Creating a video to promote your product or service can be a great investment, but the true benefit lies in getting the video seen by your target audience so they know it exists. It’s simple to make a video and upload it to YouTube or Vimeo, but that won’t get you very far; you need to attract viewers to your video. There are various ways to drive traffic to a YouTube video, including social media, but today we will focus on how to rank a video organically on Google and YouTube. This applies to most other video sharing platforms as well.
Keyword Research: This is where everyone must start, but most skip. Finding high search volume keywords is what makes you money. Ranking for a keyword without any search volume does you no good so please research your keyword before moving any further.Unfortunately, the YouTube keyword tool has been shuttered for good on September 14th. Google has replaced the tool with the Display Planner’s AdWords for video keyword suggestions. You need an AdWords account to access this. This is your best friend for finding relevant keywords to target for you videos.
Another great place to do keyword research is by searching on YouTube directly for your main keywords and seeing what other videos pop up in the top results and how they are aligning their video title with specific keywords. You can also see suggested and related videos for even more ideas.
Once you have a list of keywords you then want to throw them into the keyword planner to ensure they have month search traffic. Find keywords with over 1,000 monthly searches as anything below that is not worth your time and effort (unless you have a high converting high ticket item).
Video Title: This is the most important aspect of your video in terms of on site optimizations. This is similar to the SEO page title tag. You want it to be as close to 60 characters without going over. You want to make it with a compelling title that is both keyword rich and readable for humans. This is tricky and almost is an artform of itself. If you are good at on site SEO then this should not be a problem.
Video Description: Do not hold back when it comes to the video description. Make it as useful and informative as possible. You want to properly describe the video and include any relevant keywords you’re trying to rank for in the description. When using keywords in the description I try and differ them slightly from the title by adding plurals, synonyms, etc. If you want to include a URL you should always place it on the first line on the description as it will always be visible for people to click without having to expand the description.
If you have a transcript of the video is is great to include this here. Google LOVES content and cannot read videos (yet) so the description is where the algorithm looks when assigning relevancy. Adding a transcript to videos is similar to adding an alt tag to images. It helps assign relevancy which will in turn ranks your video.
Video Tags: These are a great place to SPAM as many relevant tags as possible. Do not hold back, the more the better. Keep filling out tags until you cannot add anymore. Stop if you start seeing irrelevant tags, but there is no harm in adding as many relevant tags as possible. it is helpful using the suggested tags as a starting point.
Views, Likes, Comments, Subscribes: It is true that these still work when bought, but if done properly. You want full retention views and it is even possible to get people to search YouTube/Google for your video and then to watch it. It is important not to buy a Fiverr gig for this, but rather find a reputable seller or source. When it comes to likes, comments, and subscribers should from legitimate people as you want this to look natural.
Link Building: For quick easy links use social media and social bookmarking platforms such as Reddit, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc. There are thousands of sites like these, but pick and choose the best. To simplify things you can always go onto Fiverr and find a good social bookmarking gig to help get more exposure. A few backlinks are more than enough.
Video Embeds: Video embeds are key to ranking a video. To get the embed code from a YouTube video go to share > embed and grab the snippet of HTML code to paste on third party websites. Web 2.0 properties such as WordPress, Tumblr, Blogspot, etc. are the perfect place to embed videos. make sure to have content surrounding the video that is relevant to the keywords you are trying to rank for. Getting a few video embeds is usually sufficient to rank a medium competition keyword.
Social Sharing: Share the video across all your social platforms such as Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.. You always want to do the social sharing on your own platforms so you hit the correct target audience. it is good to share your videos in relevant groups to get more exposure and to share it will collegues to see if they will reshare it with their audience.
If all these steps are done you should be able to rank for almost any keyword in Google Video Search and YouTube. Start ranking those videos today!