What if you spent thousands of dollars and countless hours planning and scripting a video for your marketing strategy and no one watched it? Resources, intense planning and of course expense go into making an excellent video that gets very few views. What do you do?

This article discusses optimizing your videos for search. You need to get those videos on page one of search engine results when people enter search terms that are relevant to your videos.

Search Engines Didn't Care

Wow, have things changed! I am looking at a blog from 2009 reminding us that YouTube videos are invisible to search engines. Nothing could be further from the truth today, just two years later.

It is important for YouTube videos to be optimized for search. By using all of the tools, your company videos can show up in the top search results as well as provide important link backs to your website therefore increasing your website search ranking as well. As the competition to be on page one of a search result is fierce, companies need to use all the tools at their disposal.

Factors that Effect a Video's Search Ranking

Universal search results are defined as a combination of search results from a variety of search verticals such as news, social media, books, shopping and of course video. In Google, videos are interspersed with relevant links and images. Videos that appear in search results have a much higher click through rate than a simple text link for obvious reasons. The video thumbnail view is a very enticing motivator for people to check out the content.

In April of 2011, aimClear did a study that covered over a thousand search terms from 24 different categories. They used key word search tools including YouTube's keyword research tool to find the most-searched words and phrases and then used search in Google and Bing to see what showed up. What they found is that there are three main factors impacting a video's chances of showing up in a universal search.

Platform

No surprise here. Use YouTube! Of all the video platforms that show up in Google search, YouTube shows up 84% of the time. Since YouTube is owned by Google this makes sense.

The story is a little different at Bing however who tends to favor their platform heavily though YouTube and Bing are pretty even in the Bing results. (A downloadable copy of this document has charts from the aimClear study.)

Ranking Within the Platforms

If your video does well in the platform's own search results (inside YouTube for a YouTube video for example), it will do well in universal search results. The aimClear study says nearly 100% of the videos that showed up in universal search also showed up on page one of their native platforms. So it seems a requirement to do well in universal search is heavily tied to the video platform's search rankings.

Keyword Intent

Keyword intent is also important for universal search criteria. Transactional keywords such as "buy", "free", "sale" and "cheap" did very poorly in universal search results. So while these phrases may appeal to your target audience as they read the words, they won't help you in universal search.

The study hypothesized that the search engines don't want videos taking up the space that can be populated with PPC ads - revenue at the search engine companies may be the driving force here.

Informational keywords seem to do very well however. These keyword phrases include comparative (this versus that), instructional such as "how to" or "learn ...etc." and educational like "what is" or "history of".

The study shows the potential for creating educational video content as being a good strategic tool to getting your company page one results in search engines. This makes sense on many levels since users who are still in the research mode of the purchase funnel can be shown your informational videos which will in turn motivate them to look deeper into your product offerings.

Navigational keywords and phrases had a mixed result. These type of keywords include website addresses, brand names and brand descriptions. Very large brands did better with navigational keywords. This is surprising as current best practice techniques involve always including your company's website URL!

So when using tag words in your videos, stick to informational keywords and phrases (about the actual content of the video) and stay away from transactional phrases.

YouTube Platform Video Search Optimization

Since we have seen the importance for your videos to do well in their platform's search results, this section discusses the factors that affect rankings inside the YouTube platform.

Relevancy

For search, the term "relevance" is used to describe how closely the item resembles the user's search criteria that they entered into the search engine text box. For a video, this means how relevant is the video to the search critera. Since search engine spiders can't actually watch each video to determine this relevancy they use the video's title as a key indicator of relevance.

A good way to measure relevancy is to count the number of words in the actual video that match the actual query. If the search term entered in the search field is 5 words and you match three of those words in the actual video title the relevancy is 3/5 or 60%.

Search term: How to play Flamenco Guitar

Title of the video: Play Flamenco Guitar 3/5 60%

So being strategic about the title of your videos is extremely important. Let's say you just released a new electric guitar that is endorsed by a famous artist. The model of the guitar is: X-DF435. Do you call the video "Release of the new (insert company name) X-DF435"? If you do, you are not thinking like consumers who will be searching for this guitar. The guitar is new so they won't remember the name but they will remember it is endorsed by the famous guitarist. Be your customer when it comes to search.

User Engagement

User engagement is a measurement of users' interaction and perception of the video. Factors include:

Favorites - the number of times the video has been added to the user's favorite list.

Comment Count - This is the total number of users comments associated with the video.

Number of Likes - This is the number of viewers that clicked the "Like" button on the video which has replaced the five star rating system.

These factors obviously show that the more popular and engaging you can make your videos the better!

Trust and Authority of the Video Owner

Similar to the way Google ranks websites, this might affect a video's rankings inside YouTube. These factors include:

Membership Age - This is the number of years the video publisher has been active in YouTube.

Total Channel Views - This is the total number of viewers to the publisher channel.

Total Number of Subscribers - This of course is how many people subscribe to your channel.

Again no surprise on this either: content is king. Deliver great videos that people want to consumer so your channel views and the number of subscribers will grow.

YouTube Keyword Tool

The YouTube keyword tool is used to help define your keyword strategy for search inside YouTube. You can use the tool to generate new keyword ideas. You can either enter a few descriptive words or you can type in a YouTube video's ID or page URL.

One nice feature is the keyword tool lets you choose the demographic you wish to target. This includes sex, age, country and 24 interest topics. You may have to experiment here as small markets (such as the musical instrument industry) will not have the data history as large consumer markets. For example when I typed in "hand built electric guitars" there was not enough data. I adjusted the search to look for "custom electric guitars" and found some results. Even more generic terms can produce insightful recommendations like "electric guitars".

In Summary

Identify the keywords that are popular for your subject matter and think like a person searching for your subject matter. The takeaways include:

• Use YouTube until Bing or other platforms become more entrenched.
• Work a strategy to increase rankings inside YouTube.
• Spend the time making your video title a search engine magnet.
• Avoid transactional keyword phrases that are typically used to trigger a sale.
• Focus on informational words for your title, tags and your captions.
• Make great videos - easier said than done but good content is what people want.