Video marketing is something just about any business, in just about any niche should be doing these days, and many companies are and are using video SEO to increase rankings.

As a result, the web is flooded with video content which means it is getting harder and harder for your video content to be seen by anyone.

How do you get your video found and seen?

There are many ways, from being active on social media to producing engaging videos on current trends for YouTube algorithms to like you.

But there’s also another step to getting your videos found, surprisingly under-utilized by many video creators, which is search engine optimization.

Video SEO: Where Does the Opportunity Lie

When it comes to video SEO, there are two distinct organic search opportunities we can achieve:

• Video carousels that show up in organic search as a separate section for better SEO
• Video rich snippets that show up as organic listings: Your video shows up as part of your organic search listing:

This article will cover both.

Video Carousels

Video carousels are not part of organic listings: They show up as part of a dedicated search section like Google Ads or Google Maps do.

To increase your video’s chances to be included in the video carousel, you need to host it on YouTube because most videos within video carousels come from YouTube.

When uploading your video to YouTube, make sure to add thorough text context to it.

This is because Google still very much relies on textual content when ranking any type of content.

The video fields you will need to complete are:

Video Title

This is the most critical part of your video listing for two reasons:

• Google uses both the page title and page heading to understand what the page is about, and the video title is both: It shows up as the title of the page as well as the main heading underneath your video on YouTube
• Video title shows up within the search carousel so that it will impact your click-through (along with your video thumbnail)

Make sure you include your target keyword in the video title when uploading it to YouTube.

It will prompt Google to rank it higher and generate more clicks from people who will see what they were looking for when they search.

Video Description

Video description is another visible on-page text element. You can add up to 5,000 characters in the video description.

I urge video creators to use up most of that limit to give Google more context. Some ideas for your video description include:

• Ask and answer popular questions on the topic (e.g., from People Also Ask boxes)
• Give your full script
• List the main takeaways
• Include definitions and statistics, etc.

Another great idea is to include timestamps of your video within your video description as those help your viewers to get to the part of the video that’s the most interesting to them.

Create Optimized Content

Text Optimizer is a great tool for creating optimized context for your video.

It relies on semantic SEO to extract underlying concepts and entities from the related search engine results.

You can use the tool to find ideas of what to cover and even to build optimized sentences:

To increase your video odds to get ranked, you should also send some links to your video.

Linking to your video from your own website is an easy way to rank it higher.

If you create a lot of video content, setting up a dedicated site to share them on is also a great idea.

Quite a few themes are allowing you to create video galleries pretty easily.

And that will create a lot of opportunities to generate backlinks for your videos.

You can create Namify’s blog name generator to pick a cool name for your video gallery and set up a memorable video-driven brand.

Of course, there are other essential elements, like video thumbnail, video category, etc., but those are not SEO-related. It is always a good idea to pay much attention to those as well.

Video Rich Snippets

Video-rich snippets are your regular search snippets with a video thumbnail embedded.

The video-rich snippet stands out in organic search and may also generate more clicks to your site, which is never bad.

To earn a video rich snippet, you need to:

• Embed a video on your page: YouTube provides their code for you to use, and recent WordPress versions allow you to easily embed any video by using the YouTube block
• Use video schema: There are free WordPress plugins that you can use to generate video schema

There’s one thing to keep in mind here, though: Embedding video may hurt your page performance.

Now that core web vitals are essential for your organic visibility, there’s always an issue of adding extra elements to your page that can slow it down.

Surprisingly, YouTube videos do negatively impact page performance when you embed them, even though YouTube belongs to Google (so publishers usually assume it is optimized for Google by default).

You can cope with this by using the trick described here, which worked wonders for me personally.

One of the unexpected benefits of using that method was the related videos YouTube shows at the end of each video when you embed it.

Using the steps in that tutorial, I found those related videos disappear and my own video showing up instead.

The main difference between video carousels and video-rich snippets is that you don’t even have to have your video on your page with the latter.

You can embed someone else’s video on your page and use video schema.

People are clicking that video thumbnail in search results will land on your page, not that video source page.

Conclusion

Both video carousels and video-rich snippets provide excellent opportunities for your video to generate more views and engagements.

And the great news is it is still a low-hanging fruit opportunity that is not yet over-crowded by marketers.

While you cannot sustain the whole YouTube channel by SEO-only, this is a nice additional tactic to generate targeted clicks to your video page.