Video is increasingly popular and is a preferred medium in higher education marketing and communications. According to higher education marketing research, video:
- Captures attention
- Creates human connection
- Builds trust
- Drives enrollment
Some of the most engaging, authentic higher education video content includes:
- Student testimonials
- Faculty interviews
- Campus tours
While many units have already harnessed the power of video, remember to create and publish videos with SEO and accessibility in mind.
Video captions
Video captions are essential for accessibility. Most video hosting sites make it easy to create video captions to ensure your video is accessible to all users.
Be sure to proofread your auto-generated captions.
Note: Using your video editor’s tools to create captions is usually fine for short, marketing-focused videos. When publishing longer, required videos such as lectures, be sure to visit the Office of Access, Compliance, and Community for assistance with captions.
Code for iframes
To embed a video on your page, you need to locate the embed code from your video hosting site.
While most embed codes will provide the necessary data to embed your video using the CHSS Web admin tool, you do need to add a title for your iframe. It’s simple!
Your iframe code will look something like this:
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IWuiVwMNNmQ” width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen">
Just add title="create a descriptive title here” just after the iframe tag, like this:
<iframe title=“descriptive video title” src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IWuiVwMNNmQ” width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen">
Benefits of video in search engine optimization (SEO)
Page SEO
Engaging, informative videos can increase your visibility in search by increasing the amount of time visitors spend on your page.
When a user performs a search, if the page does not address their query, they will likely leave the site immediately and return to the search results page. This signals to the search engine that the page did not adequately address the user's query, which can negatively affect the page's SEO.
If users spend more time on the page, it signals to the search engine that the content provided the information they were seeking. This can help maintain and even improve the page's visibility in search results.
Video SEO
This is typically presented as a video landing page, which can appear in search results under the Video tab or in the main search.
To be eligible for video search results such as the main search results page and the video tab, you should create a dedicated watch page for your video.
A dedicated video watch page should include a page title and description that are both descriptive and unique to the video, along with the video itself.
Here are some CHSS video landing pages that show up in Google's video search results:
https://academicaffairs.chss.gmu.edu/undergraduate-students/pass-program
https://economics.gmu.edu/undergraduate/job-internship/careers-in-economics
Note: Many of the features described above, such as iframe titles and video captions, are essential for accessibility; they also support SEO by helping search engines better understand and crawl page content.