On-page Video SEO – Whiteboard Friday

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.