YouTube SEO
In order to rank videos on top, you must know YouTube SEO. It is a method which can boost your performance within the platform and help you to gain better ranks and can bring more views and engagements on your YouTube Channel. Today we are going to learn about YouTube SEO. I will share few steps and tools to perform SEO for YouTube Videos.
Before getting into tips and tricks, first we need to know about the ranking factors so that we could work according to them.
Social Engagement
Social engagement is form of any type of engagement such as Video comments, Subscribers, Social Shares, Likes/Dislikes, CTR (Click through Rate) and recommendations.
Video Comments
Being a content marketer, it’s not easy for you to make everyone happy. You will see both positive and negative comments on your videos. But you need to understand the importance of it and use it for your betterment. But what if there are no user comments or lesser user comments on your videos? In this situation you need to work hard and encourage people to comment on your videos. Later in this article we will learn about the techniques by which we can make users to comment on videos.
Subscribers
All YouTube channel owners want subscribers on their channel. Apart from asking people to subscribe to your channel there are few methods which could follow to gain subscribers and improve engagement on your channel.
Social Shares
If your videos are being shared by people, it drives great engagement on your videos and channel. It is one of the major factors in YouTube rankings.
Likes and Dislikes
Likes and dislikes are core engagement factors and also helps videos to rank within the platform. These are considered as best engagement metrics for any YouTube video and can help in improving rankings.
CTR (Click through Rate)
Click through rate in YouTube is based on number of times people got the videos on search results divided by number times people click on it to watch. You could improve your CTR by having compelling titles and thumbnails. Choose something that makes your result stand out from the rest.
Recommendations
It is similar to shares by instead of social media platforms; it is done on specific platform or personality. For example, if your video is recommended by celebrity or authorized authority, then engagement break records for your videos.
All these are Social Engagement ranking factors. Let’s move on to next factor which is:
Length of Video
Length of video is important according to your targeted audience and channel category. It is also a good ranking factor. A good length of video would give you better response. According to a study conducted by Backlinko, “The average length of a first page YouTube video is 14 minutes, 50 seconds.”
This is the average time of most ranked videos. As I said earlier, you could adjust your video length according to targeted audience. For example, if you are planning to create tutorial videos, then it should be of good length with easy steps to learn. However if you want to attract audience who are looking for quick tips then the length of video should not be long.
Use of Keywords in Title
Writing a catchy title is in the trend. It drives curiosity between users and makes them click and watch the video. It is a good technique but apart from writing cheesy titles, you can also use the best keywords to make your video title. Writing a video title which perfectly matches to your video content will be SEO friendly and user friendly both at the same time. In order to write this kind of titles, you can take help of search engines and YouTube itself.
Keyword Research for YouTube Videos
Keywords play an important role in any form of SEO. While working for YouTube SEO, you need to put maximum efforts to collect best keywords for your videos. In order to conduct keyword research, first you need to set an AIM and find keywords according to it. There are few common things which you need to keep in your mind while doing keyword research for your YouTube videos.
Relevancy
Target the relevant keywords which can describe your videos. Do not choose the keywords on the basis of search volume. Always keep quality in your mind and pick the best keywords which are relatable to your YouTube videos. Let’s take an example of TheSEOGuy. At my platform I provide digital marketing services and I am based out in Delhi. If I would ever create a video, then my focus keywords would be “Digital marketing Services”. In order to find more relevant keywords based on this, I will use YouTube search feature i.e.
These are the actual search terms used by people while looking for content on YouTube.
Competition
It’s nearly impossible to find zero competition on YouTube because whatever you do, you have to deal with competition. Apart from analysing competition in keyword planner tool, I try to collect data from direct competitors by analysing their content and keywords used by them in their video titles and description.
Research on multiple Search Engines
You need to collect data from as much as platforms to filter out best keywords for you YouTube Video. It will help you to perform better YouTube SEO. For example, we could use multiple search engines such as bing, duckduckgo, ecosia and many more.
Pro Tips:
While doing keyword research I always keep in mind that I am going to upload fresh content and it is not at all easy to rank on high competition keywords. So I target the low competition keywords first and try to achieve ranks. Let’s take another example here.
