With 500 hours of live-action and animated video published to the platform every minute, you may believe viewers won’t locate your videos. How will you attract clicks and deter others?
The answer to that is: With an effective SEO approach, just like on other search engines! That’s why we’re here.
We’ll show you how to optimise your YouTube videos for top rankings. You’ll understand YouTube keywords and content optimization after reading.
Research Your Potential Keywords
By conducting keyword research, you may find out what people are actually looking for. Fortunately, there are a few low-cost strategies you may employ on YouTube:
- Looking at the Search Suggestions
Yes, it’s literally that easy. It’s a good idea to base your SEO off of the most popularly used terms, which you can see by looking at the keywords YouTube suggests as you type. You may find out what people are interested in seeing more of on YouTube by selecting a wide keyword connected to your video.
- Visiting Related Channels
It’s always beneficial to examine the successes and failures of others. Our advice is that you investigate a channel that appeals to an audience not dissimilar to your own. Focus on the keywords and subjects that are generating interest from your target audience and avoid those that aren’t.
While you’re at it, take note of how viewers respond to the channel’s material in general (for example, are they more into animated or live-action videos? Is it more effective to provide them with information or to keep them entertained? In any case, this data can help you fine-tune your YouTube approach with little wasted time and effort, regardless of your focus on search engine optimization.
- Handling Google Trends
Google Trends is a great resource to use if you have a set of keywords in mind. This useful tool provides insight into the popularity of certain YouTube search terms. What’s even better is that, after a quick signup process, you can start using it for Google as well!
Choose Your Ideal Keywords
When you’re done with your investigation, you’ll have a long list of potential key phrases to choose from. Looking at them, you can tell that broad, general keywords far outnumber their more specific counterparts. It’s natural to want to go with what everyone else is doing, but you should give it some serious thinking before making a final decision.
You have to remember that most of the time those keywords are too broad. There are millions of results when you look for them online. That means there are millions of other videos vying for the same attention as yours.
Longer and more specialised search terms, or long-tail keywords, provide fewer results and thus less competition on the search engine results page.
It’s true that fewer individuals use those search terms, but you may turn that to your advantage. Using a long-tail keyword as the basis for your video will increase the likelihood that people searching for that phrase will find and watch your content. Although your potential viewers would be smaller, they would be more engaged since they would be more likely to watch your video.
Time to Put your Keywords to Work!
Once you have settled on the perfect set of keywords, it will be time to put them into action. In order for YouTube’s crawlers to understand the context of your videos, you should include your keywords in the video’s metadata. Let’s take a look at the factors that need improvement right now:
- The Title
You can choose whichever keywords you like for your title, but don’t forget to include your focus keyword.
Your primary keyword is the term used in the industry to describe the word or phrase that best characterises your video and the results of which you hope to rank well.
The truth is, the title of the video impacts your search engine optimization in more ways than one. It’s also a major role in your CTR, another important metric that YouTube uses to rank videos. Because of this, you should think of a title that will entice people to click on it.
- The Description
You may optimise your video description for search engines by including the terms you’ve selected in the text box provided. The YouTube crawlers will be better able to understand the context of your video and index it accordingly.
It also aids the audience in deciding whether or not to click on your video. After all, the first few words preview on the YouTube SERP, thus the beginning of your description might affect your video’s Click-Through Rate and, by extension, its SEO.
- The Transcript
Your video’s conversation and narration will be captured in a text file called a transcript. When will we learn? Because YouTube spiders can only read text but cannot analyse audiovisual information at this time.
Simply put, the words you use in your video can be used as keywords if you include a transcript of the video. This transcript can be written by a human, a speech recognition software, or both. An increased and more varied use of keywords is the end outcome.
Are you looking for a helpful hint from the pros? Use your target term within the first 15 seconds of your video to maximise the SEO value of your transcript.
Optimize Your Content for SEO
You may believe that optimising your videos for search engines is the last thing to do when launching a marketing campaign. It makes perfect sense, as search engine optimization (SEO) contributes to the video’s exposure in digital spaces like YouTube. While it may come as a surprise, a great search engine optimization plan for videos starts with the script.
An initial source of video concept ideas can come from doing keyword research. After all, the popularity of certain keywords suggests that people have an inherent interest in the subject, so reaching out to them by discussing it seems like a no-brainer.
Aside from keywords, there are other aspects of your video script that can affect your position in the YouTube search results page. Then, let’s take a look at them:
- The Script’s Length
Longer videos tend to rank higher in YouTube’s search results because they encourage viewers to spend more time on the site. Moreover, many people assume, reasonably so, that a lot of time and effort went into making a lengthy video.
It’s crucial that you understand how the length of your video impacts its position in the search engine results page (SERP), but you shouldn’t artificially lengthen it for the sake of SEO. Video metrics like watch-time, likes, and shares are all at risk if they are not engaged with, suggesting that SEO is not the only thing you should be concerned about.
- The Introduction
You can add this to the list of criteria YouTube uses to determine your video’s ranking: Audience Retention measures how engaged a viewer is with your video over the course of its entirety.
Having the majority of viewers stick around until the conclusion is the best case scenario. To be sure, that’s easier said than done. You just need to learn how to keep your audience gripped from the very beginning.
To hook them, you can directly or indirectly describe the benefits they’ll reap from watching the entire clip. Remember that people have clicked on your movie assuming that this value will be what they get based on the title, description, and thumbnail.
- The CTAs
An increase in views, engagement (in the form of comments, likes, and shares), and new subscribers should lead to a rise in the video’s position in the search engine results page.
Since you have no say over how viewers interact with your video, this YouTube SEO component is by far the most difficult to master. However, you may sway their choices by encouraging people to engage with your content in various ways such as commenting, liking, subscribing, and sharing. The inclusion of calls-to-action in the screenplay of your YouTube video is, thus, crucial.
A number of CTAs The answer to this question is highly context-dependent; nonetheless, 10- to 20-minute videos typically feature three calls-to-action: one at the conclusion of the video’s introduction, another at the midpoint, and a third at the end.
Closing Words
You may think that only established YouTubers, well-known brands, or funny cat videos have a shot at the top of the YouTube search results pages (SERPs). But the truth is that anybody can achieve that coveted position by employing the proper SEO strategies.
The first step is to aim lower and concentrate on long-tail keywords rather than broad ones. Certainly, you would be targeting a smaller subset of YouTube’s audience, but this subset would be actively seeking out your product or service. They’d be more likely to watch your video as a result.
