Video SEO: Complete Guide to Optimize Videos for Search

When your marketing team creates webinars, tutorials, and product demos, you want to make sure potential customers can easily find and watch your video content. If competitors' videos routinely outrank yours, it creates a visibility gap that costs you revenue.

Video SEO is the key to making your video content more visible so it generates more engagement, leads, and conversions. In this guide, I'll explain how video SEO works, how we approach it at Livestorm, and which optimization tactics work best for video content.

Key takeaways:

• Video SEO helps your content rank higher in Google and YouTube search results, attracting more views and potentially driving more traffic to your business.
• Video content now appears across multiple Google SERP features beyond traditional search results, including AI overviews and video carousels, making SEO more important than ever.
• Together, hosting video content on YouTube, embedding it on your website, and repurposing it across marketing channels can help you maximize reach across different search contexts.

What is video SEO?

Video SEO is the practice of making your video content rank higher in search engine results. It involves tactics that help search engines index and understand your content — making them more likely to display your videos in relevant searches.

Good video SEO increases the chance of your content appearing near the top of relevant Google and YouTube search results. The higher your videos rank, the better they can drive views, engagement, and conversions.

Where videos appear in search results

Video content typically appears in a few key locations in search results.
In Google search results, videos often appear in video carousels. Like this Livestorm video, which appears in the video carousel for the search query "how to host a webinar:"

They can also appear in Google AI overviews, which synthesize a response to the search query. Like this Livestorm video that appears in the AI overview for "what is a webinar:"

Additionally, videos appear throughout YouTube search results. For example, this Livestorm video appears in YouTube results for the query "evergreen webinars:"

Why video SEO matters for your business

When you optimize your videos for search, you increase their visibility and improve how they rank in search results. This leads to a range of benefits for your business:

• Increases brand awareness: When your videos rank better for relevant searches, they make your brand more visible and help you reach a larger and more relevant audience.
• Contributes to lead generation: Greater reach can lead to more clicks and views, which can improve brand awareness, generate leads, and drive conversions for your business.
• Creates a competitive advantage: When your marketing team focuses on video SEO while competitors ignore it, you can easily outrank other brands in your space.

11 ways to improve your video SEO and boost visibility

Use these tactics to optimize videos for search and make your content easier to discover.

1. Do keyword research to identify video-ready topics

Keyword research for video SEO helps you find terms and phrases that trigger videos in search results. Use an SEO tool like Semrush to identify the right keywords to use.

For example, this Semrush search engine results page (SERP) analysis confirms that the keyword "what is a webinar" features video results.

Based on these findings, you could consider "what is a webinar" to be a video-ready topic. From there, you could plan to produce a great video on the topic.

To build out an initial video SEO strategy, plan to come up with a list of 10 to 15 keywords in your niche. Prioritize keywords with higher search volume to maximize your potential reach.

2. Create high-quality video content

The better your videos are, the longer they keep viewers engaged. Search engines consider engagement a positive signal, meaning it can help with video optimization.

Making engaging high-quality content is an art and a science. But it starts with investing in quality equipment and learning the basics of scripting, shooting, and editing.

Start with these best practices:

• Script your videos. Plan out the main points and structure your video content to deliver a clear message.
• Use the best equipment available. Invest in the best lighting, the right microphones, and the ideal cameras to make your videos enjoyable for viewers to watch.
• Edit with purpose. Add a hook to the beginning of each video to capture attention right away. Include transitions between sections, and remove mistakes or unnecessary parts.
• Add music and sound effects. Add background music during sections with no dialogue, and insert sound effects during transitions.
• Keep video content concise. Eliminate any empty space in your video content to improve pacing and decrease the chance of viewers clicking away.

3. Use the right video hosting platform

The video hosting platform you choose affects search visibility, user experience, and technical SEO performance. Different platforms give you varying levels of SEO control and integration capabilities.

We typically prefer YouTube for video hosting. Not only does YouTube support both short- and long-form videos, but it also improves reach and visibility in search engines like Google.

Plus, you can easily embed YouTube videos on your site, further improving your SEO efforts. For example, Livestorm content like the blog post below often includes embedded videos to add more context to the topic.

4. Include relevant keywords in video titles and descriptions

Placing the right keywords in video titles and descriptions helps search engines understand your video content and surface it in relevant searches. Keywords also help your audience learn what your content is about so they know if it's likely to answer their question or solve their problem.

Adding the right keywords and tags to your video content can improve click-through rates (CTR) and views. Both of these metrics signal engagement, which can improve how your videos rank.

For example, Livestorm's video on evergreen webinars includes the keyword at the beginning of the title and naturally throughout the description.

5. Add chapters and timestamps to your video content

When producing Livestorm video content, we start with keyword research. Then, we write clear, natural summaries — ideally with timestamps or bullet points. It’s all about helping users and Google quickly understand what the video covers.

