How to Rank Your Videos on Google & YouTube
Did you know by 2022 (less than a year away!), online video will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic according to Cisco. On average, people watch 16 hours of online video per week. So, it should not be a surprise that that 85% of business use this to their advantage and utilize video as a marketing tool. Now the big question is how to publish videos and get them to rank on Google & YouTube. The YouTube video ranking process is multi-faceted and we will explain below!
Produce Quality Content
While there are many important factors to consider when trying to rank your video on Google and YouTube this might be one of the most important aspects. Quality is not directly correlated to ranking factors BUT user engagement is. Which quality content and user engagement go hand-in-hand. The more people who watch, comment, like or share the better your video will rank. So, a big tip here is to produce quality content that solves a particular problem for a prospect viewer! Share a piece of useful knowledge, teach them something, or provide analysis of a particular product or service. These tips will guide you for quality content which in turn leads to better user engagement (a direct ranking factor!).
Keyword Research
Keyword research for the YouTube ranking process is fairly simple. The best place to start your keyword research is to type a word or phrase into YouTube’s Search Suggest feature. This will generate search terms based on user activity- what people are already searching for! Start building a list of potential keywords by writing down the most relevant suggestions.
Another avenue you could utilize to help build an optimized keyword list is to look at some of the popular channels within your niche and identify their most-watched videos. What keywords are they using? Make sure to note that a high view count does not necessarily mean it is a great topic to make a video for. There are many factors that go into that number which include their other advertising channels, such as paid search, social, email, etc.
Do not skip this step! Put in the work to build strong keywords that totally encompass what your video is and represents.
Video Optimization for Your YouTube Video Ranking
Optimizing your video to help with the Google & YouTube video ranking is simply the process of telling the search engine what your video is really about; labeling it so it can be indexed in a way that will make it easy for the viewer to find.
Video Optimization is another crucial step because the largest search engine in THE WORLD (Google) includes video results in the SERP. Coupled with the fact that YouTube, which is the second largest search engine, means that keyword optimized videos are essentially part of any web traffic strategy.
Length of Video
The length of the video is an important aspect regarding how informative your video can be. Longer videos tend to be more comprehensive and answer more questions that leads to more satisfied viewers who are more likely to comment and share the video as well as watch it longer.
Quality of Video
When we talk about the quality of the video this is rather different than produce quality content. The difference here is the quality of the video is about the actual quality of the video file itself. The quality of video directly correlates to user engagement. The better quality of a video leads to more satisfied viewers and higher engagement. Did you know that 68.2% of videos on the first page of YouTube are in HD? That emphasizes the importance of the quality of your video file.
Using Keywords in the Video
As we all know and understand Google is forever implementing new ways to improve viewers experiences. Machine learning is one of those things. They are extracting the audio from the videos that are uploaded and automatically creating a text transcript-so it is not too far of a stretch to believe that they use that transcript in their ranking algorithm. We are not sure if this is a direct ranking factor but it’s still beneficial because YouTube’s transcripts can be used for the viewers experience by applying text on the page where the video is embedded.
There are 4 factors to consider for your keyword selection
Relevance
Traffic
Competition
Traffic and the Cost Per Click (CPC)
Adding Tags
When adding tags to your video you can use the same keywords but also take an extra step and analyze the tags other popular videos to double check to see if you are missing any. Tags don’t directly affect how well your video ranks on YouTube BUT they do help your videos show up as a suggested video. By showing up as a suggested video this can have a strong impact on your engagement rate just by placing your videos in front of more viewers.
Extra Steps to Consider to Rank on Google
Inbound Links
It is important to understand that your video still needs inbound links for multiple authoritative websites to help compete against other videos. Often, a couple of links from high-quality, authoritative websites is enough to help with this factor. When adding your anchor text make sure it matches or is very similar to the video title. Don’t worry about over-optimization here because you’re linking directly to a Google property.
User Activity
Most people don’t understand that user activity not only plays a role in ranking within YouTube but also it plays a role in how well it ranks in Google search too. The engagement it receives within the search results correlates how well it ranks within the search results. Google wants to give the users what they’re looking for so higher engagement means that people are finding what they want in your videos. There are tons of ways to manipulate your engagement rate, but we suggest the better approach is to used paid social, PPC, and email marketing to put your video in front of real people who will engage authentically. We wrote more about this in our 10 reasons Why You Should Be Advertising on Facebook blog if you’re interested!
With all of that being said we hope you understand the power of the Video SEO process to help with your Youtube video ranking and Google ranking. It is crucial to set time aside and optimize your video to increase the number of viewers and user engagement. After creating a great video you want people to see it so optimization plays a key role in marketing and distributing your video to places where your audience can find it easily and watch it!
If you’re interested in more information on how we can help you with your next SEO project we’d love to hear from you!