Rising through the ranks of Google SERPs is a dream for most businesses and blogs that wish to attract new attention. As SEO continues to be a primary component of most successful marketing strategies, it’s only natural to want to improve your performance in this regard. As Google has expanded over the years, so has the number of ways in which websites can be found via search. Whether people are using a standard text-based search, voice search, image search or shopping, there are ways to make yourself more visible to audiences. Today, we’ll review how you can better optimize your videos for Google’s video search results.

Select Your Keywords

Just like with standard SEO practices, you’ll need to know what you’re targeting with your video content. Which niches are best for your video? Do some keyword research to discover which keywords or phrases offer a) the most potential in terms of clicks and views, and b) the least difficulty in terms of ranking well. By pinging to Google, Bing and other search engines your content – laced with keywords and phrases you’re targeting – their algorithms will be able to latch onto your content. In many respects, the direct competition in multimedia  SERPs is less stiff and can actually be contested independently of the standard text-based SERP variants. Inevitably, video has even less obvious context than text when it comes to what search engines see; you have to fill in the blanks by using keywords as one indicator.

Create Thorough Videos

Most of us know by now that Google has an affinity for long-form content. Shorter pages and blog posts tend to rank lower than longer ones; it turns out that the same is true for videos. Google’s video search result algorithms prefers longer videos, meaning that your focus from a SEO perspective should be on details. While this contrasts completely with the most effective strategies for sharing videos on landing pages and social media (i.e. the shorter, the better), it makes sense when you consider that Google aims to provide detailed, authoritative content. To be an authority in an area generally means that you have a lot to say. If you’re creating new videos from scratch, then aim to please the Google gods by going long. If you’re wanting to rank well with existing videos that are shorter, then consider creating mash-ups with multiple, relevant videos combined into one.

Promote Where Possible

Once you’ve created your video and you’ve decided on keywords for title and tag optimization, you may think you’re done. Wrong! Now begins the hard work of promoting your video in a variety of places where it’ll get attention. From embeds on your blog posts and pages to social media shares, garnering as much attention as possible for your video through these sources is a good idea. Most people wanting to rank well in Google video results rely on YouTube; as it is owned by Google, the number of video views a YouTube video receives is believed to affect SEO rankings. If you can naturally boost the number of people watching your video through YouTube and other sources, then those stats will be pinging to Google, telling it that your video is in demand by audiences who find it relevant. This will in turn affect how well you rank in video results.

As it turns out, ranking well in Google’s video results isn’t too difficult. Start out by creating detailed videos that contain plenty of content. Next, figure out how best to optimize and target these videos using carefully selected keywords. Lastly, promote your video wherever possible – and ideally, upload to YouTube – so that the combination of video views and social signals send the right message to Google.