How to rank your video on the first page of Google
I’ve been using video to market our startup affiliate programs for the past few months, and it has done great with video, bringing a steady stream of views, leads and customers.
Now, you may already know that video is an important marketing tool in today’s online world, that’s why products like Powtoon exist, but the way I use video may be a little different. See, I’m not using video in the traditional sense of putting it on my website and using it to convert customers or explain ideas (even if I do too), I’m using these videos as content to rank in Google to bring organic search traffic .
Because the video is great
Creating videos in this way is similar to creating blog posts or landing pages for SEO, but with some important benefits.
First, YouTube videos rank well in Google. Like it very well. Because YouTube is owned by Google, and is already extremely high site authority , a content you put on YouTube is likely to rank higher than your site, especially if your site is new and doesn’t have much authority.
Posting content to YouTube also allows you to discover your content when people search YouTube, which is the second largest search engine in the world, bigger than both Bing and Yahoo. Additionally, optimizing your videos for ranking on Google automatically optimizes them for ranking on YouTube as well, bringing in an additional traffic flow that you wouldn’t otherwise have.
But the really great thing about Google search ranking is that it’s search traffic, the best type of traffic for a product like mine, that is solving a very specific pain point for businesses. This type of traffic brings us customers from large companies that I would otherwise have had a hard time identifying and marketing.
The amazing thing about ranking videos for these types of keywords is that while they may not get a lot of traffic, they are A LOT of targeted visitors, people looking for that exact type of product.
I’m not going to talk about how to make a video in this post. If you want to learn more about creating videos, you may check my other posts to learn that.
In this post, I’ll show you how to optimize your videos and get them ranked for your target keywords
On page optimization
The first thing you should do before uploading your video is to prepare your keywords, title and description.
Research keywords
When ranking YouTube videos it is good practice to target multiple long tail keywords in the video. This will bring more traffic when you rank for multiple terms with just one video.
You should find a keyword to target based on the content of your video. This is quite simple: put some variations in the AdWords Keyword Planner Tool file and find the one that is the highest. There are a few tricks you can do to find keywords that have low competition, but for the sake of this guide I’m assuming you already know which keyword you want to rank for before creating the video.
For our example, let’s use “Tree Removal Miami”
Tree Removal Miami
Once you have your primary keyword, it’s time to get to work creating a secondary keyword list and building a title and description for your video.
Below is a video I made for a friend teaching him the keyword research process and building the title and description. In the video I walk through two keyword examples “Tree Removal Miami” and “Electrician Miami”. The video is behind me doing this and lasts about 30 minutes if you need a detailed explanation.
Build your keyword list
Take your main keyword and enter it into the AdWords tool, then choose 3–6 other keywords that have the highest search traffic and are related to your product. You can also use Uber Suggest to find the most common search terms after the keyword.
This is the list of keywords I found for Tree Removal Miami
tree removal miami tree
removal costa miami
tree removal service miami
tree stump removal miami
palm
removal miami
tree removal services miami emergency tree removal miami tree removal
company miami tree
removal miami FL
tree removal cost miami FL
service tree removal miami FL
tree stump removal miami FL
palm
removal miami FL
tree removal services miami FL emergency tree removal miami FL tree removal
company miami FL
Video Title
Use the keyword list to build the title. Weaving as many keywords as possible with the title still makes sense and doesn’t feel like spam.
Tree Removal Service Miami FL | 555–555–5555 | Low Cost Emergency Tree Stump Removal Company
Video description
The description should include ALL of your keywords, woven into readable paragraphs that again don’t look like spam.
Tree Removal Service Miami FL | 555–555–5555
Low Cost Emergency Tree Stump Removal Company in Miami FL. Get lower cost services in emergency tree removal.
We guarantee the lowest tree removal cost in all of Florida for stump removal. Contact us today for a free quote from the most trusted tree removal company in Miami FL.
Video tags
For video tags, copy and paste your keyword list. Easy.
Advanced optimization
There are also a couple of advanced optimization techniques that I hear good things about. They are:
- Transcript (adding a written transcript to your video can help search engines crawl the video and give you a higher ranking)
- Annotations (again adding more text to the video helps with the search)
I haven’t tested them on my own yet, but so far I’ve been able to access the first page of Google for a number of terms simply by using the methods above to optimize the title, description and tags, then performing the off-page optimization steps described. below.
Off page optimization — Backlinks
Now your video is uploaded and optimized, it’s time to start ranking it. The ranking of a YouTube video is quite similar to the ranking of any website where the determining factor of the primary ranking is the number of backlinks pointing to that video. However, YouTube has another factor and that is the number of websites that have actually embedded the video, making it slightly different from backlink building for traditional websites.
