How To Get Your Videos to Rank High on Google Search

Want to get started?

We regularly get asked: "How do we rank our video higher in search for our keywords/brand?"

Here's a quick guide to get it done!

To get this started let's take a quick step back and assume the following: You’ve got a unique product at an affordable price point, Great!

but you won’t get sales unless your target audience knows about you.

What you need is a solid strategic marketing plan that will make your brand stand out by implementing quality content marketing.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a method of tactical marketing that focuses on producing consistent, quality content that is relevant to your target audience and provides value.

Content marketing will help increase your reach and convert your audience into paying customers.

There are a ton of benefits to including content marketing in your strategy.

When you create content that is valuable to your audience, you will demonstrate that your business is reputable in the industry and that you can be trusted. For service businesses, this is your lifeblood.

By discovering your content, prospects will begin to believe in your brand. Building trust with your audience is essential to generating more business and hype about your product or service.

There are many different types of content marketing deliverables, each with their own level of difficulty and time commitment.

No one works on an unlimited budget, so make sure to set ways to measure ROI before and after committing to creating.

A few ideas include:

- E-books

- Blog posts and articles, on your page or as a guest on someone else’s page

- Infographics

- Social media posts (Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest. Etc.)

- Video content

Because we are a video-focused company, we’ll talk more about that type of content.

Approximately one-third of all internet users are on YouTube.

As a platform, there are billions of video views each day. Next to Google itself, YouTube is the largest search engine. That makes it more accessible than even Yahoo or Bing for online search.

There is a massive opportunity for your video content to reach people by them searching for specific keywords.

Having your videos rank high on Google will increase your traffic considerably.

While you can produce and publish a video on YouTube, that doesn’t mean anyone will see it.

Many people make this mistake and don’t see an ROI for all their hard work.

How do you get your videos to rank higher in Google search?

If you follow all the following steps, you’ll be more likely to rank in search than those who don’t implement these strategies.

Full disclosure, we are working on these ourselves. This type of work is never done and continues to change and flux with new google search algorithms and competitors.

This video from YouTube explaining how their search logic works is worth a watch.

1. Keyword Research

The best way to get your videos ranking high on Google is through keywords.

Before even creating video content, you should figure out which keywords you are going to target.

Over half of all keywords searched will produce one or more videos on Google’s results page.

80%+ of these videos will be YouTube videos. So, you can see the power of implementing strategic keyword choices.

The most common types of videos that tend to rank on Google are:

- Reviews

- How-to videos

- Tutorials

- Entertainment-based

It’s essential to consider this, as you want to use keywords that will list your video on the first Google results page.

It will ensure that your video gets seen and will increase your traffic.

Typically, anytime you search for “How To” anything on Google, you’ll see many results from YouTube.

Even videos that were published years ago will continue to rank on Google search results, and likely on the first page.

If you’re serious about increasing your traffic, then include those phrases in your video titles and descriptions.

How do you figure out the best keywords?

While choosing more generalized keywords may broaden your audience, ranking them will be much harder. That said, if you pick a keyword that is too niche, then you could limit your audience and end up with no traffic.

⚠️ Niche or common phrases from your FAQ are usually a good way to go . Less but more focused traffic almost always trumps loads of generalized visitors.

You can get estimations for keyword traffic by using the Google Planner tool , which is in Google AdWords.

The planner will show you the average monthly search range for each keyword. It’s a great way to assess if it’s worth including that keyword in your video content marketing.

If a keyword has a low search volume, then it means not many people are searching for it and probably isn’t worth using.

You’ll want to target keywords that have a high search volume, but a low competition rate. You can also see the cost over time for that word should you decided to submit your content into Pay Per Click.

This step is absolutely crucial and worth spending some time in to choose the perfect keywords.

2. Make Your Videos Longer (Wait.. really?!)

Initially, when YouTube was released, their algorithm ranked videos based on their view count.

The problem with this was that the owners of channels could easily hack the system using bots or continuously refreshing the page to generate views.

They’ve now updated this system to rank videos based on high engagement.

It evaluates how long people are watching your video. When users exit the video almost straight away, then it’s flagged as spam or a bot and will lower the rank of the video.

YouTube will rank the quality of your video based on the below stats + many smaller factors:

- Views & Viewing time

The more time viewers watch your content before clicking away, the better you’ll rank. You can see this information on your channel’s dashboard.

