How to Improve Your Ranking With Video Content

Are you struggling to improve your website’s search engine ranking? Have you tried video marketing? If not, therein lies the problem.

According to an Ahrefs report, YouTube is the most visited website this year. It’s also the second-largest search engine, proving people are nuts about video content. A video’s ability to attract attention and engage the audience makes it the king of content.

But, billions of videos are watched every day and hundreds of hours of videos are uploaded every minute. To capture the interest of your target audience, your video content needs to stand out.

Developing creative video content ideas is certainly one element but there are several more that’ll aid your SEO efforts and improve your rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

This video marketing guide will show how to improve your ranking with video content. But, before that, you need to understand the relationship between videos and ranking.

How Does Video Content Help Your Ranking?

Google has kept tabs on user preference for a long time. The search engine giant tweaks its algorithm to accommodate the latest trends and its most recent updates prioritize websites with videos. As a marketer, you can’t ignore video content and expect to rank high on the SERPs.

Even in this social media age, the search engine is the source of 93 percent of all online experiences. So, the first and most important goal of your marketing plan must be to appear on the first page of search results.

Remember: The top three results on the first page of Google receive 55 percent of all clicks, meaning you should focus your efforts on appearing there.

Video content helps your page rank in more ways than one. The Google algorithm considers hundreds of metrics to decide the rank of a website. The following are three of the many ways in which videos can boost your website’s SERP ranking:

• People stay twice as long on web pages with video content than without.
• Having video content on a web page increases the click-through rate by 157 percent.
• Web pages with quality video content are more likely to receive quality backlinks.

Videos have the innate ability to generate interest and attract more viewers. That said, including video content on your website alone doesn’t guarantee higher traffic and page rank. You can reap rich rewards in terms of traffic and ranking only when you produce high-quality, valuable video content.

Bear in mind that a poorly made video does a website more harm than good – the videos you make must appeal to search engines and users. This means the video content must be search engine optimized and contain valuable content that’s useful to viewers.

Here are a few ideas to improve your ranking with videos.

Create High-Quality Video Content

The video title might have brought a user to the web page, but it’s the quality of the content that will make the visitor stay. If you don’t want your video content to be just another one in the crowd, here are a few things to keep in mind when producing a video.

Brand Identity: Your unique brand identity is what differentiates your business from others. Let your brand identity shine through the video. Not sure how to find your brand identity? Answer these questions:

• How is my business different from others?
• If my brand takes a human form, who would it resemble?
• How would it sound?
• What personality traits will it possess?

Target Audience: If your target audience is everyone, your video content will not appeal to anyone. To develop a solid message, you need to narrow down the basic demographics of your audience such as age, gender, location, personality, likes, hobbies, etc.

Address Pain Points: Viewers are spending valuable time on a video, so they are sure to expect something in return. In most cases, it’s a solution to their problem. It’s up to you to understand your audience’s pain points and show them how to solve their problem.

Entertain Your Audience: In most cases, videos that adopt a formal style and serious tone will only put viewers to sleep. Adding a pinch of humor and a dash of wit will engage your audience and help get your message across. If humor isn’t your cup of tea, try to keep the general style and tone casual, friendly and conversational.

Tell a Story: Weaving a story around the marketing message will influence viewers to stick around. Plus, people remember videos with powerful stories and emotions. Viewers who find themselves emotionally involved with a video are more likely to perform a follow-up action, so try to emotionally engage the audience for better SEO results.

Engaging Thumbnail: Even before the title, the thumbnail of a video attracts a searcher’s attention. The thumbnail has a key role in whether a user clicks a link or not. Make sure video thumbnails are relevant, beautiful and compelling.

Optimize the Video Content for Search Engines

One of the first rules of video marketing is to optimize the content. Using the right short-tail and long-tail keywords and other SEO moves will get your video content to the top of the SERPs when potential visitors search for that word or phrase.

Keyword research is both an art and science. Brainstorm words that best explain the video. Put yourself in the users’ shoes and determine words, phrases and questions they might ask Google.

You’re not without help on this. Several keyword research tools, both free and paid, are available to make the research process simple, efficient and accurate. You can start with the keyword planner tool provided by Google Ads.

Search engine algorithms are still not advanced enough to understand the content of videos – it’s up to you to supply the pertinent information for the search engine algorithm to categorize and prioritize your videos. These features not only help search engines and YouTube but also grab your audience’s attention.

Web crawlers use some or all of the following to understand and rank your videos:

• Title
• Video description
• Transcript
• Keywords
• Video Length
• Tags
• Likes and dislikes
• Comments
• Total Views
• Subscribers

Anything that attracts views and makes the viewers stay until the end of the video is part of the optimization strategy. Captions and text overlay also make sense of the content when the sound is turned off.

Combine Video Content and Marketing Automation

Some sure-shot ways to impress search engines are to increase traffic, nurture leads, boost conversions and generate sales. The search engines, seeing the initial success of your marketing methods, will boost your ranking and further augment your marketing benefits.

Search engines aren’t the only way to connect with prospective customers – social media and email marketing are two more of the many methods to generate leads and move them along the marketing funnel.

On social media platforms, you can use marketing automation to send the right videos to the right people at the right time to create the maximum impact. With almost all social media platforms tilting towards video content, yours might get buried under thousands of videos that appear on the users’ timelines.

Search engines, particularly Google, value social signals. Websites with the most social media activity are prioritized on the SERPs. Also, you can encourage your subscribers to view, like and share your content by sending newsletters whenever a new video is released.

Host Your Video on YouTube and Embed the Content Anywhere You Want

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, second only to its sister brand, Google. Hosting the same video at different places, such as YouTube, social media, your website, etc., can be counterproductive.

Instead, upload your video on YouTube and embed it wherever you want: email newsletters, blogs, social media website, etc. This strategy has several benefits. You draw viewers from various sources and YouTube, noticing the increasing view count and engagement, prioritizes your video in searches and recommendations.

Website visitors tend to stay long on a page that includes video content. To Google, long stays signify interest in the content, meaning the content is relevant and of high quality. The search engine giant will then reward the website with a higher ranking on the SERP.

Viewers who find a video relevant and interesting will take the necessary steps for engagement – they’ll take the action you want, click on different links or visit other pages of the website. The crawlers will consider these as positive signals, and boost your Google search ranking as a reward.

Keep the Videos Short and Concise

In the case of video content, the shorter the video length, the better the engagement will be. That’s because videos deliver a large amount of information in a short amount of time. After a minute or so, your audience will lose focus, which will force them to leave the page.

The ideal video length also depends on your particular needs or goals, the type of video and the information you want to convey.

Although we’re rapidly moving into the age of high-speed mobile connectivity, short videos allow mobile users to watch content without it buffering or losing video quality.

Experts agree that short-form video content inspires creativity and attracts more viewers, which in turn boosts your ranking.

Final Thoughts

Video content won’t lose its hold over the public for the foreseeable future. Truth be told, the immersive nature of video guarantees its upward growth for a long time.

Marketers and businesses should make use of video, but not just for brand awareness, lead generation and conversion. You should use their SEO advantages to boost your website ranking, and the ideas mentioned in the marketing guide above should help you achieve this goal.