In above image I tried to check out keyword worth on YouTube. As you can see there are more than 2,000,000 results for the keyword “Content Marketing”. It is not easy for me to outrank existing videos. So in this case I need to create a plan and target keywords on which I could get ranks and can relate my content with targeted keyword. So I tried “Marketing Tactic”
As you can see that “Marketing Tactics” has just 41,000 results and if I would work smartly, I could achieve my goal. After following these steps it’s time to take all the keywords on your list and roll them through search and see which ones have a decent competition.
Use of Tags and Filename
Use of quality tags and filename are part of SEO factors for YouTube videos. If you are concerned about YouTube SEO, then you can’t ignore these.
YouTube Tag
YouTube tags are used to highlight video content. It helps viewers to understand video content. However, you have to keep quality in your mind while creating tags for your videos. Tags should be relevant to the content of your videos. Tags can identify the category your video belongs to and help people discover your videos in the sidebar suggestions of “related videos” section.
Pro Tip: Add brand tags along with content tags to generate create searches.
Filename
The video file name should include your main keywords. It would be great if you are have used the similar keyword in video tile and description and tags. Filename should be relevant and descriptive enough to related with video content.
Similar to Image Optimization, we can also perform Video Optimization before uploading raw file to our video channels. For this you can follow simple steps given below.
- Locate the video in your system which is ready to upload
- Right Click on Video
- Choose Details from the top menu
- Put the required information
Refer the screen shot below
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
After feeding the information in video, you are all set to upload it on your YouTube Channel.
Adding Transcript
Search engines are bots and we all know that they can’t listen to audio, see image and watch videos but they do index texts. So having a transcript on your videos would help you to boost YouTube SEO. A transcript enables search engines to ingest your multimedia content and index it accordingly.
Every video has a title and description but content is blank for search engine bots/crawlers. Transcripts are body text of your video content and helps search engines to read it.
These are few factors of YouTube SEO. If you work smartly, according to above listed ranking factors, you could rank your videos on top.
However, when it comes to YouTube SEO, everyone look for easy options. So let’s talk about few YouTube SEO tools. Tools are always important for better performance if you are using correct tools and using tools wisely. Given below are few good “YouTube SEO Tools”.
- TubeBuddy: This tool provides some amazing options to creators such as bulk video editing, Adding quick links, direct upload on social media channels i.e. Facebook, helps in social monitoring and so much more.
- DrumUp: DrumUp is basically a content discovery tool. It helps you to manage promotions for your YouTube channel or videos.
- Cyfe: It helps you to analyse and track your video’s performances and stats. You could monitor reports within an easy dashboard. Cyfe lets you easily monitor your overall channel’s performance, as well as performance metrics for each individual level. It lets you check out metrics like views, traffic sources, audience retention, and engagement.
- Canva: It is a great platform to create useful and effective thumbnails for your YouTube Videos. The best part about this tools is, it has drag-and-drop format and provides access to photographs, vector images, graphics, and fonts. Even if you are not professional in editing photos, you could create great images with the help of this tool.
YouTube SEO – FAQs
If you optimize your channel and youtube videos, you could get better engagement and views. It is very important for channels to attract more audience. YouTube SEO could help you to build your brand more aggressively.
The channel owners could generate better engagement on their content. By applying YouTube SEO Tips, channel owners can rank their videos on top and reach out to more people.
Given below are few best practices for YouTube SEO.
- Use correct name for your video file while uploading it on YouTube
- Put the keywords in Video Title but do not over optimize use it naturally
- Work on Video Description and put a brief description about video and use your targeted keyword in there.
- Upload the video under correct category to reach out targeted audience.
- Create customized thumbnail for your videos.
- It would be great if you could upload SRT file to add and display subtitles and captions.
- Insert Cards and End Screen to work on your channel branding.
YouTube SEO could help you to boost your performance in terms of searches but in order to create viral content, you have to come up with unique and original content idea. Follow the tips mentioned above and work accordingly.
In order to find out best practices for your video optimization, please follow the guidelines available on support forum. You can refer the guidelines by visiting support answer
Hope these steps would help you to get into competition and rank your videos on top. These basic steps could help you to stand out in the crowd and rank your videos on top.
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