Most UK businesses that make video publish it on a YouTube channel, on their own website, or both. YouTube and video SEO is the work of making those videos easy to find, both in YouTube’s own search and suggestions and in Google, where videos appear as thumbnails, in the video tab and as key moments that jump straight to the right part of a clip. I look at how your videos are planned, titled, described, captioned, hosted and marked up, then fix what stops them being found.
What video SEO changes for a business
A video that nobody finds costs the same to make as one that brings in enquiries for years. The difference is rarely the camera. It is usually whether the video answers something people actually search for, and whether YouTube and Google can tell what it is about. A kitchen fitter in Leeds showing how a worktop is templated, an accountant in Bristol explaining Making Tax Digital, or an online shop demonstrating how a product fits together are all answering real questions. Each can keep being found long after the upload date, but only if the title, description, chapters and page around it say clearly what the viewer will get.
On YouTube, discovery depends heavily on how viewers respond: whether they click when the video is shown, and how long they keep watching. Watch time and the impressions click-through rate in YouTube Studio tell you more about a video’s prospects than its view count does. In Google, the question is more technical: whether the page holding the video is indexed, whether the video is the main content of that page, and whether Google can fetch the video and a thumbnail. Google now shows video thumbnails in its main results mostly for pages where the video is the main thing on the page, so a clip tucked under a long article rarely earns a video result.
What it does not change: video SEO cannot make a weak or off-topic video popular, and it does not buy views. If you want guaranteed reach to a defined audience next week, that is paid media, and YouTube advertising is the right service for it.
Who this service suits
- Businesses already publishing video regularly whose views have stalled, or whose videos do not appear when they search for the topic themselves.
- Firms that sell something people need to see working: trades, training providers, software, equipment, and ecommerce products that raise “how does it fit” questions.
- Websites with product demos, explainers or webinar recordings embedded on pages that never show a video result in Google.
- Marketing teams planning a new channel who want the topics chosen from search demand rather than from a brainstorm.
It suits a business less well if it has one or two videos and no plan to make more. In that case the better spend is usually on the pages themselves, through content SEO and strategy, with video added where a page clearly needs it.
What the work covers
On YouTube
- Topic research. Finding the questions your customers type into YouTube and Google, using YouTube’s own search suggestions, the search terms report in YouTube Studio and wider keyword research, so each video targets one clear need.
- Titles and thumbnails. Titles that say what the viewer gets in plain words, with the searched phrase near the start, and thumbnails that are readable at phone size. I suggest options to test rather than rely on one guess.
- Descriptions and chapters. First two lines that make sense on their own, then timestamps that become chapters. YouTube chapters also feed the key moments Google shows in its results.
- Captions. Correcting automatic captions, especially for names, products and place names, which automatic captioning gets wrong most often. Accurate captions help viewers watching with the sound off and give search engines a clean text version.
- Channel structure. Playlists grouped by topic, end screens and cards that lead to the next relevant video, and a channel page that explains who the channel is for.
On your website
- Watch pages. Deciding which videos deserve a page of their own, where the video is the main content, with a written summary or transcript underneath.
- Structured data. VideoObject schema with the title, description, thumbnail, upload date and duration, plus key moments markup where it fits. Larger sites often need wider work through schema markup and structured data.
- Video sitemaps. A video sitemap or video entries in your existing sitemap, so Google finds self-hosted videos it might otherwise miss.
- Speed. Embedded players are heavy. Loading the player only when someone presses play, a form of lazy loading, keeps a page with video from dragging down its Core Web Vitals.
- Hosting choices. YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia or your own server each change which URL Google is likely to show for the video. I explain the trade-off for your goals before anything is moved.
How I run a video SEO project
- Review. I look at your channel analytics, your Search Console video indexing report and the pages where videos are embedded, and list what is blocking discovery.
- Topic plan. I map the questions worth answering with video to the videos you have and the ones you could make, and flag where an existing video should be retitled rather than remade.
- Fix the back catalogue. Titles, descriptions, chapters, captions and playlists on the videos most likely to respond, starting with those that already get impressions.
- Website changes. Watch pages, markup, sitemaps and player loading, either done by me or written up for your developer.
- Brief new videos. A short brief per planned video: the search it answers, the title, what the first 30 seconds must cover, and the chapters.
- Measure. After a few weeks of data, I compare impressions, click-through rate, watch time and search traffic against the starting point and adjust the plan.
Filming and editing stay with you or your production company. My part is the search planning, the briefs and the optimisation around each video.
Problems I see most often on UK sites and channels
- Clever titles that make sense to the team but contain none of the words a customer would search.
- Descriptions left as a single line or a list of links, with no explanation of what the video covers.
- Automatic captions never checked, so a product name or a town is misheard throughout.
- Every video embedded on one “videos” page, so none of them is the main content of any page Google could show.
- Several heavy players loading at once on the homepage, slowing it down for every visitor, including those who never press play.
- Time spent on YouTube tags. YouTube says tags play only a minor part in discovery, mostly helping with commonly misspelt words.
- Public sector and education bodies publishing video without captions, which also falls short of the UK accessibility regulations that apply to their websites.
What you receive
- A written review of your channel and on-site video, with each problem ranked by how much it is likely to hold back discovery.
- A video topic plan that ties each video to one search need and to the page where it belongs.
- Rewritten titles, descriptions and chapters for the agreed back catalogue, and corrected caption files where needed.
- Structured data, sitemap and player-loading changes, implemented or specified for your developer, and checked once they are live.
- A short report after the measurement period showing what moved and what I would do next.
Next step
If your videos are not being found, start by sending me the channel and the pages where they sit. A free SEO audit covers the website side and tells you whether video is the problem or whether something in your site’s technical set-up is stopping pages being indexed at all.