8 Best SEO practices for a video streaming platform

We can’t deny the fact that content is the king but in today’s competitive world, the OTT platform can not only rely on quality content. They also need to ensure their content is reaching the target audience. Furthermore, it is highly crucial that their audience can reach the platform easily and that can be done by enabling search engines to discover and rank your OTT platform at the top. You need to adopt good SEO practices to ensure your streaming service gets a good ranking amongst others. 

Through SEO optimization of your OTT platform, your excellent video library will be visible and grow your audience. Video SEO plays the main role in ranking the OTT platform and getting into the sights of your potential subscribers. The success or failure of an OTT service mainly relies on SEO. It plays a significant role in taking your video platform to the right kind of audience. Did you know? In 2020, approximately 2.13 billion people used over-the-top (OTT) video worldwide

As we all know keywords play a major role in SEO optimization. The process begins with finding and optimizing the right keywords. Many of us are already doing it. Finding the best keywords is a very difficult job to optimize your OTT platform. You should be critically working on what your users type to find the content on the search engine. There are also many online tools available in the market from which you can get help and find keywords including Google’s Keyword Planner, Google Trends, or some other Video Keyword Tools. You can find the Top keywords from here according to your niche. You can also do competitor analysis on what keywords they are working on for optimizing their content. After getting the bunch of words you have to ensure that they are well used in your content like they should be used in the description, titles, naming the videos, and scattered them all over the content. By knowing the keywords, you can also get an idea of your target audience and build more content around them.

While running an OTT platform it is very crucial how you name your file because there is a huge number of video files in your library. So, here the keyword work begins. You should be saving the file with the right keyword you want to optimize. Don’t save the file with some default name like “video112.mp4” etc. You should make sure that the name matches the title of the video and every word should be separated by a hyphen. That’s how a search engine will recognize your videos and it will be easier for your users also to find out what they are looking for.

You can also get help from the Google webmaster tool “ Google Webmaster’s Complete Guide to video indexing. Search engines do not crawl all videos, so your videos should be in the following formats – .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .m4v, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv, .swf.

Your Anchor texts also play an important role in the SEO game. You should optimize your anchor texts. Let’s take an example to understand it. Always use keywords to hyperlink the text instead of using the old approach like “for more information” Instead of writing this, you can use “for Vodlix today and launch your OTT platform. 

You can improve two things by following this approach. First, you can improve the quality of links, and second, your keywords will get more weightage in search engines.

You need to optimize your video metadata so that search engines know what your videos are about, so it can show your stuff when someone does a relevant search. 

Here are a few steps from which you can optimize your Metadata.

• Title Tags must be attractive and short. Keep your title tags in between 50-60 words to get better results. The first thing users see is the title tag so make sure you use the relevant keyword so that this section can be optimized.

• Description tags In this section you describe your video. Make sure you use 1 or 2 keywords in it. It could be a little longer but don’t exceed 160 characters.

• Video tags These tags are very important. It will help you gain relevant traffic, but make sure you don’t go spammy here. You need to tag the locations and brands and can mention the cast and crew by tagging them. Use 1 or 2 relevant keywords instead of going irrelevant and synonyms.

Thumbs play an important role in providing information about the video. It’s the very first thing a user notices. If the thumbnail will be eye eye-catching and attractive and provides relevant information about the video then there will be more chance that the user will open that video. It should give a clear message you can add the right amount of Keywords in it to optimize it.

To rank up your OTT platform sitemap plays a crucial role. You should create a video sitemap to rank it up in the search engine. Sitemaps give you the option to present your video’s title and descriptions with some more particular information like an indication of country blocking, platform limits, or live streams, which will ultimately help rank your videos higher. After creating a sitemap always add it to the robots.txt file. To get better indexing you should add video transcripts wherever needed.

To rank up your content in search engines you need to create snippets that will enhance your appearance in search results. By adding good snippets users can see all related information at the very first look and that will make good chances to open the link. Your snippet link should be appropriate it should open the right video that matches the details. There are many tools available online that can help you generate Video Schema and Rich Snippets to aid this process.

It is always suggested to upload the content on your player but to generate backlinks you can upload the trailers of your long movies on different other sites like Youtube, Vimeo, Tune, and Dailymotion and you can embed the videos to your site.

Search engine optimization is all about taking small consistent steps and ensuring that your video platform is well structured so that viewers can find you easily. SEO may require you to make some constant efforts to appear on top searches, but you should never forget that ultimately content is the real king. If your platform offers entertaining and useful content, subscribers will certainly be multifold when you make efforts to reach them using all the right techniques.

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