When it comes to being successful in the search rankings, the importance of SEO isn’t limited to just written content. In fact, did you know video results are 50x more likely to be organically ranked in Google than text-based results?

Having strong, relevant videos on your website can help you soar to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) by:

➡️ Earning traffic

➡️ Boosting time spent on site

➡️ Winning backlinks

➡️ And more!

If you’ve been ignoring SEO video marketing and focusing all of your keyword energy on written content, it’s time to jump in. Here are 3 tips to get your video content one step closer to the #1 search result:

Embed videos onto as many pages as possible

Embedding high-quality, relevant videos within an article not only provides audiences with more ways to digest and engage with your content, but also increases your chances of driving traffic to that article in the first place. A page with rich media like video has a much higher SERP ranking than text-only articles.

The relevancy of content is the most essential factor of SEO ranking and the presence of video itself signals the search engine that your page or site contains good quality content.

Publishing videos on Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, and other self-hosting providers is a great way to increase video views and engagement with your brand. Research also shows 94% of video results on Google are from YouTube.

However, these platforms and providers take users directly to their sites — not your domain! Embedding videos within your article pages will ensure that audiences find your site in their search results, and will give them all the more reason to stick around.

Incorporate keywords into the text

By providing keyword-rich cues within a video’s metadata, titles, and closed captions, search engines can better understand the video’s content, and will capture these keywords to answer specific search queries.

You enhance your SEO video marketing by using keywords in tags, descriptions, and annotations, otherwise known as media metadata.

When a video contains multiple media assets, it’s important to make sure the keywords included in the metadata send a clear message to search engines by aligning with the rest of your article’s text. The same is the case for video titles. Just like your media metadata, titles are hidden within the HTML code of your video and a good video title that is rich in relevant keywords will increase your chances of ranking high in search results.

Another textual aspect to optimize for SEO is your video’s closed captions. Not only do keyword-rich text contribute to your ranking in the same way as metadata and titles, but they also contribute to increased engagement. After all, many social media users watch videos on mute at work or while listening to something else. When they can read the video text and understand it, they’re more likely to engage.

Publish quickly to enhance your SEO

The amount of traffic that a news story generates depends just as much on the time of publication as it does on the quality of content.

Breaking news videos that are published in real-time not only attract a large amount of attention, but also generate “a very high completion rate,” according to Neal Coolong, senior editor of USA TODAY Sports Media Groups NFL Wire sites:

“When we find the news story right away, and we create a video for it right away, there’s still a huge segment of the market that isn’t aware of what is going on.”

Publishing videos around the stories that matter, as they happen, and as quickly as possible, is the best way for brands websites to rise above the competition — all the way to the top of the search results.