Videos have become a key aspect of content marketing for businesses, but with millions of them being uploaded to YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and individual websites every day, standing out is harder than ever. 

You don’t want to spend time creating informative content only for it to go to waste because your audience can’t find it. With this in mind, we’ve compiled this guide to ensure your videos are SEO-friendly, and that they help rather than hinder your content strategy.

Do Videos Boost SEO?

YouTube, which is owned by Google, is the second-largest search engine in the world. As a result, it should be considered in your SEO strategy. YouTube videos tend to rank higher than articles and other text content in search results, especially if they’re optimized with the right keywords and descriptions – even those generated by AI. 

Professional and targeted, videos represent a fantastic opportunity to boost engagement, and to increase the visibility of your content and your brand. 

Videos can be used in a variety of ways, including:

• Provide demonstrations of your products or services, from troubleshooting common problems to helping them get the most out of their purchase
• Give customers a behind-the-scenes picture of your business and team
• Cover industry news and trends, or share your experts’ opinions, insights, and advice
• Drum up excitement and interest for upcoming events, company news, or product launches 

To make sure your videos aren’t languishing on your site and are getting the views they deserve, it’s vital to optimize them.

Video SEO Best Practices

1. Optimize Titles and Descriptions

Just as Google analyzes the text in a blog or a webpage for relevant keywords, the title of your video is crucial for Google to understand what it covers. Make sure that your primary keyword is included naturally in the title, and keep the title under 60 characters to avoid search engines truncating it.

Modifiers like the year, level, or version can help to signal specific subjects. You also want to tailor your titles to each platform.  

For YouTube videos, put keywords in the filename, title, description, and tags. Video descriptions can be up to 5,000 characters, so you have lots of room for natural keyword usage. 

For Instagram, focus on clear, engaging captions with strategic use of keywords, hashtags and emojis to boost visibility and interaction. It’s also a good idea to optimize your profile name and bio, since both are searchable.

For TikTok, prioritize short, attention-grabbing titles that align with trending content and encourage engagement. You also want to focus on hashtags over keywords to increase discoverability.

Be sure to adapt your tone and format to suit platform-specific algorithms and audience behavior, enhancing discoverability and performance. Aim to place the most important keywords as near to the beginning of the title as possible so they’re more visible. 

A well-optimized title will improve click-through rates for your content and that, in turn, will increase rankings.

2. Use Supported Video Types

Commonly overlooked but incredibly important for rankings is the file type. To be eligible for video features, Google requires your video to be in the following formats: 3GP, 3G2, ASF, AVI, DivX, M2V, M3U, M3U8, M4V, MKV, MOV, MP4, MPEG, OGV, QVT, RAM, RM, VOB, WebM, WMV, and XAP.

MPB, a platform for buying and selling used videography and photography equipment, suggests using “a video container, also known as a multimedia container or a wrapper, [which] is a file format that encapsulates various types of digital media data, including video, audio, subtitles and metadata.

“The primary purpose of a video container is to provide a standardized way to package and store these different media components within a single file”. The container stores important data such as subtitles, thumbnail images, bookmarks and VR data, so it’s a vital component for your video content.

3. Create Engaging Thumbnails

Thumbnails help your video stand out among a sea of others on the same topic, so if you want to encourage clicks, you need to create an attention-grabbing image. Like meta descriptions for articles, thumbnail images aren’t a direct ranking factor – but they do help you earn clicks, and more traffic can in turn help your video rank higher.  

How you’ll create a thumbnail image depends on your niche, so look to leaders in your industry for inspiration. For example, a business in the tech space might create a thumbnail of close-up shots of a product featured in the video, while a travel firm might use a striking image of a scenic destination to engage audiences.

Make sure your lead image makes a great first impression. Use high-resolution shots and bold text that highlight key specifications or features, or reaction faces that emulate what you want your viewers to feel. 

This is something Western Community College does so well, using clear photos, contrast, and bold text that speaks to potential viewers.

4. Include Key Moments and Chapters

Breaking your video up into segments or chapters can help with user engagement because your users can jump to the moments that are most relevant to them for a better user experience. 

The Reconciliation and Responsible Investment Institute does this brilliantly, breaking down in-depth videos like webinars into actionable, digestible content.

Google points out “if your video is hosted on YouTube, Google Search may automatically enable key moments for your video based on the video description on YouTube, and you may not have to mark specific timestamps in your YouTube description. However, you can tell us more explicitly about the important points in your video and we will prefer that information”. 

Embedding it on your site? You can still enable key moments by clipping the structured data to specify the exact start and end time for each segment and the label to display, or use SeekToAction schema markup so Google can identify the key moments and link to these points for you.

5. Build Links to Pages with Videos

Ranking pages, and your site overall, highly in the SERPs can be really difficult if you rely purely on text content. Video offers unique SEO advantages that standard web pages can’t match, especially when you remember that YouTube is the second largest search engine on the web.

Videos provide multiple pathways to drive traffic, from embedded clickable links in your video descriptions, like the Oliver Tourism Association, to pop-up annotations and cards that will direct viewers to your website or including end screens with calls-to-action, like this example from Circular Materials. 

These interactive elements create direct traffic funnels from Youtube to your site, and when your videos rank well here, they also appear more frequently in Google’s video carousel which broadens your reach even further.

Video content also generates engagement signals that Google values highly, like watch time, comments, shares, and click-through rates. These send strong relevance signals to search engines and, unlike static text pages that users might quickly bounce from, videos keep visitors engaged longer. This extended engagement time signals to Google that your content provides genuine value.

6. Add Transcriptions and Closed Captions

While accessibility isn’t a direct ranking factor, it is key for SEO because it improves the user experience for as many people as possible. 

On-page SEO elements like alt text, clear headings, and structured content serve double duty because they benefit search engines and viewers. Likewise, video transcriptions and closed captions will help search engines better understand what your video is about, and will improve the chances of it appearing in relevant search results—as well as helping those with disabilities to consume your content. 

You could even make the text part of the video itself, adding a new dimension to the design, like this example from the Vancouver Foundation.

As an added bonus, you can turn a transcript of a video into a blog post to get two pieces of content out of it. 

Videos can help you create a better and more personal user experience for your audience and are a valuable way to interact with your prospective and current customers by providing them with information in a more digestible way. These tips will help you make the most of video SEO so more people can view your content and get to know your brand.