At the time of this post, Google’s own YouTube videos (coincidentally enough) tend to rank well in the SERPs. This means more traffic for Google butThis means that if you’re not creating videos to coincide with your content or just creating videos on their own then you’re leaving a lot of potential traffic on the table. Not only is it easy to get a video to rank above normal/textual results in the SERPs, it’s also generally pretty easy in my experience to overtake competitor’s videos, as well. In this article I’m going to cover both how to rank videos more effectively but also address the two obvious scenarios you could face when you’re interested in ranking a video.

How to Rank Videos

1 – First off, find keywords which don’t have any videos listed in the SERPs. This is an indication that that keyword is ripe for the picking as soon as you put up a video of your own and do a little backlinking to it.

2 – Find search results that already have a YouTube video ranking that you know you can beat by doing a little analysis. If the top slot is occupied by a video which isn’t properly optimized then you know that you can likely overtake it by creating your own video which is optimized and a bit of backlinking. Many people who post videos know nothing about SEO so it’s not as difficult as you would think, particularly in a lot of niches. To learn how to optimize your video, check out my post on YouTube SEO.

This all comes down to keyword research along with the added parameter of looking specifically for YouTube results in the SERPs. Do your keyword research as you normally would, then note the placement of videos for the keywords worth your looking into.

I mentioned backlinking a bit in this article which is generally accepted as being less effective by itself for ranking content, but videos seem to be the one blank spot where it still works wonders, probably because it hasn’t been adequately exploited yet.

Also remember that as a side note, if you ever do a search for a specific product, say one which you are actively or considering promoting, which does not have a review video to accompany it, this is prime real estate and can equate to a goldmine if you find the right product to target. This makes sense considering people are always looking for reviews and information on products before they purchase them and many people will go for a review video on that product before anything else.