Since Envoca buys advertising on local.com their sales team called me today trying to get me to upgrade a listing and add video to my listing. The sales person told me, “video is 5 times easier to get on the first page of Google then a website.” This is completely wrong, it is actually more like a 50 times better chance. So if you’re not optimizing your videos, you should start.
Ever since we started seeing Blended search, the practice in which search engines display videos, images, news stories, maps, and other types of results alongside their standard search results, has become increasingly common on major search engines. And optimizing video content to take advantage of blended search is by far the easiest way to get a first-page organic ranking on Google.
Last month Nate Elliot at Forrester published an interesting blog post titled, “The Easiest Way to a First-Page Ranking on Google.†In his post, Nate discloses the results of a study/experiment that they conducted whereby a series of popular keyword searches were run on the major search engines and the number of video results that were displayed were compared to that of regular HTML documents and organic results (text results).
When looking specifically at result sets on Google, they found the following:
On the keywords for which Google offers video results, we found an average of 16,000 videos vying to appear on results pages containing an average of 1.5 video results-giving each video about an 11,000-to-1 chance of making it onto the first page of results. By comparison, there were an average of 4.7 million text pages competing for a place on results pages with an average of just 9.4 text results-giving each text page about a 500,000-to-1 chance of appearing on the first page of results. What it means: on the keywords for which Google offers video results, any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index. Those are some attractive odds.
The problem with using this number as a sales tool is that it suggests that a site owner can create video of any quality, slap it on YouTube and it will magically be on the top of Google – sorry its just not that simple.
First, I have never seen a video make it onto the first page of Google before it has 400 views. even for relatively uncompetitive keywords. So while we and many development companies have a tool that can simulate views, the implication is that the video has be to be good enough that it will be viewed widely. That can be as simple as creating a script with unique content focused tightly on your topic. We have found that informative videos with a small plug for the sponsoring company will get the most views and click throughs to the websites.
Second, videos like websites have to be optimized. Dozens of online tutorials have been written on this subject, but at the very least videos you upload should have :
- Have a file name that includes your keywords. Less than 20% of publishers, or even marketers, insert keywords into the file names of the videos on their site, and even fewer use more advanced tactics like writing keyword-rich captions and annotations, or creating online video libraries.
- Add a descriptive title to your video. This is a suggestion from the mouth of Google , “When users search for a topic on Google Video, they will find your content easier if you include the subject of your video in your title. For example, a video title such as “SS-59 submarine” may work better for a video than simply including “submarine.”
- Provide a clear description of your video. We recommend that your “metadata” field clearly describes the content of your video, while also highlighting any characteristics that distinguish your content from your competition. The metadata you enter will appear above your video when users play it on Google Video. If your metadata attracts users’ attention they will more likely watch the entire video, and visit your website.
- Include a brief call to action with a link back to your website.
- A little known secret we found was when we hired a scopist to create a transcript and then added closed captioning we saw a boost in our placement. According to Google Video their Googlebots actually read through closed caption files. For more on putting captions on Google Video hosted videos see Reel SEO.
Once the video is optimized and uploaded there are several additional features which effect where the video displays within search engines. These factors include:
- A modest amount of views. I rarely see videos with less then 400 views shown on the first page of results.
- Viewer feedback. Some marketers say the more the better I haven’t really found that to be the case, but a handful of comments does have a positive effect on how your video is viewed.
- Ratings. Similar to feedback video with ratings have a slight advantage over clips with no feedback or ratings.
The moral of this post is, if you’re not optimizing your videos, you should start video can be a way to leverage existing content and give you another method to have your message available for your clients.
