Why Online Video and SEO are Coming Together in New Ways

Not long ago, online video marketing and search engine optimization used to be (mostly) separate topics. Video is something you did for customers, while SEO depended on text, titles, and tags.

That’s all been changing in recent months and years, however. In fact, these two marketing channels are beginning to come together in new and exciting ways. To understand why – and how your company can profit from the evolution of online video clips – here’s what you need to know…

Google Can Watch Your Clips (or at Least Listen to Them)

The big evolution in video and search engine optimization occurred when Google started using speech-to-text technology to “crawl” the content of online videos. Now, the company can use software that pulls out key words, phrases, and even themes within video clips. It can also examine some forms of still images and captioning to determine whether keywords and search phrases are present.

In this way, video has now joined text as being a type of content that can be scanned, indexed, and more or less “understood” by the world’s largest search engine. So, the one main drawback to video as an effective form of marketing content has been taken away.

Optimizing Video Means More Than Video and Tags Now

Making your online videos as searchable as possible used to mean ensuring they had search engine-friendly titles, descriptions, and tags associated with them. But, since Google now has the capability to turn streaming sound into something that can be crawled, the actual content of your video matters, as well. It might not be scanned perfectly, and you certainly don’t want to stuff keywords into your video so they seem unnatural, but it makes sense to pay more attention to what you’re saying to viewers.

With that being said, however, it’s still a good idea to pay more SEO attention to titles, descriptions, and tags. These are still the most easily searched parts of your online video, and carry greater weight within Google’s algorithm.

Video is Still Great for Earning Followers and Conversions

It’s important to note that we aren’t advocating you start producing video simply as a search engine optimization tool. Instead, we just want you to recognize that SEO and online video now work together more cleanly.

In fact, the best reasons to produce clips still have to do with the user-oriented results you get. Video is great for tracking views, explaining ideas, and earning conversions. People like video because it grabs attention in a way that text and still images don’t. Keep your focus on the elements of video that work, and simply add in new elements of search visibility like you would any other piece of content. You wouldn’t write an article just for Google, so don’t shoot a video solely for search engine spiders, either.

There were already lots of great reasons to produce online marketing videos to be distributed through YouTube  video, and your website. Now that video could actually help you bank more searchable content, it’s an even better idea. Get in touch with our team today to learn how we can help you make the most of video, along with other emerging Internet marketing trends.