Video marketing has many benefits, from building your brand’s awareness to developing effective marketing channels.

But there’s another video marketing opportunity every other brand is missing: videos rank.

Scroll through just about any search engine result page: there will likely be quite a few videos ranking all over the place!

Would you like to have your video in Google search and take advantage of video SEO? Here’s what you need to be doing to identify and capture organic search opportunities for your videos:

1. Know your keywords for video SEO

When it comes to organic search opportunities, videos can rank in Google in three ways:

Way #1: In dedicated video packs

For some queries, Google “blends” video search results with organic search. In these cases, videos appear in dedicated video sections. For each video within the section, Google pulls the video titles, video description, video thumbnail, date when the video was uploaded to YouTube, and the channel name:

Way #2: As video-rich snippets

Video-rich snippets are organic search results enriched with the information on the video that appears on that ranking page. Video-rich snippets include the video thumbnail, duration, creator’s name, and publication date. Clicking the video thumbnail takes you to the ranking page with that video on it:

Way #3: As video featured snippets (aka featured clips)

Video rich snippets pull the most relevant video to the very top of search results, showing the part of the video that answers the query:

From there, you need to research your actual keyword opportunities for successful video SEO.

Just to be clear: your video can rank for any keyword. However, when you are just starting, it is important to identify low-hanging opportunities, i.e.:

• Search queries that are already triggering video sections AND/OR
• Keywords with doable competition AND/OR
• Search queries that trigger featured snippets, with YouTube videos being featured

Creating videos to target those opportunities will make your video marketing more predictable, as you will be able to focus your video on searchable keywords.

This approach will also help you cater to your audience’s needs. When Google ranks videos for specific search queries, it means that those search users were found to be looking for video content and willingly engaged with videos. By creating videos on these searchable topics, you will be giving your target customers exactly what they want, i.e. videos.

To identify keywords that present more organic opportunities for your video, identify search queries with lower competition. WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool offers an easy and transparent way to find keywords with higher demand (search volume) and lower competition which is referred to as The Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI).

A higher KEI represents a higher demand and lower supply, so these keywords will help you achieve higher rankings quicker:

2. Create your videos and brand them well

Create a list of your chosen keywords, and organize them based on the topic clusters. In most cases, you won’t need a separate video to target a specific keyword.

One video can very well rank for a variety of closely related keywords. In some cases, you may feel the need to create an article in addition to a video. A Google spreadsheet can help you concisely organize all that information.

From there, proceed to create your videos which is going to be a breeze if you use a solid online video maker.

Make sure you brand those videos well: You want searchers to get familiar with your brand identity even if they don’t click your listings. Video results are very visual: They are great for creating a recognizable brand identity (which will help you attract and convert more traffic in the long run):

3. Publish your video on YouTube and embed it on your site

Since we are targeting three district organic search opportunities here (video packs, video rich snippets, and video featured snippets), we will need to publicize your videos with all three in mind:

Video packs (video carousels): Publish your video on YouTube

There are several powerful video hosting social networks but when it comes to organic rankings, YouTube is the best choice because YouTube videos rank best. In many cases, all you need to rank a video for a long-tail query is to publish it on YouTube. You have even more chances for it to rank if you optimize your YouTube page with an optimized title and detailed video description.

Video titles appear everywhere (next to the video thumbnail), so they may impact both rankings and click-through, so spend some time creating an effective title:

Video description is not as important as its title but it does help videos rank in organic search because they offer search crawlers easy-to-understand text content. Tools like Text Optimizer can help you create an optimized YouTube description in minutes. Text Optimizer uses AI to automatically create semantically relevant video descriptions that help videos rank:

Use the first line of the video description to link to your relevant page on your site: this is how you are going to build traffic to your site!

Uploading your video to YouTube is the most effective way to have it appear in video packs that are blended into organic search results.

Video-rich snippets: Embed your video to your site (and use video schema)

The best-case scenario is to have your video appear in all three of these search sections (dedicated video packs, organic listings, and featured snippets), so embedding your video to your page is a very important step.

When embedding your video to your site, use this video schema generator to increase its chances to be pulled into rich snippets.

Within a week or so, make sure Google has indexed your video. You can do that using ‘Video pages’ report in Search Console.

To ensure Google is generating video-rich snippets for your pages, use Google’s Search Console “Performance” section by creating a “Search Appearance: Videos” filter.

Finally, make sure your video is lazy-loaded for it not to impact your page load time.

Video featured snippets: Work on your YouTube title

YouTube SEO is not much different from any SEO. If your target query triggers a featured snippet, your YouTube video has a good chance to rank there. To increase those chances, word your title as a related question, and answer that question in the video description. This will make it easier for Google to pick up on that answer and use it as a featured snippet.

4. Cross-promote your videos

Make sure to promote your video through all your available channels, including social media and your newsletter. Each of those channels can get your video discovered by bloggers who will likely link to it (and help it rank):

Conclusion

Video optimization is an effective but often neglected marketing strategy which means there are a lot of competitive advantage opportunities there. Start creating videos focusing on what your target audience is searching for and you will soon notice your videos watched more, and bring qualified leads to your site. Good luck taking your video SEO to the next level!