SERPs in 2024 are certainly not what they were a few years ago, and should change even more in the coming months as Google aggressively implements SGE.
Defining an SEO strategy to capture SERP real estate is becoming increasingly complex due to recent additions like SGE, rich snippets, and other features.
Surprisingly, video search optimization, a method to dominate real estate, remains underutilized.
Let’s take a quick fitness-related search to see video’s SERP dominance in action:
Reason enough to read on, right? Well, there are two main approaches to hosting your video: YouTube and self-hosting, and each requires a different set of optimization techniques.
This article compares YouTube to self-hosted video, highlights key optimization factors for each, and discusses strategies for expanding the reach of your video content beyond views.
YouTube video optimization
I’ll start with this option because it’s the one I recommend my clients use for one simple reason: you get the benefits of organic search on both Google. i YouTube.
Another pro of YouTube hosting is that it’s easy to upload videos to the platform, much easier anyway than embedding them in your media, which you have to do with hosted videos.
YouTube also bears the brunt of content storage, while self-hosted videos can impact site speed and processing power.
YouTube optimization depends on a few main factors:
Keyword research that allows you to feed Google the right signals to show you for related queries. Video page optimization including headlines (the most important factor and should include your main keyword), descriptions, tags and thumbnails. Video structure that allows display time signals; and watch time optimization means that videos with longer watch times can rank higher, so the content should be engaging.
One of the things I like to remind my clients to do for YouTube optimization is to build a good list of YouTube channel subscribers, so when you launch a video, you can get subscriber engagement from from the first moment
Dig Deeper: How to Audit Your YouTube Channel for Brand Success
Self-hosted video optimization
The big advantage of hosting your videos is that you have full control over branding and cookies, which YouTube hosting compromises a bit.
This can have different levels of importance depending on the brand’s priorities, but the overall YouTube audience is a more powerful consideration.
Auto-hosted video optimization relies on some traditional SEO practices, such as structured data and sitemaps and making video crawlable and ranked in SERP video search features (as explained in these Google guidelines).
Veteran SEOs should have little trouble translating their skills from other forms of content to video SEO.
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How to get the most out of your video
Use it to extract content
You’ll notice that I’ve nowhere claimed that creating videos is easy (although artificial intelligence is producing options to make it easier). Whenever you invest in video (especially longer-form video), make sure you’re using it to produce a full range of content.
A couple of use cases I like to recommend include:
Choose any of several freeware services to provide a translation of your video (if you go with a YouTube video, YouTube will automatically create a transcript). Enter the transcript into ChatGPT and ask for some sort of blog content (as always with ChatGPT, you’ll need to refine your queries to get what you want, then mercilessly edit the results). Use featured clips from your video in discreet social media posts and tag guests to expand reach. If you have enough quotes to highlight, extract them into a “Top 10 Blog Highlights from {video},” which you should add to your next newsletter.
In these and similar cases, be sure to embed your video where it makes sense so you can capture more video views.
You can do this with YouTube or with self-hosted videos. This creates a virtuous cycle of content (eg video content translated into a blog with the video embedded).
Use video in your email campaigns
Adding video to your emails does more than make the content engaging; makes users more likely to check out the content in the first place. Simply adding “VIDEO” to email subject lines increases your open rate almost 20%according to Covideo.
Monetize video
If it’s difficult to track visual performance and impact on paid media, you can correctly guess that it’s even more difficult for organic video.
But you can use links (ideally UTM shortened links from a tool like Bitly) either to:
The YouTube description. Content close to a self-hosted video.
This helps people find landing pages or product pages that are a natural extension of the user journey. (For example, a running shoe store might create a video showing “the best shoes to correct pronation” and add the link to the best-selling model in the video.)
If your priority is to generate leads or revenue from your video, you can always sacrifice organic performance if you can limit it. Or you can try adding it in full to your YouTube channel, writing a blog post and including an excerpt, then asking the user for an email for the link to the full video (and waiting have the user do that instead of searching YouTube, hey, that might work).
Ultimately, the primary function of video will be to increase brand awareness, as measured by an increase in brand search. While the tactics above can help video drive people toward purchase, good video campaigns typically lead to more brand searches first and conversions second.
Check things like video views, YouTube search trends (you can see a map of video watch time by keyword), and related increases in brand search trends and corresponding conversions, and you’ll have at least some directional data on revenue impact.
Maximizing video impact for better search visibility
Ultimately, I see video optimization as a smart strategy to protect against any negative effects of the rapidly evolving SERP.
Start with great content that will keep users’ eyes on the screen, pull some levers to get your content displayed when they need it, and you can afford to worry a little less about the impact of SGE evolution .
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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