Video SEO isn't something we always think about when optimizing, but we really should. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Danny Dover reviews some of the video SEO basics that every SEO should know about. After all, it's a largely untapped market, unlike the Canadian maple tree market. Which is very tapped. (The Canadian maple tree video market, however, is quite untapped, but based on my scientific and extremely boring research in YouTube, I don't recommend you pursue that market at all).
Anyways, we have a very special visitor this week, what with all of Danny's meta discussions this month. Great Scott! That's what happens when you get all meta and self-referential on us, Danny.
Video Transcription
Hello, everybody. My name is Danny Dover. I work here at SEOmoz doing SEO. For today's Whiteboard Friday we're going to be talking about video SEO. Now, last week I mentioned that was the most meta video we'd ever done. It was optimizing SEO resources, right? Now, this one is a video on video SEO. So this one, this one is the new champion of the most meta video that we have ever done here, and possibly the most meta video that you have ever seen. If there is some kind of disruption in the space-time continuum, totally my fault. I apologize.
--1.21 Gigawatts!?!--
That was unexpected. That was Doc from Back to the Future. A poor impression of it. Totally derailing my Whiteboard Friday. You're killing me.
All right. Now, video SEO, huge opportunity here. This is more of a serious thing. Video SEO has low competition. You see in the universal results that video thumbnails show up about a third of the way from the top, right. You're seeing little thumbnails. A lot of times it's YouTube, but you also see Vimeo and lots of other video providers showing up. You are seeing those in lots and lots of SERPs, and increasing so actually. There is a huge demand from people because, you know, Google is doing A/B testing or multivariate testing. They're seeing people are clicking on those. But, at the same time, you'll have low competition. You'll see a lot of times for very high competition keywords that have video results that the video results will just be kind of mediocre. They just kind of showed up there. Part of that is because it is new. Not a lot of people are optimizing for video, which is becoming extremely important. So, a lot of opportunity there.
The other part of this, I guess I can only talk for the United States, where I live, but the way that people are starting to consume media is changing drastically. We've all seen YouTube. We've all seen Vimeo. Now the devices people are using and the places they are watching video are different. You have things like the iPhone, the iPad, and the iPayWayTooMuchForGadgets and I am an Apple fanboy, kind of thing. You're seeing these all over the place. There is the Android model, the operating system that is running lots and lots of things. system. You're seeing the way that people are consuming media very differently. The market is growing. Based on that, the demand is high but the competition is really low. Lots of opportunity. This smells like money to me. This is huge. This is a big deal.
How do you take advantage of this? Well, there are different metrics the search engines use to look at video content. When the search engines crawl normal content, they can get some kind of idea of what text is trying to say by using their natural language processing algorithms. They can get some idea of what this text says just simply because they put so much time and so much energy into developing these algorithms to get some kind of semantic feeling for what text means. Now, this doesn't translate directly into video because, part of the reason at least, is video is much bigger files. It takes a lot more processing to get an understanding of it. It is a lot more zeros and ones. With these Google and the search engines have provided Meta information that you can do about a video.
The two most important ones here are the title of the video -- what do you title your video. That's probably what people are going to search for, right. If it is the shoes video on YouTube or whatever it may be on YouTube. Those are a lot of times what people are searching for. That information turns out to be very important for video SEO.
Likewise, the description is also very important because it gives you more than whatever may be the character limit, probably around 140, I would guess for the title. But it gives you more text to describe it in more depth. This helps the search engines understand the video without having to go through all the intensive video processing.
Now, as video SEO is maturing, we're starting to see more and more metrics start to affect the algorithm. So, let me be totally straightforward with this. This is just my speculation. I have not done tests on these ones. But they seem very likely to be impacting the video search results. My guess would be that they'll be more impactful going forward. So, they are something to start paying attention to now.
The first one I see here is engagement stats. The most obvious one here is views. How many times is a video viewed? I know that when I go to YouTube and I search for something, after I look at the text, the title and the description, I then look at the views. Has this been watched 30 times or has it been watched 10 million times? It seems very, very likely to me that click-through rates are going to correlate with high view rates also. So, I think views are becoming increasingly important and are something that you should keep an eye on.
