Video SEO: Keywords, Titles, Descriptions And The Transcript

This post is dedicated to simple rules to maximise your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) impact with video content.

There are 4 things you need to do to maximise your video content’s SEO impact. They are, title, description, keywords and the transcript, we will look at each one of these in detail.

Why Do Video SEO?

From this DeepCrawl article, search engines cannot index video content. This is because search engines can only index text content.

Edit: Stop!

Also have a look at this newer article by the folks at Amplitude Agency about how search engines work for a high level overview of what search engines care about.

So we literally need to tell the search engine what our video content is about!

This is why we need to distribute video content optimised for SEO.

How To Optimise A Video Title?

You have two goals in your video title - target keywords and maximising click through (CTR).

• Make sure your include your target keyword ONCE in the title.
• Create a compelling title!

Don't use a click bait title. YouTube will penalise you if you have low retention numbers!

Bonus Tip: Use eye-catching thumbnails with at least one human in them!

How To Optimise A Video Description?

Your first 125 characters should drive click through to your video!

In the above image you can see that the title, description and thumbnail are very important to CTR numbers.

How To Optimise Keywords?

Ok - without getting into too much detail. The easiest way to work out keywords is to do the grunt work!

We can do this in Google, where you start typing the words you care about, and the auto-fill kicks in:

And you do this for YouTube also:

In both the above examples, we type in "amazing" as our first word, and then go "a", "b", "c" etc etc.

Why are the suggestions offered by Google different from the suggestions offered by YouTube?

Because people search for different things on Google vs. YouTube! This means depending on where you are putting out your content, optimising for different keywords is super important.

How To Optimise The Transcript

There are two ways to optimise your transcript. We used QuickTranscribe to get the transcription.

• We use the VideoTranslator’s SRT download option to get the *.srt file which we use for subtitles.

• We used the VideoTranslator’s Auto-Overlay feature to create a Open Captions version of our video. The below image is from Matija Squire, a good friend of VideoTranslator!

When would we use Open-Captions?

• We use open captions in social media channels where the video auto-plays muted, such as LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.
• We use open captions where accessibility is a concern.

Conclusion

We use the VideoTranslator to add transcripts to our video content.

This helps us with Video SEO, and is best used with optimised titles, descriptions, keywords and a nice thumbnail!

Please connect with us on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook for any comments, questions, or just to keep up to date with the work we do!

If you are interested in trying out our technology, please try our platform or drop us an email at hello@videotranslator.ai.