By Yulia Edirisinghe
A while ago, we blogged about how clever keyword optimisation and hosting on YouTube can help boost your video’s search ranking on Google. However, given the growing importance of video as a B2B marketing tactic, and the ever-changing landscape of search optimisation, it is likely that these methods alone will not guarantee you the top spot. But luckily, there are a few other tricks that will help you get your video content to the top of the search results, and in front of your prospects.
1. Begin your promotion immediately after posting
How well you rank in search results is based to a great degree on how popular the video is – the overall number of views as well as the number of views in the past 24-48 hours. Share your new video via multiple social media platforms, embed it in your blog, and promote it through email to maximize your views.
YouTube rewards big spikes in views by placing such videos in lists such as “Most Viewed Today” potentially boosting your viewership further.
2. Use annotations
Annotations are pop ups that appear within the video itself, and can be scheduled to appear at a certain point of playback. These can help increase viewer engagement, which is a key indicator YouTube uses to rank videos.
Annotations also have a nifty link out function, which allows you to drive traffic to other videos, playlists, channels or subscriptions, which YouTube’s search algorithm considers favourable when ranking.
3. Respond to comments early
Try to respond to comments on your videos as soon as they happen. Those responding are your keenest audience, and you should treat them as such. Comments not only drive up engagement and indicate a worthy video for viewing, but also signal ‘rank worthiness’ to YouTube.
4. Get geeky
Sitemaps
Similar to regular sitemaps cataloguing the various pages on your website, video sitemaps provide search engines with metadata to help them find and index the various videos on your website. Submitting a site map will help improve your video’s ranking for the right search queries.
Using Google Video Sitemaps, you can inform the crawl bots about the category, title, description, and intended audience for each video – all very important information when you’re trying to get your video in front the right prospects. Not only this, submitting a sitemap enables Google to offer some video-specific information, as well as a video thumbnail to further increase the likelihood that a prospect will click on your video.
By allowing for the indexing of the embedded location on your site, sitemaps also offer the benefit of the prospect viewing the video on your site, rather than on YouTube. This allows you to leverage all of the branding and positioning content on your website, as well as to present specific call-to-actions to progress your prospect along the buyers’ journey.
Schema
Schema is a form of micro data HTML mark-up that provides additional information to major search engines helping them to understand your content better. Google identifies Schema.org as the recommended way of describing videos on the web. See Google’s guidelines on adding Schema mark up to your website here.
Using Schema.org mark-up will not affect any of the sitemaps you are also using, and it is recommended that you continue to use sitemaps as well.
5. Enable sharing and embedding
While the jury’s still on out on how relevant backlinks are after Google’s many algorithm updates, you definitely want to facilitate the sharing and reposting of your videos. You will reach a wider audience and build credibility with your prospects, and the potential boost to your rankings won’t hurt either.
We hope these tips help you rank your videos higher and reach the prospects you deserve. If you have any questions, please leave us a comment below!
Want to find out more about SEO in general? Read our SEO wiki. Or, for more information about producing your own videos, read our video production wiki.
With thanks to Wen Xi, research assistant.
Yulia Edirisinghe is a Marketing Associate at align.me. For more information or to contact her, click here.
