Video marketing has become a great way for businesses to get their messages out on the web and use videos as advertising to promote their business. Google’s search now tends to include more videos and images within the first page of Google’s rankings. A perfect example of this is a search for the keyword “golf swing”.
I have looked into the importance of the optimising factors that have been known to alter the ranking of a video on video hosting websites such as YouTube, Vimeo and Videojug.
Searching for “golf swing” in Google, I have compared the first two golf video results ranking for position 1 & 2.
Rank 1: Videojug: How to perform the perfect golf swing
Rank 2: YouTube: How to swing a golf club like Tiger Woods
An optimised video on a video hosting website, such as YouTube will contain the following:
1.Likes and Dislikes
Both sites allow for likes and dislikes of the video so viewers can rate your video if it is relevant and engaging or not.
3,660 likes for YouTube’s how to swing a golf club like Tiger Woods
4,000 likes for Videojug’s How to perform the perfect golf swing
2.The Ability to make a Video a “Favourite”
Both sites allow for videos to be added to favourites when logged into their account. This means videos will again be looked at another date and Google sees it as a good video for someone to watch.
3.Optimised Video Title Text
Both sites have relevant keywords and catchy titles included within the title of the video to make it compelling for the viewer to click through to.
4.Tags
Tags are added to videos to categorise related subject areas so each video can be found by various different tags. Tags help users easily continue engagement across to other related video content on a site. Tags help order the video content on a site which is good for usability an therefore good for SEO when specific videos are searched for. The Videojug video has not got tags relating to any other related areas, whereas there are a wide range of tags used on the YouTube video surrounding the area of golf.
5.Description
Creating a description that is compelling and includes top keywords will help some sites to rank well for their videos. Both videos have information and descriptions surrounding the area of golf, helping to explain in more detail what the video is about.
6.Comments
Comments are allowed on both videos, and each of them have comments on the videos, this helps with interaction and allows people to talk about the video in the same place and not go elsewhere to talk about the content.
7.Informative Video Content
These videos have informative information about their titles. Both videos are under five minutes which is a good time length for someone to watch the whole video and not bounce off half way through.
8.Embeddable Videos
YouTube allows you to embed videos so it can be posted and written about in blogs and on other sites. Videojug does not have the ability for the embed code to be shared.
Videojug doesn’t have the ability for tags or embedded videos, so I bet your wondering why Videojug video is ranking higher than the YouTube golf video? With YouTube having two million more views than Videojug’s video there is one factor that seems to stand out and show that Google does in fact value how many Likes a video achieves highly when it comes to video page rankings.
So when you are planning your video content strategy ensure you have the following questions in mind.
- Will the video appeal to the intended audience?
- Is the video content engaging?
- What keyword should we target?
- Will the title sell the video to ensure clickthrough & likes?
This way your video content will not only attract targeted traffic & customers to your site, but your video content can build links to your website too.
For more film, animation and video SEO marketing tips check out my blog.
