Here’s the ROARlocal guide that shows you how to get your video to the top of YouTube search.
First some facts to consider:
* Google owns YouTube
* Videos are 27% more likely to be clicked on in the search engine results than websites
* Videos LOVE mobile phones
* Given the choice between reading and watching, 78% of people prefer to watch something
* It is MUCH easier to sell a product via video than text and pictures
* Final fact – Zappos and Amazon are moving to videos to sell their products
Those facts are cool, but for you as a marketer, the HUGE advantage you have with videos over conventional SEO is that it is easier to get a YouTube video to rank on page 1 than it is to rank a website.
What that means is you can compete for rankings with well-established sites if you have optimised your videos correctly, giving you equal footing with the competition.
Google’s algorithm to find and index videos will only get better over time… And the competition for these results will obviously get more competitive, which means first page ranking will get tougher. So if you haven’t created a video yet, you’d better hurry up!
With that being said, here’s how we rank videos on page 1 of Google.
1. Create Your YouTube Channel
If you don’t already have one, create a YouTube channel… And make sure you create a channel name that is related to your industry. You can even go as far as creating a channel name that has your keyword in it.
Not many names will be available, so this will take some time. And don’t forget that there is a character limit to the channel name, which seems to be about 30.
The fastest way to get the keyword loaded copy is to upload the transcript to YouTube. The procedure is pretty straight forward… You just upload it like it was a caption:
The reason this is important is because all of your keywords are in that transcript, which then gets indexed by Google.
Enter the keyword in the title, description and keyword tag, and now start building links to it.
Focus on long tail keywords.
The video title is important. It is what Google is most interested in when it comes to the term that is being used for a search. In other words, the title and search term needs to match your video title.
In the above search I typed in “how to make pancakes.” The title influences the search rankings, as well as the description tag, so make sure you fill those in as well.
And just like normal SEO, it’s much easier to rank videos for long tail keywords, so focus on them instead of going after generic keywords like “credit cards”.
Once you figure out the keywords you want to rank for, make sure your video title and descriptions match them, as it will be very difficult to rank them if they don’t.
Create a video site map
You don’t need strict video content to get indexed. Google recognises a lot of other formats as video, like slide shows, screen capture and PowerPoint presentations that are animated.
The issue is, Google doesn’t see your video content, which means it searches for other ways to determine what your video is all about. That’s where video SEO comes in…
Traditionally, Google reads a page of content to figure out how to index it. But Google, though it is trying, can’t fully read Flash, so the content in the video remains invisible to their spiders. That means you need to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap found at their Webmaster Tools site.
Here is an example:
Embed your video on pages with text
To help search engines like Google get a better understanding of what the content is all about, make sure you are putting copy on the page.
There are two simple ways of doing that.
One, write an introduction to the video that goes before the embedded video:
The other strategy is to put the transcript on the page, too
You can insert the transcript under the video.
You can get the transcript by using a service like SpeechPad. You are also going to use the transcript on YouTube, so save the transcript as a text file.
Of course, you also want to make sure that you:
Embed the video onto your website
What you have to do is embed the video on your site like this…
By embedding videos onto your website it will help get the videos more views.
This is important because Google algorithms want to know how many times a video on YouTube has been watched…
The views on the video on your site will get included in that tally. Keep in mind; almost all of the videos that Google show on its blended searches are from YouTube.
Upload your video to YouTube
So, while it won’t guarantee first-page results, you can be certain that Google will index your video if you upload it to YouTube.
The only problem is this won’t accomplish your SEO goal of driving clicks to your site since anyone who clicks on a result on YouTube will get sent to YouTube and not your site.
Now, this just won’t be a successful SEO strategy… So that’s not the only thing you should do.
Build backlinks to your video
If you want to build links to your video I recommend that you hire a professional company (such as ROARlocal) for your link-building tactics. If you want to be lazy about your link building, you could use Fivver.
Fiverr is a site where people will do just about anything for $5, like dance in a chick costume.
But that’s not what you need!
What you need is to look for social bookmark.
Once you give him the keyword and URL and pay him $5, he’ll get backlinks to your YouTube video.
In about a week he’ll be finished, even giving you a report with all of the links.
The amount of time that it takes for your video to actually rank, however, may take anywhere from a week to three weeks after the backlinks have been added.
So in total, you could be ranking in one month, but you probably won’t rank as high as you would like, as the links that you’ll get from Fiverr won’t be as high in quality.
Which is why I recommend that you ideally try to build them manually or get us to look after this for you
Neil