Here is a list of YouTube ranking factors in order of importance:
- incorporates
- Links with Anchor Text
- Links without anchor text
- Social signals
Below are the strategies I use to rank my YouTube videos. Keep in mind that these aren’t all strategies out there and that there are plenty of ways to get backlinks and embeds.
Submit to Social Media Properties
- Share personal and company on Google+
- Share on the company’s Facebook page, like it, share it
- Share it on a corporate Twitter account
- Retweet on your account
Send to Onlywire
Onlywire is a service that allows you to manage over 30 web 2.0 properties from a single control panel. It’s great to get a quick backward shot of 20–30 links to any post or video you post. Sending your video to Onlywire won’t move the needle much, but it only takes a second to do so and the more links the better. I use Onlywire quite a bit because I use it to create links to every Web 2.0 post, guest post, video, forum, profile, etc. That I create. This is a really easy way to get a quick link boost.
Plus, you can pay someone on Fiverr to set everything up for just $ 5 — an effective, affordable, and automated way to submit social bookmarking recommendations.
I talk about submitting to Onlywire a lot in the rest of this post. This is not a necessity, but just a shortcut. There are other social tools to help you manage various social networks, or you can just manually submit them for free. However, Onlywire is the simplest tool I have found and it is the one I use in my business.
Publish on the site
Create a blog post or landing page on your website. A general rule of thumb for a landing page is that it should contain 300–500 words of unique content. The keyword should be included in the title and body. The keyword must be linked to the YouTube video, the video must be embedded on the page, and you must also link to an authority site. To further reinforce the page, add the keyword in a h1 tag and as an image alt text.
This formula should be followed when posting anywhere, including your site, other blogs you own, or Web 2.0 sites.
Here is a short checklist:
- 300–500 expresses unique contents
- Keyword in the title
- Key word in the body
- Keyword anchor text linked to the video
- Embed video
- Authority connection
- H1 tag with keyword
- Image with keyword in alt text
Once you’ve published your post on your site, don’t forget to promote it. Submit it to social bookmarking sites, Onlywire, and around the web. If you’re looking for more places to promote your content, try this checklist .
Post to the blog network
Create a blog post on a personal blog or other site you own. If you don’t own any other web properties, now might be a good time to start a blog . Having a second web property like a blog is a great way to get additional exposure and backlinks for your videos.
Once you’ve published your blog post using the same format as above, submit it to Onlywire.
Send to profiles
Business profiles and business directories are another great way to get embeds for your video. Depending on your niche you can embed your video on your LinkedIn page, Angel List profile, or Guaire list.
These are great quick ways to not only get backlinks to your videos, but to increase your overall brand as a company as well.
Remember to submit your profile pages to Onlywire to get some secondary link juice.
Guest Message
Write guest posts related to other sites and find meaningful ways to link or embed your videos in the guest post. This is one of the most powerful ways to get links to your videos. In fact, I’m doing it right now with this post. Another example of a guest post where I embed and link to a number of my videos is this post I Did It for the Startup Chile blog.
Remember to promote your guest messages too! Submit it to social bookmarking sites and Onlywire.
If you want to learn more about guest posting, try these guides:
Advanced Guest Post
10 Resources To Make You The Best Guest Blogger Ever
Create a post on the Web Properties 2.0
Another great way to get embeds, links, and views for your videos is to post them on Web 2.0 sites like the ones listed below. Use the same format as when submitting your blog or website.
There are a lot of different Web 2.0 sites out there and it can take a lot of time and resources to post to all of them, so I’ve broken them down into Tier 1 and Tier 2 sites. Start with Tier 1, and if you have time, keep posting on Tier 2 sites .
Tier 1
WordPress.com
Blogger.com
Tumblr.com
Medium.com
Tier 2
LiveJournal.com
Soup.io
Webs.com
Cloudwards.net
Doomby.com
Hpage.com
Sosblogs.com
Blog.com
SnapPages.com
Jigsy.com
Beep.com
Tripod.lycos.com
Ucoz.com
Jimdo.com
Bravesites.com
Newsvine.com
Storify.com
Over-blog.com
Whether you are posting on Tier 1 or Tier 2, every time you create a new post, be sure to submit it to Onlywire .
Keep connecting
As you continue to write content, make presentations, post in forums, etc., remember to keep linking to your videos whenever you can. The more links you can recover in your videos, the better they will be ranked over time, so keep linking them where you can.
If you follow the link optimization tips above and actively work to generate links and embed them with your YouTube videos, they rank in Google and generate a targeted, free traffic stream.
In summary, I want to give you eight key points to rank your YouTube video to the first page of google;
- Build links and embed
- Push to Social platforms.
- Optimize your Channel
- Customize a Thumbnail
- Create a Playlist
- Video Description
- Video Name
- Video Length
Disclosure: an affiliate link included