Number two is ratings. So, on YouTube they offer a five-point scale. On things like Vimeo and other things, they use a thumb up and a thumb down. That's more similar to the Reddit system. These are actual humans who are giving their opinions and their expertise on video content. This is very helpful because search engines are designed to provide results for humans. Any imput you can get from humans is helpful for getting output for humans. This is something that Google figured out very early and is something that is very important.
Number three, comments. What could be more human than commenting on videos? In YouTube's case, it is some of the lowest thresholds of intelligence we've ever seen on the Internet, which is really saying something. You have floor chant, below that you have YouTube comments. It is kind of rough, right. But this is a metric of actual human beings engaging with content and with the author or producer of the video. This seems like a very important metric to me. I don't think it is the content of the comments, because they are awful. But I think it is the volume of it and the kind of themes that people are talking about. Are they saying, "this is awesome" or "this sucks?" I think that does have some kind of impact on it.
The last one is social metrics. Really, I think this is universal. It is not just the video vertical; I think it is the other verticals as well. By social metrics, I mean things like the amount of tweets or what people are saying in tweets, Delicious popular saves, or submissions to Reddit or Digg or any of those other things. How are people talking about this with their friends? So, you have things like the QDF algorithm, which is Google's Query Deserves Freshness algorithm. What this does is it will artificially inflate the ability for something to rank based on temporal metrics. So, if lots and lots of people are linking to something or tweeting about it, then it can artificially rank higher than things that normally wouldn't just because it is very important. You see this a lot of times with natural disasters. Things will just rise to the top when normally they wouldn't. Michael Jackson stuff. We saw lots and lots of QDF stuff really blowing, making things rank when normally there was no way they would. This is something to keep in mind also. These social metrics.
Now, duration. I think is the last one. This one is more about the extremes, finding the outlier. If a video is three seconds long, it is probably not something that Google, Bing, or Yahoo will want to rank highly. At the same time, if it is something that is multiple hours long, they might want to rank it, but it is probably not what people are going to look for when they are doing video. One of the things about video and content on the Internet in general is that people want to consume it quickly. They like bulleted lists. They like quick pictures, inforgraphic types of things, and they like short videos. I should probably take my own advice and get to the end here. So, I'll try to do that.
The last one we have for you is tactics. I have expressed that there is a huge opportunity here. I have talked about some of the metrics that are important. Now, tactics, the search engines have given you several tools on how to do this. Video sitemaps is, not new, because video sitemaps have existed for a while, but the protocol was recently revamped by the major search engines and the people who are involved with that protocol. They've added a couple of things that are interested. They've added the location of the thumbnail of the video. They've added things like if it is family friendly or not. They've added the URL of where the video is embedded. So, from an SEO perspective, this is really interesting. We don't want links going to YouTube anymore because YouTube has plenty of links. Instead, with the new video sitemap, you can provide the URL of where it is embedded and then when the search engines index that content they'll link back to you. So, it's not so much that you get a link from it per se, but you get the click-through. So, someone clicking on the SERP, clicking that thumbnail, is going to go to your blog, where you embedded the video, rather than to the hosting provider. This is a big win for us SEOs and for us content producers.
The other one is transcriptions. So, what could be easier than just going back and using the old tactics you already have for creating content? With transcriptions, you take video, you take the audio from the video, and you turn it into plain text. This is something that the search engines can then use and interpret just like they do a normal web page. This is important for search engines, but it is also important for human beings as well. People with hearing impairments who can't hear this video right now can then go through and read it. They can understand it that way. International people who are speaking different languages can then go through the content and read at their own pace. They can do whatever tools they need to translate it. It helps spread it more. It is both good for humans and for users, which is a win-win and that's always the situation I try to get when I do SEO.
I recommend that you always try to go for those win-wins, because ultimately what the search engines are doing is chasing after the idea of getting the best information to human beings. I think that's what it really comes down to, crafting your content for human beings. It is harder to do with video SEO, but it is becoming more and more possible to do it.
I appreciate your time today. I will see you next week.
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
Follow Danny on Twitter! Even more to your benefit, follow SEOmoz! Alternatively, you can always follow me, Aaron.
If you have any tips or advice that you've learned along the way, or if you came back from the future, we'd love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!
