7 Key Tactics to Rank Your Video on SERP

It is normal to focus on content for SEO and define content as text, but images and videos play a huge role as well. It is easy to make a great impression with a well composed video especially with people not given to reading much. When you optimize your videos and rank with them, you are appealing to an entire segment of Internet surfers that spend a considerable part of their time watching video only. It figures, therefore, that you’d be leaving out chances for this extra bit of audience and consequent conversion if you ignored videos.

Quality

Never compromise on this aspect. It is better to have one video that is meticulously created and edited than a hundred carelessly recorded ones. Your video will represent your brand, so be careful of what you post out there if you want to rank your video.

Time

The average viewer supposedly watches a video for 2.7 minutes as opposed to just a few seconds they are normally willing to spend on a site visit. We suggest you create shorter ones when you begin your video marketing campaign. And don’t think this is for the novice – well-known brands have scored with videos that last less than half a minute. You want your audience to watch the video from start to end where you show your brand logo or CTA. That is etched in their memory so that they associate something nice with your brand essence. Why is this relevant to ranking on SERP? Well, unless you are viewed, you don’t hold your rank for very long even if you somehow managed to make it to page one.

Sharing

Make sure you post your videos everywhere. And by everywhere, we really mean everywhere. Don’t stop until you’ve run out of places to post them in. There are dedicated video sharing sites (even apart from everyone’s favorite YouTube), there are forums and, of course, there are social media sites. We are asking you to share, not spam, and you should know the difference. While there may be a penalty for duplicate content, as long as you vary your caption, descriptions and transcripts, you will continue to gain search engine favor – they can’t view videos! And you will be reaching out to a wide audience who, it may be hoped, will continue to share them, making them go viral. This helps your ranking and this gets you traffic.

Text

Transcripts and captions and descriptions are important to get search bots to notice you. So are titles. Use your keywords but use variations (e.g. If you are promoting a software by using video as a medium then you can use keywords such as Construction Software, Construction Estimating Software etc.) as well or you’ll be competing against yourself. Work on the language, don’t consider it as something secondary. Imagine that you are spinning one article into a number of versions each of which is eminently readable. You don’t actually have to spin – that was just an example. You can always write separate descriptions each time focusing on something different. For a 30 second video this might be difficult, so focus on the reason you made the video. Get creative without going overboard.

YouTube

Engage viewers on YouTube by uploading your video there. You can use the search engine friendly closed captions that YouTube generates and edit them to suit your marketing strategy and keywords. Definitely use the old version of the embed code that search bots can crawl instead of the new, iframe embedding which they can’t. Directly embed your YouTube video on your landing pages. Views from your there will count towards total number of views on YouTube, further ensuring your rank on SERP. This can be done with any other page on your site, but read the next point to decide if you want to.

Sitemaps

Have a separate video sitemap to assist search engine crawling. There are tools available online for that, including Google Webmaster Tools. However, do this with videos that you upload and embed for viewing on your site. This could be a duplicate video with an alternative description that you have used on YouTube, but it will rank on its own and increase visitor engagement on your site. This is just another side of the strategy we mentioned earlier regarding YouTube vids on your landing page. This works best when you can incorporate a video with an article in the most natural way. Alternatively, you can always keep a separate video category. Whether you want to keep certain videos exclusively on your own site is entirely up to you. Also remember that when people share such videos, you will paying for the bandwidth!

Schema.Org

Schema, among many other things, is the preferred way to describe videos – we are telling you what Google told everyone. Go the Schema site and learn how to use the mark-ups to optimize videos best for search spiders.

Videos are generally a great tool for ranking your entire site. As everyone knows, Google loves sites with videos because it is reasonable to assume that videos take some time and effort and so, the site owner must be serious about their content. So, even aside of ranking just your videos on SERP, definitely keep some time to creating them as a value addition to what you are all about.

Michael Kelly is a Freelancer Writer, Entrepreneur and passionate blogger. A writer by day and a reader by night.