Over the past decade, the standards for how video is indexed by search engines have evolved, and as a core part of the platform, TwentyThree has been committed to offer full support for relevant video metadata as they've been introduced and gained prominence. This guide will help you optimize the content you publish for search engines, while also helping to maximize the user experience.

In particular, video content is optimized for SEO using, amongst others, video sitemaps, RDFa, OpenGraph, Schema.org, and JSON-LD. TwentyThree handles these with a transparent implementation—meaning that video metadata is automatically added to TwentyThree-hosted video landing pages and embed codes.

Video hub, Video landing pages, or SEO optimized embed codes.

With a video marketing platform like TwentyThree, you can host and run all your content from a video subdomain. We ourself run all of our content from the domain video.twentythree.net and our customer’s use their own subdomain to host content (example: video.branch.io).

This means that any video being shared on social media or embedded on a website refers back to your own domain. For instance, when the video is shared from here: https://video.twentythree.net/george-b-thomas-impulse-creative-1, we drive all traffic back to our video hub and with the branded header and calls-to-action we ensure that we control the journey of each video.

With TwentyThree you can also set up and run a designated video hub, or single video pages for each video, live event, or webinar. Both the hub and the single video page can be completely customized and styled to match your company brand and identity

TwentyThree SEO Configurations

TwentyThree is geared towards making it easy for search engines to find your content. Under “Inbound” you can find some additional SEO configurations.

1. Search Engine Indexing
   You can disable or enable search engine indexing. We strongly suggest that you do not disable this, as without indexing your content will not be searchable on any search engines.
2. SEO Optimised Embed Codes
   You can configure it so that SEO friendly embed codes—that include Schema.org objects and Microformat—are produced for your videos.
3. Video Sitemaps
   By using video sitemaps search engines will be able to more easily index your video content and might even display your videos directly on the search page. You can enable video sitemaps, allow search engines to embed your videos in results, and enable Rich Snippets to have additional information displayed alongside your search results.

Video SEO best practises

One of the biggest pitfalls to SEO success is the lack of good title, description or thumbnail for the content. To avoid this there are some best practise standards you want to consider following in order to maximize your SEO.

Hosting

One of the most important things to keep in mind is to host your videos on your own site. By embedding videos from YouTube or Vimeo, you are essentially giving those sites all the value your content could be bringing you. This means that your potential audience will be directed to YouTube for example, and will continue browsing on those sites. In the end, this means that you are losing out on traffic and possible conversions and even leading the audience to your competitor’s content. By using the TwentyThree Video Marketing Platform your content is hosted on your own video hub that can be integrated into your existing website with a custom domain. Learn more about setting up your custom domain here.

Keywords

Keywords are your target audience’s search queries. They are essentially the ideas and topics that define what your content is about. We can split keywords into two main categories: head keywords and long-tail keywords. Head keywords are broad and far-reaching—think “cat”—whereas long-tail keywords are a more specific combination of terms—” best harness for small cat”. Head keywords are appealing to use due to their high search volume, but you need to keep in mind that not only is it hard to rank with so much competition for the top, but they are also extremely vague. There is no way of knowing the intent of a person searching for “cat”—are they looking for cute cat videos, cat food or even heavy construction machinery? Long-tail keywords usually have a more clearly defined intent, as well as less competition for the top spot on Google. Here are some useful tips on researching keywords for your content.

Metadata

Metadata is the data that describes and gives information about your content. This, among others, includes titles, descriptions, transcripts and subtitles. This is not only what will get users to click on your contents, but also helps the search engines crawlers understand what your content is about. In order to optimize your metadata for search engines you want to make sure to use your keyword(s) liberally in all your metadata. Use your main keyword once in the video title, and try to use it more in both the description and your actual video along with other relevant keywords. In order to optimize the content of the video, you’ll want to upload subtitles to your video. This will help crawlers understand the topic of your content.

CTR optimization

You can improve the click-through rate of your content by adding compelling titles, attention grabbing descriptions and eye-catching thumbnails to your videos. It might be tempting to use clickbait titles and thumbnails in order to get your CTR up, but refrain from doing this as it will impact your audience retention rates. Your title should—as mentioned above—include your keyword, as well as compel your audience to click on the video. Same principle applies for your description, give your audience a reason to click on your video. This is especially important if you distribute your content to Facebook or YouTube for example, where there is an abundance of content. Finally, you want to make sure you have an eye-catching thumbnails. You can think of the thumbnail like a book cover. You can’t judge the quality of the content from the thumbnail, but it will surely make it more appealing with a good, custom thumbnail.

Relevant content around video

Providing your audience with content relevant to your videos can improve your retention rate, as well as their dwell time. You can suggest relevant videos on the endscreen or around your video, use CTAs with Actions or use Collectors to invite your audience to sign up for a newsletter.