- Comments & Likes

The more comments your videos are receiving, the higher your engagement. Higher engagement means more top ranking.

- Shares & Back-links

YouTube will also rank your video higher the more shares it has on social media platforms. This category will also include the amount of likes that you receive. (This may change as platforms adapt, but for now, it holds true)

The length of your video is also an important statistic to consider.

It works in the same way that lengthy content ranks well in search. Both YouTube and Google will rank longer videos better.

For example, if you search for a software tutorial on Google, you will find that the majority of the top-ranking videos are long.

It’s no surprise why.

Not counting music videos, tutorials and how-to guides provide in-depth content and information about the topic and therefore have to be longer. When captioned, they also become keyword-rich.

That’s not to say that all your videos have to be an hour in length.

It’s very hard to create engaging content that long... It’s also costly when done professionally.

The top viewed videos on YouTube are not even close to that long. Let’s take a look at the average top videos with the highest views on YouTube.

Average length – 4 min, 20 sec

Since many viewers are watching full movies and television shows online, it’s pretty standard to see lengthy content.

The general rule is to produce a video that fully dives into your topic in detail. Make it as long as possible, but don’t repeat yourself unnecessarily to make it longer.

Some videos will be shorter, like explainer videos. Trying to make them longer can lose your rank as viewers are looking for a quick summary.

⚠️ Don’t fluff your videos for sake of length. It’ll hurt more than help. Youtube videos show more ads after 10 minutes so creators are forced to fluff more to hit those marks. Same with facebook, longer content is rewarded, but it still needs to be well done to get you positive ROI.

3. Title And Description Optimization

Once you’ve filmed and edited your video, it’s time to upload. At this stage, you will implement SEO into your title and description to ensure it ranks high in search engines.

Make sure that the title contains the keywords you’ve chosen, but also makes it distinct what information your video contains.

It is the first thing consumers see, and you want them to see value in watching your video.

Your description will include additional details about what to expect in your video, including links to external sources. It is vital in terms of SEO.

The viewer needs to be able to look at the description to get a quick idea of what the video will be featuring.

It’s also an opportunity for you to communicate with Google so that the algorithm can assess your video.

Use the following guidelines to ensure you get the best SEO for your videos.

Titles

Make sure you use your chosen keywords in your title, but it should still sound natural.

You want it to identify what your viewers can expect to see in your video.

It’s a good idea to use AdWords to help by searching for your keyword on Google.

You can then see which advertisements show up on the results page and model your title around that.

Descriptions

The description is equally as crucial as your title for ranking your video high on search results.

Again, include your chosen keywords within your description as many times as naturally possible.

On top of this, you’ll also want to write a summary that is engaging and entertaining.

Feature a call to action in this portion.

It will encourage people to click through to more of your content or your website.

Make sure also to include all links to your social platforms and a link where your viewers can subscribe.

Tags

Though tags alone won’t boost your rank, they should be an integral part of your video marketing strategy.

Make sure they are specific to your video content.

These will be the words that potential viewers will search for when looking for content to watch.

Many online resources can help you choose the best tags, including TubeBuddy.

Regardless of what type of video content you’re posting, use these tips to optimize your titles and descriptions to help them rank higher.

4. Promote

Now that your video is displayed and optimized, you’ll want to promote it.

You will need to implement a good marketing strategy to help your videos rank.

Your video content likely won’t rank high by itself, unless you’ve already established yourself on YouTube and have a high follower count .

Generating views will come down to you.

While it seems like a time-consuming task, it can boost your reach.

Many people post their videos and then leave them to do their thing, but they are missing a big trick here.

Even if you do a minimal amount of promotion, you’ll still gain an advantage over the majority.

Here are some promotion tools you can use to get your video out there.

- Post on social media platforms.

The easiest way to get views quick is by posting on social media. Publish in social groups where your target audience hangs out.

You’ve got Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more to spread your video around. Social media will also allow others to share your content easily.

- Create a blog post.

You can publish a blog post relating to your video and then embed your video on the page.

- Newsletters.

Send out an email newsletter letting your audience know you’ve launched a new video.

Beyond that, just including video in your newsletter alone will boost your click-through rate by up to 300%.

When posting on social media, you have the opportunity to boost your views hugely.

That is due to the domino effect of sharing. If ten people share your video, and ten people in each of their networks share it, that’s one hundred shares.

You can see how it can grow exponentially, especially if the content is well produced.