Introduction to YouTube SEO
Much like website SEO, YouTube SEO is the process of optimizing your YouTube channel to get more views. It mainly emphasizes on creating playlists, adding meta title and description to your videos, and targeting keyword research. Other essential factors of YouTube SEO includes promoting your videos outside the YouTube platform and providing a valuable user interface to your audience.
Optimizing your channel according to these aspects of the YouTube search engine can help you rank on the top of the search results, and get more viewers.
SEO plays a significant role in bringing your videos to your audience. If you find your content isn’t getting enough views, it’s time to implement these best SEO practices and have your videos reach more viewers!
Identify your Target Keywords
Identifying the best keywords for your topic is one of the first SEO practices to embark on. Whether it’s Google, Bing, or YouTube, search engines focus on keywords that convey the message of your content.
However, keywords for YouTube differ from keywords for other search engines. For YouTube SEO, you’ll want to focus on highlighting long-tail keywords rather than single and double word keywords.
To find relevant keywords for your videos, you can use free SEO tools like Google Analytics and Keyword planner. You can also try out paid applications like SEMrush, ahrefs and more to find accurate keyword volumes.
Focus on the Retention Report
Audience Retention reports present statistics on how valuable your content is to your viewers. This emphasizes how much time they spend watching your video.
If the retention report is greater than 90%, then your viewers are enjoying almost every second of it, if not, you might have to make some adjustments to your content. You can see the retention report of your videos in the Analytics of your channel.
The first 10–15 seconds are critical for your video’s success.
High retention improves your overall SEO ranking, and YouTube is more likely to rank the video with a higher retention rate.
Apply Best Practices to write your YouTube Title
Keep your title creative to match your audiences’ demands. For instance, if you’re providing a video tutorial for using Instagram to grow a personal blog and business, you can form the title as ‘Best Instagram Growth Hack That Works in 2020’ or ‘Become An Instagram Influencer With These 5 Easy Steps” rather than ‘How To Become an Influencer on Instagram’ and How to grow your Instagram followers’.
Add your target keywords to the title and form it as per viewers’ needs. This way, you will please both, your audience, and the search engine.
Add Transcription in your video’s description
Transcriptions of your video can serve as a great description. Apart from giving an insight into the content of the video, it also helps Google understand the context of the video & helps you rank better on YouTube & Google search engine.
Additionally, since 50% of YouTube viewers do not speak English, adding foreign language subtitles can help you reach a much larger audience. You can use Maestra to automatically transcribe and subtitle your YouTube videos to 50 languages.
Promote Your Video
Promoting your video across blogs, articles and all social networking sites can boost your YouTube SEO rankings. You can share your videos across the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin and all other sites you use for everyday social networking.
These websites can drive lots of traffic and can help your videos rank at the top of all search results.
Add Relevant Tags
Tags refer to individual words that are trending on YouTube and created by YouTubers for a particular niche. You can add all tags subjected to your content and let YouTube know that your content has valuable information for all of these tags.
When it comes to video SEO, YouTube pays close attention to your first few tags. So make sure that your first tag is the exact word-for-word keyword that you want to rank for.
Choose a Creative Thumbnail Image
Sometimes, a thumbnail looks so stunning that you immediately click on it without even reading the title properly. The thumbnail you display can set you apart from all other competitors’ videos. The more attractive the thumbnail looks, the more clicks you’ll get!
Credit: 5-Minute Crafts
YouTube lets you choose from three screenshots of your video footage to represent as your thumbnail, you can also upload a unique image to use for your thumbnails. Make sure you choose a click-worthy image!
Create a Playlist
Not only viewers, but channels too can make playlists in order to keep videos perfectly organized. For instance, if you’re creating a series of information to avoid long video footage, you can split your content into more than two parts and create a unique collection, while giving a name to each segment.
Link to Blog
If you have a blog, it’s a great way to promote it in every new video you upload. You can add a link to the blog and redirect your viewers for more valuable text information and services beyond the length of the video description.
Transcription in Blog
One of the best things you can do to promote your channel is to convert your videos into text-based transcripts and promote them as a blog. These blogs can be optimized with SEO for better rankings, helping you to get your channel in front of a larger audience without much promotion.
For the best transcription of your videos, you can use any third-party app, such as Maestra, or hire a manual transcriptionist online.
Tubebuddy & VidIQ
Tubebuddy and VidIQ are two Google Chrome extensions that help you make your channel more SEO-friendly. Tubebuddy is a video platform for YouTube channel optimization that helps with major parts like production, management, and promotion of your videos across various platforms. It features a language translator for non-English language rankings, tag suggestions, rank trackers, and all other ways to help you optimize your channel.
VidIQ is a tool that helps you keep track of your channel’s performance. It lets you compare the performance of your videos, as well as gives you statistics of the average watch, and also provides an SEO score.
Wrap Up
Some of the most popular content that you’ll come across on YouTube, has been optimized for search engines. SEO for your channel is essential, and these practices can help you reach a larger audience, and can get you more viewers and subscribers!
Author Bio
Aaron Johnson is head of business development and content creation at Maestra, an automatic cloud-based editing software that can transcribe, caption, and voiceover video & audio files to 50+ languages in just minutes, enabling content creators to reach a wider audience all over the world. Website – https://maestrasuite.com/
