity for a video to rank by itself.
These rankings come from YouTube, so you’re going to want to make sure that when you publish video content, you’re publishing at least on YouTube and hopefully as well on your own site. Using some filters took us down from around 2,000 keywords to 42, which is much better.
Next, take a look at keyword difficulty level and find some options you know you’re likely to rank for. Finally, sort by volume.
I selected “video SEO marketing” or “SEO video marketing” for this tutorial. I think that our site can probably rank eventually if I sort of strengthen this entire topic cluster around “video SEO,” because of our fairly high domain rating.
Another way to find good video SEO topics is to start with your site rather than starting with a topic. So, in my case, I’d look into Linkflow.ai, and then I’ll do a very similar set of filters. Instead of looking at the keyword level, I’d look for top pages that have video blocks on the SERP.
When to Create Video Marketing Content vs Written Marketing Content
The next thing I want to cover is when to publish a standalone video vs a blog. Basically, I’d always recommend making a video to support your blog content. You can use the blog as a starting point for your video’s script. However, if the keyword you’re going after includes a lot of videos on the SERP, I’d recommend making the video first, and adding blog content to support it. That’s what I’ve done with this keyword – “video SEO marketing.”
Here’s a little advice on where to start adding video content to existing blogs. Head over to your top pages report and find those that are in striking distance. Video can likely give a good boost and potentially move things from page 2 to page 1.
How to Publish Your Videos for the Biggest ROI
Finally, we want to actually use that video content on YouTube and your site. Using YouTube honestly deserves it’s own blog, but a few quick things to remember:
- Use keywords in your tags
- Use part of the transcript, likely the introduction, within your YouTube description
- Include links back to your site, especially to the blog version of your video if you have one
For both YouTube and hosting on your site, here are some more best practices. Make sure to include the keyword, which for me is “video SEO marketing” in all the usual on-page places like title and meta description. You’ll want to generate a transcript, and sort of blog-ify it for your website. Upload the video and include it right at the top underneath the title. Then follow that up with the transcript blog.
We include that transcript because your video will cover the topic well and you’ll use contextually relevant keywords and subtopics. Google needs that copy in order to make a decision about whether to rank your content and what position it should be in. It can’t crawl your video.
You can also give yourself a leg up by using video schema, which connects the dots a bit better for Google.
Partner With Video SEO Experts
That’s our take on SEO video marketing at a high level. There’s a lot more to it and things can quickly get overwhelming if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s why we’re here to help. If you can make your videos, we can rank your videos.
