Do videos have to be at least 60 seconds long to rank?

Some folks think videos have to be at least 60 seconds long to rank in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)

… but others think they need to be either shorter or longer.

Here’s a question about ranking videos:

I had a customer ask me to make his video at least 1 minute in length because they rank better if they’re a minute or longer. Has anyone else heard this? I thought ranking videos was based on titles and tags because video content can’t be crawled like text.

Here’s my 2 cents worth:

1. listen to your client — and if they think videos have to be at least 60 seconds, that’s easy (it doesn’t really matter why he wants that, just do it)
2. rather than focusing on the “what ranks” question, make the videos engaging, interesting and powerful enough so the viewer acts on the Call to Action at the end — that’s the first part of the goal
3. if they follow the Call to Action, make sure they convert into subscribers, buyers, customers or whatever the client wants/needs (that’s the second part of the goal).

As you are probably aware, there is a TON of info out there about ranking, SEO etc for videos — and if you try to do/understand any/all/some of it it, your head will hurt even more

I’m pretty sure the creators of LOL CATS videos (and other virals) didn’t think about ranking, video length, etc — they just wanted to engage their audience

Once you know what the client expects as an “end result” (sign up, purchase etc), work with the client to come up with clever and interesting ways to use video to achieve that (thinking outside the box too), and don’t worry about all the so-called supposed rules there are/might be. Focus on what you do best — getting people to act on the videos you’ve created for your client. (And don’t worry about asking him where he got that info, that’s a whole other can o’worms you don’t need to open.)

PS — don’t forget to put your tracking and stats in place before publishing the videos, so you can both evaulate how well the videos are performing over time

Work out what’s working the best, then rinse and repeat with more videos using that tactics.

So the bottom line is, it’s not essential that videos have to be at least 60 seconds long to rank, but it is essential to get your potential customers to watch, like and enjoy the videos — then take action!

In regard to videos not being able to be crawled by search engine robots, it’s imperative and extremely important to TRANSCRIBE every video and paste the transcript on every page that you have control of where the video is embedded — your site, your Youtube channel, any other video portal where you publish your videos etc. THIS give those little search robots food to digest and keep with their video data, making it easy for your videos to be found for searches online