1. Choose the right hosting based on your goal.
Although we could be talking about the delights of YouTube all day, the truth is that in order to position one of your pages (from your hotel website or blog) with a video rich snippet, we recommend you not to use this platform as your hosting provider. That is, if your goal is improving your SEO by positioning your videos, YouTube is not your best chance.
Think about it, this platform is the second most used ‘search engine’ among Internet users and what you want is to appear in Google SERPs with a video rich snippet, not compete in positioning with YouTube, right? And the same goes for a Vimeo free account. For this reason, you must think what your objective is and in order to reach it, create the content, in this case the specific video that you are going to position.
So, what should you do? If you didn’t even had the chance to show your video on your website, don’t think about the big platform and place it on your pages to ensure at least the right traffic. Then, you can rely on paid hosting solutions. There are many options but here we show you two that we find more interesting:
- Vimeo Pro. This is one of the most affordable yet reliable solutions you can find on the Internet and that allows total visibility in search engines. It is a secure hosting with a good value for money for what it offers. Even if it doesn’t have an XML sitemap generator you will get custom HTML5 players, you could also upload up to 20 GB per week free of ads, analyse your videos' performance with statistics and reports, etc.
- Wistia. This is one of the best solutions that you will be able to find if your intention is to generate content (video) that reinforces an Inbound marketing strategy (including SEO positioning). Their service is great because Wistia's integrated codes are designed to automatically optimize the videos on your website for search engines. Wistia also offers other functionalities as well as integrations with platforms such as HubSpot. A win-win!
On the other hand, you could also choose to host the videos directly on your hotel website. In this case, if you don’t use your own services, be sure to use cloud solutions like Amazon S3 or MetaCDN to host your videos. Also, if you have chosen one of these options remember to compress your videos so that they don’t weigh too much.
2. Follow the next tips to integrate your videos.
Tip # 1. If you embed a video in your domain, that is, if you add it to any of your pages, make sure no one else can copy it, and that includes yourself. Don’t generate duplicate content; each video or each piece of content has a purpose, a goal. If yours is getting positioned with that video, you have to keep in mind that if it only appears in one place (your website), Google can only find it there.
In addition, if this video is only available on one of your hotel's web pages, users who are attracted to it (your potential guests) will only be able to watch it where you are embedding it. This way you will boost the chances of user conversion.
Watch out! Tip # 2. Google crawlers are not very good indexing iFrames so you should embed the video with HTML5, jQuery or JavaScript. The two hosting solutions we talked about in the previous step already give you this option. And if you use your own code to do it you could use Video JS or Kaltura HTML5, which are free tools.
And tip # 3 is not to flood your pages by adding multiple videos. In fact, it’s better just embedding one video on the page you would like to boost the ranking with a rich video snippet. That way Google would only be indexing just that particular video, increasing your chances. Make sure that there are other content formats in addition to a video and that it is of quality too! Pages working different content formats often have a better positioning in the SERPs as they are worthy for those consumers who prefer video and those who don’t.
3. Be sure to create a Video XML Sitemap.
A video XML sitemap is what will allow search engines like Google to have access to the video thumbnail, raw file and other data. Take a look at the Google guide where sitemap elements are explained in detail.
4. Choose the right keywords for your target.
Now that we have talked about the more technical aspects, it is about time to discuss about what we most identify as SEO. And is that your video, like any other content, needs to be conceived for a specific target and with a keyword that corresponds to the needs of this target.
Think about what you offer and to whom you offer it. To decide the right terms you can follow the same exercise as with the text. Specifically, to try to get a rich video snippet you can investigate in terms (related to the tourism and travel sector) that have managed to position a video in the SERPs.
As you can see, there are terms that get a better ranking than others. But be careful when trying to position short-tailed keywords that have a great competition like the "booking" or "holidays". These terms alone would be almost impossible to rank for. For this reason you should think of long tail keyword to include in the title and description of your video.
There are words that you could include and that work in general. For example, if you make destination videos you can include terms like "how to", "what is" or "explanation"; and for the rooms, "demonstration".
Once you have chosen the right keyword for your audience, remember that if your goal, besides positioning, is also to convert, the video has to be as less advertising as possible. Sell experiences, yes. But from an educational perspective, from an Inbound orientation.
