On-page Video SEO – Whiteboard Friday

Your video content, the video platform that you use, and your video webpage all contribute to the value of your on-page video SEO. Learn more in this Whiteboard Friday with Crystal Carter.

Hi, I am Crystal Carter. Welcome to my Whiteboard Friday all about on-page video SEO. When I talk about on-page video SEO, I mean SEO that allows you to get great benefits from embedding and using videos on your webpages and around your blog or your website.

So, what we're thinking about is essentially three parts of this activity all working together. Your video content, the video platform that you use, and your video webpage all contributing to the value of your on-page video SEO. Now, when you're thinking about your video content, the overall aim of what you're doing is trying to emphasize the quality of the content for user value so that you're demonstrating that you've got great quality content for users as soon as they discover your content. We also wanna be thinking about the video platform. And the video platform should be used as a tool. So, the video platform should essentially be an opportunity for you to use some of the built-in content distribution infrastructure and also some of the built-in communication infrastructure for your video platform. When you get to the video webpage, you want to identify ways that you can show the value of the video for the page and the website overall. And we'll get into the details of how we can do that as part of our on-page video SEO strategy.

So, your video content, essentially when we're thinking about quality, the first thing you wanna think about is high quality files. This is a fairly straightforward operation. Essentially, you wanna get the best quality files that you can. So, if you're doing video, you wanna try and shoot in 4K. When you're doing your images, you want to make sure that they're like a good resolution and you want to try to get some great quality files and make sure that your audio is as good as quality as you can get for the content that you're creating. This gives you a few additional opportunities in terms of content visibility because you're more likely to be seen on bigger devices and other devices because not everyone just watches YouTube or other video streaming things on their phones, sometimes people watch them on their televisions and even larger screens.

So, the better quality your content, the more likely it is to be seen by others and the more likely Google is to serve it to others. You also wanna think about your thumbnail. Your thumbnail is very important because your thumbnail will be seen again on the video platform, but your thumbnail is also really important for Google on Google's Search engine because it can show as the thumbnail next to your SERP entry, it can also show in image carousels independently, it can also show in the Image tab as well. So, spending some time on making sure that you have a good quality thumbnail, but also a very distinct thumbnail can make a really big difference.

In terms of emphasizing the quality for user value, you also want to think about the user intent when you're creating your content. So, the users that are watching your video are gonna be watching it for a reason. What are they trying to achieve? How does it help to deliver the purpose of your content? How is the video helping to deliver that? Make sure you're thinking about that and you're aware of how you're gonna be using that content and how users are gonna be engaging with that. Similarly, we also want to think about the keywords in your content, particularly the keywords in your script. So, what we have here is essentially on YouTube, they generate a transcript while you post your video. So, they do that so that people can search for information within YouTube.

So, if you are searching for a piece of content or you're searching for it for a piece of text or something that someone said, even if it's not written in the description, if they said it during the video then you can search for that and you can find it in the transcript that YouTube is generating. This means that it's really important for you to keep on track when you're talking about the information and your videos. And it's also really important that you think about the keywords and the terminology that you use while you're writing your scripts.

When we think about the video platform, I would highly recommend that you use YouTube. A lot of people ask me, "Which platform should we use when we embed videos?" And I highly recommend using YouTube. And the reason why is because Google has set a lot of the parameters and the technical specifications for on-page video SEO, and a lot of them directly align with a lot of the defaults on YouTube. So, if you use YouTube, then you're saving yourself a lot of trouble of trying to figure out, "Is this like this or is that like that?" because a lot of the things are in YouTube already. Following on from that, you wanna be thinking about optimizing on YouTube.

So, again, I'm privileging YouTube, but if you are using a different platform, in either case, you want to use all of the facilities that are available to you. So, within YouTube, for instance, you have the ability to add lots of tags to your videos, you can add a description to your video, you can add cards with different links to different parts of your video or different parts of other videos or different parts of your website within the videos. So, make sure that you're using all of the optimization tools within YouTube to your benefit. Following on from that, add your links from your website onto your YouTube description. This gives you a couple of things. In terms of user value, this helps users who have found your website or found your video to discover your website.

So, if they have an intent, for instance, to learn about a chocolate cake, let's say you did a beautiful video that was a recipe for chocolate cake. If you put the link for the chocolate cake recipe in your video, then you have an engaged audience who can find and discover that content right there and they're ready to to visit your website. This also allows you an opportunity to connect to let Google know that that piece of content and the video are connected. Additionally, when you add the link from YouTube, you're more likely to see both the video and the video and the video webpage on the SERP at the same time. What we see very often is that Google will show a video in multiple places on the SERP.

And this is something that is fairly unique to video where they will show the YouTube entry, but they will also show the webpage entry. And so, adding your link in here gives you double opportunity to be visible in that space. You also want to think about engaging on YouTube. And engaging on YouTube again allows you to connect with an engaged audience. So, you can post comments, you can pin comments, which can help your video to perform better within YouTube's algorithms. You can also add links into the comments and discussions on your video. So, for instance, if someone says, "That chocolate cake looks great, but do you have it in gluten-free?" You can say, "Yes, here's the link to my gluten-free chocolate cake recipe," and that link will be a live link that allows people to engage with your content and allows your video to perform and add better value for those users.

Now, when we get over to the video webpage, we want to make sure that we are showing the value of the video for the page, and there's lots of different ways that we can do this. So, first of all we want to set technical SEO foundations. And this means making sure that you have a webpage that is ready for the video so that you have the ability to generate structured data for your website. And that includes video schema markup, and that you also have the ability to add in any additional meta tags that you might need for that particular video as well. Now, one of the things that we do is at Wix is we have something called Wix Video. And Wix Video allows you to add in a YouTube link and then when you port it into your Wix website, it scrapes the metadata and the information from YouTube and generates schema markup for you automatically.

This means that we have all of those things and that we have great consistency between one platform and another. We do this via API. The YouTube API is open to anyone, and so if you would like to engage with a YouTube API, you can use that to make your video on-page video SEO more streamlined as you go along. You also want to think about adding a transcript to your site. Adding a transcript to your site is a really good way to add natural language onto your webpage. And this is something that's particularly useful in the days of AI where we have a lot of people creating machine-generated content. And if you have a transcript on your website, that can mean that you have like more unique and more natural language on your site, which helps Google to understand that this is created by experts and can help with your E-E-A-T.

We also wanna consider the positioning of the video. Google is very specific that they want to be able to see the video at the top of the page. So, if you have a piece of content that is video content and you want Google to know that this is an important part of the page, put it at the very top. You can put it secondary if it is a secondary video, but if you want it to rank for that particular thing and you want to make sure that users and Google know that it's important, put it at the very top of the page, it will help with what you're doing. Google also has some very specific requirements with regards to how wide or how tall it should be, they also expect that it should be in the middle of the page rather than on the side of the page. They've got some great documentation that explains it very explicitly, so check that out.

Finally, I would say think about audience engagement. Audience engagement for your videos is a really, really good way to illustrate the value of the video for users and for Google. And one of the things that's really great for this is thinking about user-generated content. So, if you have comments on your blog, then having comments underneath your video page can be really, really useful. If you don't have comments on your blog, then you might wanna think about making sure that people can review the content. This is something you see a lot on recipe blogs, for instance. And it can add another layer of richness and help Google to understand that this is valuable content that people really, really appreciate.

And I think if you bring all those things together, you can have some great, great, great results from on-page video SEO.