Timestamps appear in your video description. These clickable elements improve the user experience by allowing viewers to navigate directly to the content they want to see. This helps viewers get more value from your content, and it can improve video engagement.

Think about it this way. If a viewer can't easily navigate your video, they might click away after only a few seconds of watch time. But if they can find what they want, they'll be more likely to stay and engage.

However, this information isn't just for viewers. Search engines often turn this structured data into rich snippets with clickable timestamps.

When chapters appear in search results, they give viewers more context and more opportunities to click. This can enhance video search and increase video views.

6. Generate video transcripts and captions

Video transcripts and captions improve accessibility for search engines and viewers alike. While search engines can't watch your videos, they can crawl text-based transcripts.

As a result, transcripts help search engines understand your content and provide more opportunities for keyword rankings.

When you use a video platform like Livestorm to record content, you don't have to worry about creating transcripts manually. Instead, our webinar software automatically generates transcripts, which display in real time and in video replays.

7. Design video thumbnails that stop the scroll

Great video titles and descriptions tell viewers what your content is about. But an eye-catching thumbnail shows viewers what the video is about — often conveying the message faster.

Images tend to communicate concepts more effectively, according to picture-superiority effect. So when you need to grab attention quickly on a competitive search results page, you need a compelling thumbnail.

The best thumbnails:

• Show a glimpse of the video topic so viewers can decide if the content is relevant
• Inspire curiosity and targets a pain point, making viewers want to click
• Align with your brand identity so viewers can easily spot your content

For example, Livestorm's video thumbnails use a consistent design that includes the host's headshot and the video title as a text overlay.

8. Embed videos on your website using structured data

So far, we’ve mainly focused on how to SEO YouTube videos. But YouTube is just one aspect of a complete SEO strategy. I also recommend embedding videos on your website where they're relevant.

But don't make this common mistake: with video SEO, marketing teams often just drop a video into a webpage and expect magic — without context, transcript, or schema.

Here's what to do instead. At Livestorm, we always add supporting content to the page and make sure Google can actually index the video. We add video schema, a type of structured data markup that helps search engines understand what the video is about so they can display it in search results.

Here's an example that shows how we embedded a video about how to repurpose webinar content in a blog post about the same topic:

Google now understands video content better, especially in context. We’ve seen big wins by aligning our videos with specific keyword themes like webinars and using proper markup to appear in video snippets.

It’s not just about having a video anymore. Instead, it’s about where and how it’s used on the page.

Also, with AI overviews becoming more and more common, videos with transcriptions, schema, and relevant context are more likely to be understood by LLMs powering AI overviews.

Google’s models are getting better at parsing video context through transcripts and metadata. The more you help them, the better your chances of inclusion.

9. Build backlinks to your video content

Backlinks from authoritative websites tell search engines that your video content is valuable and trustworthy. This can improve your ranking potential and drive more traffic to your videos.

High-quality video content often attracts backlinks naturally. As an SEO expert, you can also build backlinks by reaching out to websites with relevant content that would benefit from a link to your video.

Use an SEO tool like Semrush to monitor your backlink portfolio. It automatically generates lists of link sources and quality, making it easier to measure your success.

10. Repurpose your videos for better visibility

When you repurpose videos, you get more value from the content and create more opportunities for it to appear in search. For example, one webinar can fuel blog posts, product pages, FAQs — you name it.

This is why repurposing is key to a successful video marketing strategy.

At Livestorm, we use videos across different content formats and channels, including our website and social media platforms. This helps us grab extra visibility in search, even if we aren't number one for every query.

11. Check your video analytics regularly

Effective video optimization for SEO isn't about making one-time changes to your content or strategy. Instead, it involves improving elements and making continuous changes over time.

Review your video analytics regularly (e.g., weekly or monthly) to see what's getting views and what's ranking. Then, use the insights to adjust your marketing strategy.

Our video team looks at a mix of metrics, including:

• Video snippet views on YouTube
• Organic ranking on the SERP
• Watch time and other engagement metrics
• Leads from video content

Frequently asked questions about video SEO

What does SEO mean?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It involves optimizing or improving content to make it more visible in search results. Video SEO helps search engines like YouTube and Google understand what your content is about so they can include it in results for relevant search queries.

What is an SEO-friendly video?

An SEO-friendly video is a piece of content that's easy for search engines to understand and viewers to watch. It follows a set of best practices, including using a clear title, a relevant description, a transcript, and chapters. It also uses technical SEO tactics to improve discoverability.

How do you SEO your video?

SEO for video content starts with keyword research. Once you know what your audience is looking for, incorporate relevant keywords into the video title and description. Then, add video chapters and a transcript. Upload an eye-catching thumbnail and add structured data when embedding videos on your website.