Make sure your veterinary video is seen

Chaiphorn/stock.adobe.comVideo marketing is a critical component of digital marketing today, but many veterinary practices doing video ignore search engine optimization of those videos, which renders them largely unseen by potential clients. SEO on these educational and promotional videos makes a big difference, regardless of how well-produced or snazzy the video content is. Without strong SEO, video can fail to reach your target audience or generate sufficient views.

What counts in veterinary video SEO?

Video SEO is a means of putting names to faces. Because search engines can't comprehend words or images in videos, you can help those search engines-and your hoped-for pet-owning viewers-find videos by optimizing the text attached to them.

You can achieve this goal by putting both the video and its transcript on the same page. This approach has two big benefits:

• Search engines can index the content because they can now “read” the video and understand the content.

• Some of your target audience prefers not to watch videos. By adding text to a video, you maintain the visual element on the web page (yay!) while catering to your target audience's preferences (double yay!).

These principles are important to remember when you use videos on both your own website as well as social media channels. Videos must also be hosted on YouTube and other similar third-party video sites, as they act as a vital factor in making video SEO successful. Google-owned YouTube is the leading site hosting video content right now; any video not on YouTube could suffer in terms of search rankings.

Best practices for video SEO

Here are a few simple tips that can help you connect with potential clients while increasing the reach of your videos.

Get creative with your text. When creating transcripts for videos, include scene descriptions, captions and other relevant factors, rather than just depending on simple tags. Better text makes it easier for search engines to find a video and put it in the right place to allow it to perform better. Well-written content, good descriptions and comprehensive titles for videos can help improve your search engine rankings. To attract more views, you need to provide a good viewing experience for both pet owners and search engines. It's also a good to promote the videos on social media (and get people to click on them) and reference videos in your blog posts. Make sure you fully explain why the content is relevant to people who see your mention so you can get more users to hit “play.”

Flash is out

Flash was great for its time, but I don't advise using it as a format for video anymore. Search engines prefer more modern formats and can't adequately “read” videos built on Flash. Also, many web browsers today are no longer compatible with Flash video viewing.

Invest in A/B testing. In these experiments, users are shown two or more variants of the same web page at random. Analysis of which variants do better helps you learn what to do in the future. With the help of A/B tests linked either to YouTube or your practice's website, you can better identify the creative, visual approach that will work for you.

Don't obsess over length. Worried your videos are long? Editing out content just for the sake of making a short video won't help. Videos that are unique, informative and useful don't need to be short. Your video titles, however, should be. People who aren't interested in your video title won't click on your video anyway, and those who are interested may prefer longer videos that tell the whole story. Don't skip something important and deprive your curious viewer of relevant information.

A comprehensive video SEO strategy can ensure that the videos you work on reach your target audience and improve engagement. Without investing at all in video SEO, your time spent filming and editing could be wasted.

Naren Arulrajah is president and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, a complete internet marketing company that focuses on SEO, social media, marketing education and online reputations for practice owners.