Video SEO: getting your films found

Video SEO comes down to three things: naming and describing the file so a search engine understands what it's about, hosting it somewhere that engine indexes, and giving it a transcript so its content is readable, not just watchable. Get those right and a well-made video keeps earning traffic for years after it's published, rather than disappearing the week the post it was attached to scrolls off the feed.

Most businesses treat search as something that happens to their written content and forget video is searchable too. That's a mistake, because video is one of the few formats that performs across every surface buyers now search: Google, YouTube, TikTok, and increasingly the AI assistants people ask directly instead of typing into a search box.

Google is no longer the only search engine that matters

Buyers research suppliers on YouTube before they call. They search TikTok the way older audiences search Google. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini for recommendations and expect a cited answer rather than a list of links. A video SEO plan built only around Google web search is missing most of where research now happens.

That doesn't mean Google stops mattering. It means the target has widened. Structured data, clear FAQs and content written to be quoted rather than scanned all help a business get surfaced by both traditional search and AI assistants, because the underlying requirement is the same: clear, indexable content that answers a specific question directly.

YouTube SEO, step by step

YouTube is still the most important video search platform, and its ranking signals are well understood.

• Name the file with the search term. YouTube reads the file name before it's even uploaded, so corporate video Melbourne, company name.mp4 beats a generic export name.
• Title with the search term first. Lead with the phrase a buyer would type, then a colon and the benefit: what the video helps them do.
• Write the first two lines of the description to matter. Only the opening lines show above the fold. Lead with the search term, the action you want the viewer to take, and the link.
• Tag broadly and specifically. A mix of exact match, broad match and brand terms, ten to thirty tags in total.
• Add chapters. Keyword-rich timestamps that break the video into sections. YouTube weights this heavily in how it understands the content.
• Upload a clean transcript. This drives both search ranking and accessibility, and it's the single most overlooked step.
• Use an end screen and a pinned comment. Both re-state the call to action and give the algorithm a reason to keep the viewer on the platform.
• File it into a relevant playlist. Playlists add context and watch time, both of which YouTube rewards.

Short-form search: TikTok, Reels and Shorts

Short-form platforms are increasingly used as search interfaces, especially by younger buyers who type a question into TikTok before they'd think to open Google. Three things matter here specifically for search, separate from the engagement mechanics: a spoken keyword in the first five seconds, since the platforms transcribe and index speech, on-screen text that matches that spoken keyword to reinforce the match, and a caption that repeats the term in plain language rather than only hashtags. A short-form video that ranks for a genuine search query keeps earning views for months, which is a different outcome to a video that only performs on the day it's posted.

The transcript is doing more work than you think

Search engines, including AI assistants, can't watch a video. They read around it: the title, the description, the captions, the transcript. A video with no transcript is invisible to most of what's indexing it, no matter how well it performs with a human audience. Uploading a full, accurate transcript alongside every long-form piece is the single most valuable step most businesses skip.

Landing pages built around video still need their own SEO

A video embedded on a landing page benefits the page's own search performance too, provided the page carries proper structured data, a clear headline naming the buyer and the outcome, and enough surrounding text for search engines to understand the context. Video alone on an otherwise empty page under-performs a page that pairs the video with real, indexable copy.

Where this fits the bigger picture

Video SEO isn't a separate project from the rest of a video strategy. It's what happens after the channel decisions are made, covered in our guide on where to publish corporate video, and it feeds directly into whether a video's performance shows up in the numbers that matter. Our guide on measuring video ROI covers what to track once a video is published and findable.

If your videos aren't getting found, the fix is usually less about the footage and more about the metadata around it. Our media strategy service covers this as part of a full distribution plan, or get in touch and we'll audit what's currently live.