If you’re looking for a great way to boost your own SEO ranking, repurposing your blog content into video content is a great place to start. However, it’s not enough to turn your blog post into a video and call it a day. This is why we’ve put together a guide to show you how to use keywords to rank on Google using YouTube SEO.
What is Video SEO?
YouTube SEO and Video SEO are not the same things. Just like Facebook SEO, Linkedin, SEO, and even website SEO are all different. Video SEO focuses on increasing your visibility and ranking in search engines, while YouTube SEO only focuses on improving your search ranking on the YouTube platform. While there is some overlap
How Can I Use YouTube to Rank on Google?
If your YouTube video is optimized well, you can rank on Google. However, you will need to make a few changes on your videos’ frontend and backend to see a change.
Make sure your videos have traffic potential
A natural place to start is by making sure the topic you’re going to make a video on even can get search engine traffic. Google puts in its search results the best results for the query. This is why keyword research is so important!
You don’t want to compete with searchers that already have a ton of results. Instead, you want to find topics that have good results from YouTube.
>How to find video topics
A great place to start when looking for video topics is to search for video topics that have a good ranking and topic potential. To do this, you can use a site scraper tool like Scraper or search through a keyword search tool that works well with Youtube to find the right keywords and video topics.
Create videos that are well optimized
While you may have been able just to throw up a short YouTube video from your phone back in the day, the same doesn’t hold true now. Your video needs to engage your audience and encourage them to watch through until the end of the video. However, video SEO goes far beyond whether or not someone has watched your whole video.
Google’s search is mostly text-based. So, you need to give your videos as much context as possible to help make it easier for search engines to find relevant content on your site.
To do this, you will need to focus on the following areas of your video:
- The words you speak
- The visuals
- Metadata
The words you speak
Google can extract some of the meaning from your video file. However, there are ways you can help Google out a bit and increase your chances of ranking.
- Use a script or outline to help you add in keywords and make your speech concise. This will make your videos sound more professional and help you remove filler words from your speech too!
- Add in closed captions to your videos. Even if you use the auto-generated one by YouTube, make sure to go in and polish it out a bit to get rid of any errors.
The visuals
While your video should be high quality, we specifically want to refer to the video clips and your thumbnail. For your video, especially in instruction videos, make sure that you are both showing and telling. This means, for example, if you were making a recipe, your voice over and b-roll should match up. Taking the time to plan out your b-roll can make a huge difference in your ranking!
The next thing to focus on is your thumbnail. Do not use a still or clip from your video, instead create your own, but try to stay away from Google search colors to make your video stand out in a search result.
Metadata
The last piece is talking about your metadata. In this case, this means your title and description. Your title should include your keyword of choice and ensure that it’s still concise and straight to the point.
For your description, include timestamps from your videos that focus on key moments and a short description beside of it. Keep these short and sweet, and make it easy to read. Your description section can also be a place to add in some more keywords and leave valuable information for your audience in the description, such as links or more information.
Optimizing a blog post and optimizing a video are two very different things. Both of which require very different things to focus on. Hopefully, this guide has made it easier for you to figure out how to get your videos to start ranking on Google, so you can start getting more organic search traffic to your content.