5 Best SEO Practices for OTT Platforms

Keeping up with the trends that your viewers follow is of crucial importance to OTT platform owners. You may have an excellent video library but, how do you ensure that your audience is able to find your platform easily and watch those videos? Here’s where the importance of SEO practices comes in. From the innumerable OTT platforms out there, make your streaming platform stand out by enabling search engines to discover and rank you at the top. In the next few minutes, we will enlighten you about the best SEO practices for OTT platforms to ensure your streaming service gets a good ranking amongst others. 

Why Do You Need SEO for your OTT Platform?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is indispensable if you want search engines to rank you and get into the sights of your potential subscribers. Without SEO, your OTT platform may stand little or no chance against your competitors who may have lesser valued content than you but a better SEO strategy.

SEO for OTT platforms is the process of optimizing your streaming platform’s traffic through video search engine optimization strategies. SEO plays a huge role in increasing the visibility of your OTT platform and growing your audiences and the success or failure of an OTT service relies greatly on SEO. It plays a huge 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?

Also Read: Smart Video SEO Strategies for your OTT Platform

Best SEO Practices for OTT Platforms

There are many crucial steps that are involved in devising the perfect video SEO for OTT solutions. Some of the best SEO practices for OTT platforms have been listed below: 

1. Having a Correct URL Structure

A URL (Uniform Resource Locator), more commonly known as a “web address”, is a human-readable text that was designed to replace the numbers (IP addresses) that computers use to communicate with servers and it specifies the location of a resource (such as a web page) on the internet.

Having a well-structured URL is absolutely essential SEO practice for OTT platforms from the perspective of  user experience. If your url is not structured properly, your website may stand unnoticed as website crawlers will fail to comprehend what your website is all about. The following are various aspects you must keep in mind while structuring the URL of your website:

• Use a phrase that best fits/describes your business in the URL.
• ALWAYS add keywords in your URL for better discoverability. Search Engine Indexing always looks for related keywords that are relevant to the video.
• Instead of underscores (_) , use hyphens (-)  as hyphens are treated as spaces between two words. For example, an optimized URL would look like this: “https://www.muvi.com/blogs/smart-video-seo-strategies-ott-platform.html/” whereas a non-optimized URL looks something like this: “https://www.muvi.com/blogs/smart_video_seo_strategies_ott_platform.html/”.
• We advise not to use dynamic URLs. It is always better that the URL remains the same with every reload as it allows the search engines to read the website better.

2. Optimizing Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing words or phrases that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research provides valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google. Here are some of the steps you can follow for optimizing keyword research for your OTT platform.

• Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business. For example, ‘video streaming’, ‘live streaming’, ‘subscription video service’.

• Now that you have a few topic buckets you want to focus on, it’s time to identify some keywords that fall into those buckets. For example, if your topic is ‘video streaming’,  some keyword phrases that people would type in related to that topic are ‘best video streaming platform’, ‘top video streaming platforms’, ‘how to deliver better video streams’, etc.

• Research related search terms. When you type in your phrase and scroll to the bottom of Google’s results, you’ll notice some suggestions for searches related to your keyword. For example, when you type ‘live streaming’ on Google, related search terms include ‘live streaming platform’, ‘live streaming software’, etc.

• Take help from online resources like Google’s Keyword Planner, Google Trends or some other Video Keyword Tools to take out a set of top searches in your niche

• Don’t overuse keywords, distribute them well in your content and in descriptions, titles and naming of videos/files.

3. Video Optimization

Video optimization is must if you want to improve your OTT platform rankings across search engines. It can be obtained by incorporating the following steps:

• Optimizing video metadata– To make the search engines aware of your video, you need to generate targeted metadata or meta descriptions. Title Tags will be the first thing that are noticed by the search engine, hence, the presence of the primary keyword in them is imperative. Keep it short and catchy- about 50-60 characters long. You can make the Description Tags a bit longer describing what your video is about, but don’t forget to incorporate one or two keywords in here; keep them 160 characters or shorter. The final step is creating Video Tags. Video tags will help you gain relevant traffic, but make sure you don’t go spammy here. 

• Video Thumbnail– A video thumbnail is a still image that acts as the preview image for your video. It is the first thing viewers notice about your videos, and thus, make sure you use this section well to provide a clear message about your platform and by incorporating the right amount of keywords.

Did you Know? Videos with custom human thumbnails receive a 35% higher play rate than those without!

• Video Sitemap– Another important thing to rank up your video streaming platform in search engines is to create a Video sitemap. Sitemaps provide another way to present video’s titles and descriptions, along with some more specific information like indication of country restrictions, platform restrictions or live streams, which will ultimately help rank your videos higher. Don’t forget to then add your video sitemap in your robots.txt file.

• OG Video Tag– Defining open graph protocols will enable your videos to rank higher in social graph when shared on social media platforms. OG tags are the tags that are picked up by-default by a social media site when a video is shared such as the title, media type, image, url, description, etc.

4. Website Speed

Increasing web page speed is clearly an important SEO practice for OTT platforms as Google factors page speed into both desktop and mobile site rankings. Having a consistently “responsive” site will ensure that your site will be crawled and fully indexed, and will not suffer slow-loading ranking penalties. 

Website speed significantly affects organic user traffic as nobody wants to visit a streaming website that takes a long time to load. Here are a few things to take care of for improving your site’s speed and retaining the visitors’ attention:

1. Compression-Make sure that the CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files are of a size smaller than 150 bytes.

2. Optimize your codes– Make sure that your JavaScript, HTML and CSS codes are optimized and minimal. It’s a good practice to remove unnecessary spaces, characters or words from the codes to enhance the loading speed of your site faster.

5. Backlinks

A backlink is a link created when one website links to another. Backlinks or ‘inbound links’ are important to SEO as they represent a certain stamp of authenticity from one site to another. It helps search engines identify the fact that others vouch for your content. So, earning these backlinks can have a positive effect on a site’s ranking position or search visibility. Alternatively, you can use expired domains from Domain Coasters to fast-track your backlink profile. Moreover, you can even allow sharing and/or embedding of your video on other websites, which exponentially increases your backlinks. This improves your website or platform’s authority, and provides high-quality indexing for your videos.

Wrapping Up,

SEO for OTT platforms ensures that your video streaming platform is well structured for easy discoverability. While choosing an OTT service provider for creating or launching your video streaming platform, it is imperative to ensure that it is equipped with all the right SEO tactics to make your platform SEO ready. 

Muvi makes your streaming website SEO ready and also allows for various customizations as per your business requirements. Take a 14-Day Free Trial, now to get better clarity!