Great WBF. I think video responses and subscriptions also play an important role in ranking of videos. Many popular videos on you tube have dozens of video responses. So you should encourage your audience to leave video responses. If video is a major part of your marketing strategy then running a video channel on youtube is a great way to engage with target audience. One should always optimize the page for targeted keywords on which the video is embedded and get some back links. Now let me give you one real life example. Ray william johnson is a popular guy on youtube. He runs his own video channel and he has like 2 million subscribers. Thats a lot of subscribers you see. His every video gets few million views. The reason of his popularity (besides the video content and the way he speaks) is that at the end of each video he let one of his viewer to ask a question and that viewer is also shown on the video asking that question. That's how people build subscribers base. So what hints we are getting here people:
1. Whiteboard Friday Channel on Youtube
2. Ask Danny a question and Danny will answer it in the next whiteboard friday
3. Make a video that encourages video responses
4. Would you like to appear on next whiteboard friday?
More viral a video gets higher its probability of getting a back link or being tweeted, retweeted, digged etc. Anyways in the end it is all about users engagement.
Chao!
Interesting, I like this idea of getting the community directly involved. The next WBF is on Image SEO Basics. Do you have a question to start us off? :-)
Ok. How to get links for images?
Does file size / image quality matter?
I have a great question/topic for your next WBF. It's perhaps a bit more than basic, but it would be timely. How to do triage on sites that were drastically affected by the most recent Google update. Case in point from Rand's last blog post. I wasn't able to get the permalink to work in my browser so scroll down to the entry from Genius Goods Inc. He lost all his Google traffic.
Hi Danny,
I always divide the blog posts on seomoz (which are always very interesting of course :-) in two sections: easy to realize and the harder ones. This post gives great advice on SEO for videos and is really simple to arrange. Especially the tip with the transcription!! Some things are so easy but never come through ones mind!!
Thank you!
Petra
I really happy to hear this helped. :-) Thanks!
Is it me or is Danny getting great at this.
Not only has he gotten great, he's quickly becoming a cult figure in the video space. I'm seriously considering writing him in on the ballot this November.
Hi Danny,
great, thanks. I agree in most points.
I think, there is one more important think when talking about (youTube) video SEO : use the first 36 hours!
There are a lot of daily ranking lists on youTube (best ratings, most comments, most views) for every category. If you reach these lists your video have good chances to be a burner. If not it is much harder to optimize.
So, make a roadmap before uploading how to involve social media within the first 36 hours.
Best wishes, hope to see Rand sometimes again ;-)
Martin
great WBF, I have seen great SERPs for one of my Travel customers using video SEO. They have 200+ videos of holiday homes from aroung the globe and all of them are above youtube entries in the Google video search and 10% of them are appearing in the organic natural searches with their thumbnail images. It's a bit to early to say if their traffic has increased as they have only had video on the site for 2 months.
Hey Chris, if the customer would give permission, that would make for an interesting YOUmoz post.
Aaron,
Your Doc Brown almost made me pee my pants... you're my new favorite mozzer!!!
Just to clarify, is it ok from an SEO standpoint (assuming you use video sitemaps) to use YouTube to host your videos? Will the SERP's show your page or the youtube page?
If I have understood things correctly there seems to be a different opinion expressed on this blog post than:
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/creating-online-video-strategy
Mayve video sitemaps is what makes YouTube an ok host. Please let me know.
Thanks!
Good WBF -
Another key thing to remember is that some day, all of the voice in your videos you make today, will be indexed and most likely effect your rankings. Since the last presidential election I know Google has been testing this auto-transcript in the Politics channel on YouTube. Google Voice now translate your voicemail messages to me into text. I can speak to my Google iPhone app and tell it what to search for. Transcripts are great now, but will not be necessary eventually.
This means, that I work with my clients to optimize scripts for any video they make just like we would for written content they might produce, because when that day comes that all content in a video is "heard" by googlebot, I want my client's videos to be clear and contextual.
This is exactly what I was looking to see in the wbf or comments. It seems to me that Google is likely to use automated transcripts of the audio portion of videos in the rankings (or at least as a confirmation that the title/description we on topic).
You are probably right but my very unscientific opinion is that it is probably too early right now. I use Google Voice and while I appreciate the auto transcriptions, they are only mildly accurate. I would be surprised if Google was using this data as a core ranking metric right now.
