How to Increase the Search Visibility of Your Brand Videos

Using video content for your brand offers a number of advantages in terms of marketing and promotion. It can help you establish thought leadership, build trust and credibility, and drive traffic to your website, among many other benefits. A study by Wyzowl also found that:

• 86% of marketers reported that brand videos helped them gain more traffic to their company website
• 84% of consumers said that brand videos convinced them to purchase a product/service
• 84% of marketers reported that brand videos are instrumental in generating leads

But all these benefits are only possible if people can actually find your videos. That’s why it’s important to optimize your videos for search engines like Google.

3 Reasons Why Your Videos Aren’t Getting As Many Views

There are several reasons why your videos might not get as many views as you want. Here are some potential reasons:

1. You’re not promoting your videos

Merely creating and publishing your videos are not enough. You need to actively promote them through your other channels such as email and social media.

Remember that the internet is saturated with so much content, it’s important to give your audience a nudge and let them know that your latest video is now live.

2. Your videos are not interesting or engaging enough

Another hard truth is that the content of your videos may not be as appealing as you thought it would be. This is why it’s important to test out different types of videos and see which ones perform better with your target audience.

It’s also crucial to have the needs and wants of your audience in mind when curating your content — the more relatable your content, the higher the chance of engaging your viewers.

3. Your videos are not optimized for search engines

This is perhaps one of the most common reasons why videos don’t get as many views as they should. If your videos are not optimized for SEO, they will have a hard time ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs), which means fewer people will be able to find them.

If you want people to discover your videos organically, you need to make sure that they are optimized for search engines like Google. This brings us to our next point.

How to Make Your Brand Videos Indexable by Google

While Google automatically indexes videos posted on YouTube, you need to take some extra steps to make sure that your self-hosted videos are also indexed. Here’s how you can make your brand videos indexable by Google:

1. Optimize your video

Begin with your video itself: Make sure to include relevant keywords in your video file name and fill out the video’s metadata (title, description, etc.) with keyword-rich content. This will help Google understand what your video is about and index it accordingly.

However, be mindful of the length of your video title. Different platforms have different guidelines for the title length, but a good rule of thumb is to keep it short, sweet, memorable, and accurately describe what your content is about.

2. Optimize your thumbnail image

Your thumbnail image is what appears on SERPs and gives users a preview of your video, so make sure to choose an eye-catching image that accurately represents your content.

It’s also important to optimize your thumbnail image according to Google’s guidelines:

• Supported file formats: JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, SVG, and WebP
• Size: Minimum 60×30 pixels.
• Transparency: At least 80% of the thumbnail must have an alpha value (transparency) of at least 250.

3. Use transcripts

Adding transcripts of your videos helps Google understand the content of your video, which makes it more likely to show up in relevant search results.

If you don’t have the time or resources to create transcripts of your videos, you can consider using automatic transcription tools like Otter.ai or Rev.com. These tools are not perfect, but they can save you a lot of time and effort.

4. Optimize your website’s videos page

If you have a dedicated videos page on your website, make sure to optimize it for both users and search engines. This means using keyword-rich titles, descriptions, and tags as well as a user-friendly and mobile-responsive design.

Double-check as well that your page is not blocked by a robots.txt or noindex meta tag. Otherwise, your page will be rendered inaccessible to Googlebots and cannot be indexed.

5. Create a sitemap

As a related point, sitemaps are also helpful in making sure that Google can find and index your videos. A sitemap is a file that contains a list of all the pages, posts, and other content on your website.

Make sure to create a sitemap that includes your video URL. You can generate a sitemap for your website using tools like XML-Sitemaps.com or Yoast SEO (if you’re using WordPress).

6. Add video schema markup to your website

Schema markup, or structured data, is a code that you can add to your website to help search engines understand your content better.

For videos, you can use video schema markup to specify things like the thumbnail image, duration, and description of your video. This can help your videos show up in rich results on SERPs, which can help increase their click-through rate (CTR).

How to Use Schema Markups for Your Brand Videos

You can use a tool like Schema Markup Generator to generate the code for your video schema markup. Once you have the code, you can add it to the head section of your website’s HTML.

For videos, in particular, use the VideoObject schema markup to explicitly provide more information about your content, such as:

• Video name and description
• Video thumbnail URL
• Upload date
• Video duration

There are also other ways to further enrich the schema markup of your video content:

1. Key Moments

Key Moments is a Google feature that allows users to navigate key segments in a video, much like how readers can navigate a book with chapter titles. While Google can automatically detect Key Moments on your videos, you can also manually define this:

Defining Key Moments for YouTube Videos: You can do this by specifying timestamps on YouTube. Instructions are provided here.

Defining Key Moments for Self-Hosted Videos: For videos posted on your brand website, use the following schema markups:

• Clip structured data: This will define the exact starting point and end point of each key segment.
• SeekToAction structured data: Timestamps are defined in your URL structure, and Google can automatically identify Key Moments. Google can also direct users to the link to the specific key segments within the video.

2. Live Badge

This is especially useful for live videos. All you need to do is use the BroadcastEvent structured data to describe the live event, such as:

• The start and end times of your event
• A title and description of your live video content
• The type of live broadcast (e.g., sporting events, award shows, etc.)

3. Video Thumbnails with Custom Links
This is a great way to increase the interactivity of your videos and encourage users to click through.

You can use the thumbnails_with_custom_links parameter in your video schema markup to include up to 10 thumbnail images for your video, each with its own link. These links can be to other videos, pages on your website, or even external websites.

Boost Your Video Marketing and SEO Strategy

Optimizing your videos for search engines is a crucial step in getting them seen by your target audience. Ultimately, however, the most important thing is to create quality video content that provides value to your viewers. If you do that, the SEO benefits will follow.

If you need any help with your video marketing or search engine optimization needs, Ilfusion is here to help. Just give us a call at 888-420-5115, or send us an email at [email protected] to get started!

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