Pro-Speak: Interview With Lee Wilson

Can you give us a quick intro?

I’m Lee Wilson, Head of SEO for one of the UK’s top 10 search marketing and digital agencies (that’s Vertical Leap) and have been heading up digital marketing departments since the early 2000’s. I also contribute expert industry content covering a number of business areas including SEO, digital advertising, business marketing and more.

In 2017 I had my first solely authored industry book published ‘Tactical SEO – The theory and practice of search marketing’.

Let’s talk about Video SEO. How would you explain it?

Optimising for video (or video search engine optimisation) enables people to rank in often prominent integrated content type search results as well as under the specific ‘videos’ search vertical. A primary goal of video SEO is enabling your video content to be understood, indexed and ranked for relevant search queries.

Can you give 3 hacks to our readers that they can self-implement?

1. Use YouTube features to place and promote videos, auto-generate video transcripts to influence search and use the YouTube embed code to position your videos effectively on your own website, preferably a landing page.

2. Speaking of landing pages, ensure your video landing pages have clearly structured content supporting the video. The supporting content should introduce the visitors to what the video is about, entice users to click/watch the video, and ideally encourage video sharing.

3. Make the most out of the video embed code. Areas like title and description can assist with video understanding and therefore boost ranking.

As a bonus tip, keep your videos short, break longer videos into a series, and ensure that the videos have a specific purpose and intended user action.

As an SEO expert, what kind of pages do you think need a video? Why?

Videos are great explainers (especially for the ‘how to’ type queries) as well as educators (like for the ‘what is/what are/who is/how does’ type queries).

Any content that requires users to have existing knowledge to make an informed decision should include easy facilitation of information sharing and digestion of knowledge – something videos are great for.

According to Video SEO, which kind of video can be called an awesome video?

An awesome video is something that delivers on its initial objective. If the video was intended to generate brand or product/service awareness, metrics to consider might typically include impressions, rankings, traffic, goals completions and sales.

For me an awesome video is something that I can relate to, remember, and chat about without hesitation. Awesome videos are often widely shared, cited in authoritative external content (without promotion) and delivering huge volumes of non-paid and natural views.

Any quick takeaway to conclude with?

Video SEO does not have to be a daunting task – if you have already created your videos, video SEO is about refining them for the audience and making them easier to find, rank and be watched.

A large part of video SEO is about doing the basics right and using common sense. After that, it’s all about making use of the new data-driven insights to refine your optimisation efforts and help the videos contribute more towards your business goals and objectives.