They may match the autotranscription to the provided transcription and use it to confirm that the transcription is accurate. This would prevent blackhat transcriptions from affecting rankings.
Let me express a thought that was jumping right out of my head while watching the WBF:
isn't funny that the web, that was said as the medium that would have replaced TV because of its interactive nature, is getting more and more influenced by the TV basic concepts being video one of the biggest source of traffic in the Internet? At least is what I am noticing also from a personal experience base (as I come from the tv field).
Apart these metaphysics consideration of mine, thanks for the WBF: it's indeed useful.
AH. Just for the news: who is better using video on internet? No, it's not any of the big brands and absolutely not ABC, HBO, Sky... no. They are usually women: mom's videoblogs, videoblogs about make-up, videoblogs about fashion... I was very very surprised to see that the videoblogs (and also YouTube Channels) my wife is following are mostly done by women with a simple HD Camera, great speech and engagement ability with their public, who understood how to use video on the web. And how to optimize it for SERPs. Therefore: simplicity, directness, entertainment and engagement are the content keys for video on web.
Interesting points, I suppose it just makes sense that certain niches would do better with video than with text. Take fashion for example, it is so visual that text has difficulty doing it justice. The same could be said about food as evidenced by the success of the Food Network in the states.
My wife spends her time on YouTube looking at exercise videos of which there are skads.
Danny - do you recommend sydicating your video accross all platforms via a service like TubeMogul or VideoWildfire? Are there pros and cons to hosting it one place vs. having all the sites having their own copy?
Thanks - great WBF. Good to see another personality.
Danny, thanks for this great WBF, I have just made a search on 'Video SEO Basics' in Google Uk and clicked on your video in the SERPs to check if you truly get redirected to the site, and it works! I didnt know you could get the CTR traffic redirected to your own webpage simply with having video sitemaps in place,... I need to get better at implementing this technicque... thanks again
Great WBF, This is something I have been thinking about a lot.
I suspect the actual youtube search will be impacted by an in-video transcript as the file is uploaded direct onto YouTube and they will look through that for keywords etc although I'm not sure if other SE are able to.
Hey Danny, I am a huge fan of your WBF's, and that's before you even get to the content. And speaking of content, I know nothing about video so I really appreciated this WBF.
PS - Forgot to mention Aaron's cameo. He is a great understudy. Between you two I expect great things!
Back to the Future. The Sandlot. All within 30 seconds of each other.
Awesome.
And a 4Chan diss!
Video SEO is definitely going to become more and more important. I look forward to seeing some research done on the topic.
or Monday :)
https://www.ankarakervannakliyat.com
Danny,
Great WBF! I also wanted to add something to the transcript piece. A while back, one of my colleagues asked me about a point of SEO that I had learned from a whiteboard friday (pre-transcription). I searched for that data for almost an hour with no luck. The same situation happened again when the transcription was present, and I was able to find it immediately. Transcription isn't just for the aurally impaired or out-o-towners - being especially helpful with video trainings or other reference content, it's extremely helpful (vital even!) in citing that content. It can also help build your links because more people will link to a piece of content than to a specific line in a video.
great post on Friday
but I read on Sunday :)
I agree with Rand here. You are becoming a superstar in WBF. Great insights Danny. Video SEO is something which every SEO should definitely know about. Great Work asusual Danny!
Really liked this video Danny - you're fast becoming a WB Friday superstar.
One thing I'd love to see someone in the SEO field for the future is to map quantities of YouTube searches to videos appearing in the Google results. I suspect that there's a connection, but it's hard to prove (this would be a great place to use a correlation analysis - Sean? :-) ).
Hi Rand! We have some correlation analysis running on this. I'll post on YouMoz as soon as we get some conclusions ;)
Looking forward to that post!
I posted a bit below, but I don't believe there is a correlation to the # of searches done on youtube and whether the vide shows up in the natural results.
From what I have seen is you can target a keyword and get it showing up in the natural results even if there is not a lot of searches done on youtube for that query.
Did the youmoz post find anything different?
Please share the link once you guys get it.
Great place here! I'm new, but old school.
Take care.
Anyone know of an easy video sitemap generator?
Preferably one that is compatible with a lot of 3rd party sources (our videos are with Brightcove)...
