If you’re not optimizing your videos, you should start. “Blended search,” the practice in which search engines display videos, images, news stories, maps, and other types of items alongside their standard search results, is now the norm on major search engines. And optimizing video content to take advantage of blended search has by far become the easiest way to get a first-page organic ranking on Google. 

Not only are video results increasingly common in Google’s search results, but your videos stand a much better chance than your text pages of being shown on the first results page. On the keywords for which Google offers video results, a recent study by Forrester.com found an average of 16,000 videos vying to appear on results pages containing an average of 1.5 video results — giving each video about an 11,000-to-1 chance of making it onto the first page of results. By comparison, there was an average of 4.7 million text pages competing for a place on results pages with an average of just 9.4 text results — giving each text page about a 500,000-to-1 chance of appearing on the first page of results. Now that’s a lot of math, but here’s what it means: on the keywords for which Google offers video results, any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index. Those are some attractive odds. 

Here’s the kicker… so few interactive marketers focus on video optimization that most of the videos in Google’s index aren’t very well optimized — so if you optimize your videos well, your chances of success will increase even further. 

Sure, it’ll take time to reorganize and tag your videos, but it’s so worth it. If you need help or want to add an online video delivery system with your personal branding… well, we know a company that specializes in just that. 

*Most of this information and content was provided by Nate Elliott of Forrester.com