Tricks to Stellar Video SEO for Higher Rankings
Video SEO for Higher Rankings
Video content creation and promotion have been in marketing trends since the late 2000s. YouTube has turned into the second largest search engine; Google has added the video tab; and, modern users can’t imagine browsing the internet without seeing videos there.
But here goes the problem:
Such a video ubiquity makes it close to impossible for marketers to get high rankings in Google.
The point at issue is the universal search results, not the video tab. While all websites can get their videos indexed in the tab, only a few win top places in SERPs.
And while the universal search has more to do with your website’s authority and focus on video-related queries, you can still win the battle for higher ranks in video search. Let’s examine how we can use video SEO for higher rankings.
That’s where smart video SEO can help for higher rankings
Video SEO is a bunch of optimization strategies to make your videos indexed and ranked high on SERPs. In this article, you’ll find the tricks on how to do that.
But first, let’s get this straightened out:
Why you need videos for higher ranks in Google
Why do you think video marketing is booming right now? That’s because most of the experts have finally understood: Video content sells better than texts or any other static ad.
The secret lies in the human brain’s constitution:
People proceed with visuals 60,000 times faster than with text, retaining 70% of information through stories. So it’s not surprising that video content has appeared to be the most comfortable format for us to consume information. It’s a natural narrative, satisfying a human need for entertaining stories. We learn the news and environment like that.
The stroke of insight goes here:
Video content helps with brand engagement and can influence consumer buying decisions. The numbers speak for themselves: Videos bring more sales, higher ROI, increased traffic, better lead generation, and better SEO. (Videos are 53 times more likely to show up on Google than text.)
That’s great, but how to optimize videos to get all the benefits of SEO for your content? It depends on your preferences:
Do you want to rank high on YouTube or get more traffic to your website with the help of video?
Video SEO for higher rankings depend on both, so let’s cover them.
Video SEO tricks to rank on YouTube
If you have or plan to create a YouTube channel for business or personal branding, please pay attention to the specifications of this search engine. To get views, subscribers, and traffic from YouTube, you need to understand its algorithms and follow its SEO rules that differ from Google’s ones a bit.
First and foremost, craft a video marketing strategy and create a content plan to nail down the types of content you’ll post on YouTube to attract the audience and win your expertness among YouTubers. The more views, likes, and shares your video gets, the higher rankings it will have.
To make it easier for YouTube to find your video, understand what it’s about, and demonstrate it to users in search results, please do the following:
1) Choose “traffic potential” topics and do keyword research.
Essential part:
You need topics that people search in Google, but these topics should have “video intent.” It means people would prefer watching a video on this topic instead of reading about it.
How to know if the topic has video intent? Type it into Google to see if there’re videos on it in the search results.
Now find target keywords for your video. Consider YouTube’s Search Suggest feature, as it provides the list of relevant words and phrases people actually type in YouTube. Another option is to check “Most Popular” videos in your niche and see what keywords they are optimized for. Their titles, descriptions, and tags will help you determine that.
Which of those gathered keywords is the best one to choose for your video optimization? Consider low-competition ones to increase your chances to outrank competitors.
2) Create and publish high-retention videos only.
Audience Retention is among the top ranking factors on YouTube: The longer people watch your video, the higher it will rank. (It’s a signal for YouTube that this video is relevant, valuable, and interesting to show to users.)
3) Optimize videos like a boss.
Help YouTube find and show your videos to the target audience: Consider all the details of YouTube Video optimization.
- Make the video title at least five words long and include your target keyword to it.
- Write a 250+ word description for a video, including your target keyword in its first 25 words and 2-4 times through the text.
- Add tags. They aren’t super important, but they will help your videos show up as “Related” in the sidebar more often:
- Promote your video. To rank higher, you need more views from YouTube users. That’s why don’t hesitate to promote your video content on Q&A websites (like Quora) or in your email signature; also, embed YouTube videos in your blog posts so that more people could find and watch it, influencing your rankings that way.
- Fix a video’s auto-generated captions. First, they may contain tons of misspellings and grammatical errors, which is not that good itself. And second, you can add your target keywords there too for YouTube to better understand the context of your video and rank it accordingly. (Make sure the script of your video also contains target keywords.)
- Add a relevant yet attractive thumbnail to grab the searcher’s attention and motivate them to click.
- Consider adding timestamps to your videos and their descriptions. Timestamps help to optimize one video for several queries for Google to show its “key moments” in search results.
- Promote your video. To rank higher, you need more views from YouTube users. That’s why don’t hesitate to promote your video content on Q&A websites (like Quora) or in your email signature; also, embed YouTube videos in your blog posts so that more people could find and watch it, influencing your rankings that way.
Video SEO tricks to get more website traffic
It stands to reason that your video content is not about YouTube channels and getting YouTube views only. As an SEO specialist implementing the best on-page marketing strategies for better results, you can use videos to attract more organic traffic.
Here go some tricks to consider for that.
1) Add videos to the top-ranking pages of your website.
In Google’s video tab, you can see not only videos from YouTube but pages from the organic results as well. It means that if you embed relevant videos to website pages that rank high already — you can get them ranking in the video tab too!
2) Mark up videos with correct schema codes.
There is no need to do that if you post videos on YouTube, but please use markups if hosting them on your own website. In WordPress, you can do that with free plugins like Schema & Structured Data: Go to “Structured Data” in your website’s admin panel, choose “VideoObject” there, change the “Post Type” to “Show globally,” and fill in all the attributes (a video’s name, description, URL, and upload date).
It will allow Google to display your pages as video-rich results.
That’s it for using video SEO for higher rankings.
Over to you
With YouTube as the world’s second largest search engine, and with the searcher’s growing request for video content, SEO specialists and marketers need to adapt their strategies to continually changing Google algorithms. That is why video SEO remains the hot topic, and you need to consider it if planning to rank your content high.
But no matter how fast trends and video SEO strategies change, some practices remain the same. First, craft useful and engaging video content for users. And second, do everything you can to help Google understand your video’s context to show and rank it higher in the search results.
About Lesley Vos
Lesley Vos is a professional copywriter and guest contributor, currently blogging at Bid4Papers, a platform that helps students and authors with writing solutions.
Specializing in data research, web text writing, and content promotion, she is in love with words, non-fiction literature, and jazz.