This is a great resource, but then I saw this:
https://goo.gl/HDIYa
In terms of position it's not outranked by those 'content copy pasters',
but in terms of 'rich snippet' it is because there is no image showing for the Seomoz link.
So is this a matter of 'eat your own dogfood' or is there currently more to video SEO then this video explains? (or both :)
Thanks for the really great WBF on this one! A great topic where it is difficult to find solid info out there. I wish we could supplement this at some point with some of the more technical intracacies and considerations for implementing this stuff.
I have a site relaunch coming up and plan on leveraging video SEO for the first time with all the great resources we have, including transcriptions etc for our technically heavy B2B solutions. Will host the videos on site where our of our supplementary informations also resides, and our CTAs etc.
A question about tracking the Google video traffic in analytics. Has anyone played with this, does the fact that it came from a video search result automatically show in Google Analytics or does this need to be accomplished another way? I was thinking if necesary we could add query string parameters to location <loc> landing page URL for the video, but not sure if this in tandem with the regular sitemap will cause Google to see this as two pages with identical content.
Any advice on overcoming this is appreciated. Thanks!
Chris
Does videos responses really mater as links? Thanks
Great article, I like the transcription tactics. I use to write a short description but changing the video into text will definitely help serp to understand what the video is about.
It's more like giving alt tag to the image. Search engine doesn't know if it's a birthday pic until we name it as birthday-boy-smiling .jpg
Thanks
Great video - whats a simple easy to use video editor to add text or my websitename.com to my video or some other transparent text overlay to help brand it? I have a couple of short 40 second videos to start to play with after this post :)
Also as a complete newcomer to video, I would also like to implement some of the above, but would love some more info on where to start and practical considerations - particularly about whether to host on own website or youtube and other platfroms - what's the process for a first timer - this will be my first time trying to use video like many others seem to be above.
good stuff. I've been working hard on video SEO for some of our clients. This is some good info to keep in mind. Thanks Danny
Hi,
We host all of our videos on You Tube and use embedded links to display on our site.
You've explained a little about new video sitemaps allowing link SERPs to link back. Can you explain how to do this and link SERPs to websites instead of You Tube?
Any advice would be appreciated.
Sean
Video is a interesting area for SEO, I have been playing around in this space for a while. All good tips for video SEO danny =)
Hi Danny,
Great Whiteboard Friday, ive been experimenting alot with xml video sitemaps recently trying to get some video content embedded on a site indexed for that site. I have managed to get the content indexed but only for short periods of time. The videos are embedded from a video hosting company but I can never manage to get them to stay in Google video search and on top of that the site has two videos embedded from another public site that are indexed in Google for the site and aren't in the sitemap.
Do you feel that the type of video hosting services used plays a part in getting your embedded video content to appear?
Thank you so much for explaining how video sitemaps allow the pages on your site with embedded YouTube content to rank in the SERPs. I had wondered about that.
Good stuff - forwarded it on to my video guy!
Betty, a housewife, offers her take on video optimization. A classic....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DixcEK5wh-g#!
Your comment regarding youtube commentators being below 4chan.... hilarious!!
I have a personal video on youtube that got over 20,000 views (when it hit 10k i got an email from youtube asking me to join revenue sharing program) I SEO'ed the video (basically everything you mention in the wb friday video) and wanted to share:
the comment "volume" had a direct connection to the views growth. the more comments, the faster the view count went up.
the interesting thing is, out of all the comments (about 3-400 of them) about 99.9% of them are negative, offensive and childish. I'm pretty sure that youtube takes into account the volume of comments and adjusts its ranking faily often based on that factor - since hitting 20k views and getting another 50+ negative comments, my views have gone up exponentially and now its about about 100 views / 5 comments per day!
Great post! I mostly do social media for clients, but of course SEO factors into that & I'm learning all I can. SpeechPad looks like a great resource, I'm definitely going to check it out. Thanks for all the great tips-- looking forward to more posts.
Emily
@emilycfarrar
@3birdsmarketing
I'm the video SEO guy at the internet marketing place I work at, but I haven't yet seen significant improvements in using the captions. However, I think that it will eventually be ranked, so why not be ahead of the curve. But your right, video is one of the most untouched areas of SEO.
Hi Danny! Great video and tips!
