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PAUL RITTER: Hi.
And welcome to this edition of Video Best Practices series
from InterActive Media Strategies.
I'm your host, Paul Ritter.
Today's webcast is focused on video SEO best practices.
And I'm pleased to be joined by Shannon Murphy, Content
Marketing Manager with 3Play Media.
Hi, Shannon.
Thanks for joining me today.
SHANNON MURPHY: Hi, Paul.
How are you?
PAUL RITTER: I'm great.
Good to talk with you again.
Before we get started on some of the topics of video SEO
best practices that we're covering today, can you tell
us a little bit about 3Play Media and the types of
products and services that the company offers?
SHANNON MURPHY: Certainly.
3Play Media is a closed captioning and transcription
service for online video.
We also offer subtitles.
Essentially, our mission is to make video as accessible,
searchable, and SEO-friendly as possible.
And we integrate with all of the major video platforms,
including YouTube, Ooyala, Brightcove, Vimeo, Wistia and
many, many others.
PAUL RITTER: In a recent survey by the Web Video
Marketing Council in conjunction with ReelSEO, more
than 600 respondents provided their input on the use of
online video for a variety of applications at their
organizations.
The survey results provide a lot of insights into the many
ways that web video is being used and the types of best
practices that companies are using to achieve success with
their online video initiatives.
Here, we see an overview of the responses from the survey
for the question about strategies and tactics being
used for optimizing videos and deploying best practices for
achieving results with search engine optimization or SEO
strategies.
Results from the 600 plus respondents of the survey show
that 77% are tagging their online videos with keywords.
51% are posting video content to their organization's blog.
And 40% are annotating videos with details about the
content, the duration and other information.
However, only 27% of the respondents in the survey are
providing video transcript for the videos on their websites.
I think this shows that there's really a significant
opportunity for companies to take more steps to really help
drive better SEO results and provide useful tools for their
video viewers by leveraging things such as
transcripts and captions.
Shannon, can you talk a little bit about why transcripts can
be so important and how they really provide a lot of value
in terms of SEO benefits?
SHANNON MURPHY: Well, transcripts are important for
video SEO, essentially, because search engines can't
watch the video.
So the crux of SEO is that it's text-driven.
You're creating page titles, headers, links all around a
keyword focus for the hopes that search engines are going
to find and rank your page for that keyword.
If you make a video around a subject, but you don't have
the transcript, then you don't have any of that keyword
potency to tell the search engines what's on this page.
You can add a title or a video description.
But the transcript really bridges the gap between video
and search engines to give you the most potency in
terms of video SEO.
PAUL RITTER: Shannon, what's the best way to create and to
publish transcripts in terms of specific strategies and
some of the best practices that companies can follow?
SHANNON MURPHY: Certainly.
Well, for longer transcripts, for video that's probably five
minutes or more, it's really great to paginate out your
transcripts--
so providing a link to the plain transcript from that
video and then paginating it out based off of the content.
You know that, during videos, subject matter
will naturally change.
So it's great to be able to create pages with titles and
headers that focus in on that specific subject matter.
So from a user perspective, I don't go and view just a plain
transcript that's black and white and kind of boring.
As a user, I can skim headings and dive into
the contact I need.
So you would paginate.
You would want to build out your titles and headers to be
keyword relevant to the content on that page.
But also, it's important throughout that transcript to
consider placing links, so relevant anchor text to other
content that you have on your site
linking to those resources.
That way you're not marooning the transcript, in terms of
the transcript within your site structure.
It's well-connected to your whole site.
And you don't necessarily have to have a lot of
inbound links to it.
I think the video would be the main focus.
But making sure that, if somebody were to read the
transcript and perhaps they come across a term or a
resource within that, that it's linked to
the appropriate resource.
It's just a lot better for the user experience, which is what
Google and other search engines are really focused on
when it comes to SEO.
PAUL RITTER: Those are really some great tips and best
practices that I think a lot of people will find both
interesting and really practical for their own video
initiatives.
Thanks a lot, Shannon, for sharing some of your thoughts
and insights on video SEO best practices and ways that
companies can really leverage the use of video transcripts
and captions.
It's been great chatting with you.
And I look forward to our next opportunity to explore more
subjects related to video SEO strategies in the future.
SHANNON MURPHY: Yes.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
PAUL RITTER: And thanks to all of you for watching today's
webcast that's part of the Video Best Practices series
from InteractiveMedia Strategies.
I'm Paul Ritter.
And we'll see you next time.
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