What is a Video SEO Audit?

October 3, 2024

When you conduct audits for your brand, you’re holding a magnifying glass up to what you’ve done so far to inform what to do next.

An audit offers insights that can help maximize business results, whether by improving brand awareness, driving more site traffic, or pinpointing areas that need your attention.

You may know about content, UX, and technical audits. But have you considered the value of a targeted video SEO audit?

Your brand's videos, whether created by your team or your community, are some of the most dynamic and valuable assets you have. It's crucial to understand their scope, performance, and status.

In this post, we'll cover the ins and outs of performing a video SEO audit and how it can make a meaningful impact on your brand's success.

What is the purpose of a video SEO audit?

The purpose of a video audit is to take full inventory of your video content and determine what needs improvement. These audits help you establish a priority list for updates and reveal new content opportunities. Essentially, they allow you to develop a roadmap for updating your videos using SEO best practices, ensuring optimal search performance.

Without a video audit, you might miss essential updates or overlook areas that require the most attention. This can lead to underperforming videos and missed opportunities for engaging your audience.

New research and insights into video SEO audits

According to a recent study by Wyzowl, 87% of marketers say video content gives them a positive ROI, and 91% of consumers want to see more video content from brands in 2024. This data emphasizes the importance of having your video content fully optimized, ensuring that you’re maximizing visibility and engagement. Furthermore, a report from HubSpot indicates that search engines are increasingly prioritizing video content in their algorithms, particularly as platforms like YouTube become the second-largest search engine after Google.

Video SEO is not just about having good content; it’s about ensuring that content is easily found, relevant, and engaging for your target audience.

What should be included in a video SEO audit?

So what exactly does a video SEO audit entail? Let's break down the essential steps.

1. Compiling a comprehensive list

Start by creating a spreadsheet that tracks all of your existing video content. Columns should include details such as video title, link, platform, date of creation, category (e.g., product review, tutorial), views, length, and performance metrics. Make sure to add columns for notes on any issues, like poor engagement or outdated information, so you can prioritize updates.

2. Referring to keyword and trend research

Keyword research is vital for ensuring your video content matches what your audience is searching for. Tools like Google Trends or SEMrush can help you identify high-performing keywords and long-tail phrases that you can incorporate into your video titles, descriptions, and tags. For example, using YouTube autocomplete can reveal commonly searched terms related to your products, giving you easy wins for improving SEO.

3. Conducting a competitive analysis

By analyzing your competitors’ video strategies, you can uncover what’s working for them and apply similar tactics to your own content. Look at their top-performing videos and identify differences in format, length, style, and even thumbnail design. Incorporating these insights into your strategy can provide a competitive edge.

4. Planning your optimizations

Include any next steps you’ve gathered from your competitive analysis, keyword research, and trend research. Create a plan based on the changes that will have the biggest impact. Update the top-performing and most recent content and work your way back.

It’s also important to consider where your videos live and factor this into your plan. If you have an extensive following on a brand-owned YouTube channel, this is a wise place to begin. Each platform may warrant an audit with dedicated deliverables.

Then, turn your attention to secondary channels, like TikTok and Instagram. While the strategy is largely the same, it’s important to recognize how video search works on YouTube compared to TikTok.

5. Organizing your deliverables

Use a tracking spreadsheet where you mark progress as you work through each video, a prioritized to-do list with assigned action items for team members, and a summary report to share findings.

Highlight the main goals and outcomes of the video SEO audit, such as increased views, engagement, and conversions.

Advances in AI and GenAI tools for video SEO

The rise of AI and generative tools has transformed video SEO audits, making them faster and more accurate than ever before. Tools like Google's Video AI now allow brands to automatically analyze video content for sentiment, keywords, and even visual elements. These insights enable marketers to refine their content in real-time based on AI-driven data.

Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT or Jasper, can now assist in writing SEO-optimized video descriptions and titles, helping brands ensure their video content ranks higher across search engines. AI-powered analytics tools can help brands keep up with changing trends and optimize content more quickly, thus reducing the time spent on manual audits by up to 60%.

An example of competitive video SEO audit success

Consider the story of Glossier, a beauty brand that built a strong following through its user-generated video content on YouTube. They conducted a detailed video SEO audit and realized that many top-performing videos were tutorials made by customers. By incorporating user-generated content and tweaking video titles and descriptions based on keyword research, Glossier was able to increase organic video views by 25% in just six months.

Digital marketing expert Neil Patel recently commented on the importance of video SEO in 2024, stating, “Video is now more powerful than ever before, and search engines are prioritizing video content. Without regular video audits and optimizations, you’re missing out on one of the biggest opportunities to drive traffic and conversions.”

When should you perform a video SEO audit?

We recommend completing video SEO audits at least once per year.

But there’s no golden rule for when and how often you should conduct a video audit. As for embarking on your first widespread audit, we recommend starting as soon as you can.

No matter what, the very first time you embark on a comprehensive video SEO audit will likely be the most time-consuming. From then on, you’ll have a template to refer to—a customized version of the components above—so it will be faster to repeat.

The frequency of auditing also depends on what you’re able to invest time and resources in, and the volume of videos you have.

For instance, an enterprise brand in the beauty industry has more resources to devote to monthly audits, whereas a scrappy fashion start-up needs to plan for a biannual cadence.

Segmenting audits makes them more manageable and targeted. For example, identify a high revenue-generating product and hyper-focus the audit on all videos related to this collection.

Outside of a product-focused approach, segmentation is also effective for honing in on a specific audience or platform.

How far back do you go during a video SEO audit?

In general, we recommend auditing all videos you posted within the last year.

However, it’s fundamental to review your most popular videos, regardless of their age. Relevancy and impact take priority over recency.

Every brand's needs are different, so the scope of your audit will vary. Determine what fits your needs, since in this case, it’ll depend on how many videos you have, the resources you have to devote to this project, and what your priorities are.

Instead of reaching as far back in your video archives as you can, we recommend aligning your approach with your goals.

Even though looking at the most popular or recent videos is standard practice, if you realize a trending topic that relates to your brand or collection of videos, you have a smart reason to start there.

Whether you work newest to oldest, most views to least, most topically relevant to more evergreen, there’s no one right way to tackle your video audit—the most important thing is that you’re doing it in the first place.

How do you make the video SEO audit process more manageable?

Whether you’re planning your very first large-scale video SEO audit or you’re looking to improve your current process, turning to an intelligent platform made for gathering video insights makes your job easier.

Vyrill helps you capture and analyze videos mentioning your specific product or brand. Logging related videos for a certain collection of items or sets of keywords is easier than ever before. Vyrill scans the audio, images, and text within each video for sentiment analysis, trending topics, ethnicity/age/gender, and brand safety , allowing users to gather insights 95% faster than doing so manually. You will then receive instructions and code snippets to best optimize every video for SEO, helping you drive more site traffic.

Vyrill is here to help you through your video audit journey every step of the way.

Ready to learn more? Book a demo today.