Do you think that Google (and other search engines) can use backlinks metrics to ranking those videos? I mean, if we see that a particular video on Youtube receives a lot of links pointing to it and they are from many different root domains, maybe they can consider this as a value.
What about video embedding? Can we consider a video popular if many people embedded it to their website?
And finally, I think something on Youtube is really important: video responses. Maybe it is like a "PageRank" formula to videos... if your video receives many responses, you probably is relevant to the system. What you think on it?
Hey Fabio!
I do think Google is using backlinks in video rankings (for universal rankings anyways). Great point which I accidentally left out. :-)
I am not sure about video embedding. It would be easy for them to map a specific embedded video if it were hosted on YouTube but it would be harder to keep track of this on other third party hosting providers. They could see that a video was embedded on a given page and even see the source file but parsing that and keeping it updated while the third party hosts change would be difficult. Google has done more difficult things but the ROI on this seems relatively low.
I don't know enough about video responses to decide if they are important or not. In my experience, I have seen that video responses tend to be mostly spam. This is especially so on popular videos as people are simply trying to piggyback off of the popularity.
Cheers!
I want to clarify something - the goal of Video SEO isn't necessarily to drive traffic to your website. You are actually driving traffic to the Video itself. I've often had the question "How does a Video result help my website traffic?" - it won't. But, it will help your overall goal of increasing conversions by increasing your overall visibility.
Why not do both? Its not difficult to make this situation a win-win by spreading brand awareness and driving traffic to your site. That's what we do with these videos and why we are especially excited about the embed url in video sitemaps.
By all means - do both. What I was trying to clarify was the term "Video SEO". When people here SEO, they immediately think its going to help their website ranking. In this situation, you are actually doing SEO on the video to help IT rank higher.
Obviously, if you put some links on your video page back to your site or even mention your website url in the video, then this could lead to some additional traffic. But that is just a side effect of Video SEO.
Is there a preferred place / site to host the videos we put on our sites? Is it better to host our videos on youtube, Viméo or on own host ?
Thanks for the insights Danny, I think you are right on about engagement metrics being very important for video SEO.
Concerning transcripts, do you recommend typing those out manually or using some sort of transcription service to automate the process? Have you found any good transcription software that is really accurate?
I suppose Danny uses Video transcription by SpeechPad.com - like you see in each of his Whiteboard Fridays :-)
Indeed, thanks for pointing that out, somehow I missed it.
Human video transcription is very cheap and can check for things like grammar, provide context, etc that a machine couldn't. In the US you should be able to find reliable transcription services for $0.80-$1.00 a minute, .20-.45 a minute overseas. I believe youtube has a build in transcriber now also.
Great video - easy things to do to increase visibility. Also, good to see that you include metrics for viewing not only this video, but others as well. ;-)
One nit - it is not so easy to grab the embedd code for the post.
Great !
really interesting wbf danny congrats
taking away a good few pointers from this
one thing about video, not sure if just my pc, the last few videos, sound quality much better, but sound level seems to be quite low on my laptop?
Thanks for letting me know. We are still tweaking the setup but think we have made a lot of progress. Is the volume so low that even with your speakers turned up, it is still to low?
Sound quality is great here. Its loud enough that I can drown my roomates out for a few minutes :). The outro sound effects are VERY loud though. Would be nice to match them to the rest of the audio.
I agree the audio needs to be upped a little.
Having problems hearing it correctly on my laptop. I mean I can hear it... but it is not as loud as I would like with my volunme maxed out.
In regard to Rands reply on if there is a correlation between youtube searches and whether those queires then show up in the natural results. I would have to say no from my experience.
I think you can get any video into the natural results right now if you optimize it right as seen in the WBF post video on this page.
Maybe this is old... not sure as it is my first post on SEOMoz.
But I am pretty sure you can get whatever video you want to show up in the natty results.
Peace yo.
Good stuff. Some of my favorites posts are the ones on topics I know almost nothing about, and video SEO is definitely one of those. Great tip on the embedded location in the new XML protocol - people ask about that often in Q&A and are afraid of YouTube getting all the credit (understandably so).
I also liked the moment around 2:05 when Danny looks at his hand for a moment, as if to say "Who's moving this thing?!!"
That moment remind me when I was at school and I was writing chemical codes in my hands for the exams...