12 video marketing tips to help you rank higher on YouTube

Are you using marketing videos in your social media strategy?

Interested in getting them ranked higher on the most popular video search engine?

In this article, I’ll show you first-hand pieces of advice to grow your reach on YouTube by optimizing your video content, your SEO efforts and your channel.

I’ll start by stating a few facts: videos have become marketer’s no. 1 choice because they’re visually compelling, great for wrapping up complex ideas and also easily shareable. Besides, they’re perfect to use to increase audience retention and conversion rates.

Now, when dealing with video content, I think we all know that YouTube is without a doubt the best place to host your videos. YouTube is the world’s second largest social media site and search engine (right behind Google, who actually owns it). So I don’t need to tell you why you have to host your videos there.

However, getting to YouTube’s front page (the one that matters) is not easy as pie: you’ll need to carefully optimize your videos and everything around them.

With that goal in mind, let me give you 12 useful tips to increase your YouTube ranking position, using a real case study in this short animated explainer video that now ranks no. 1 under its main industry keywords:

1. Make it short

When I first started working on video marketing I realized that there’s a commonly known golden rule: your marketing videos shouldn’t be over three minutes long.

Why is that? Well, because video engagement is strictly linked to video length. And so is the possibility for your potential customers to watch the whole video and understand what you’re trying to sell to them.

This graph (made by video marketing experts Wistia) gives you a quick glance at this problem: