YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine, offering your company unprecedented access to a massive audience of potential customers. Optimizing your videos for search engine optimization (SEO), however, is critical to attracting your audience and earning their support.
What is a YouTube SEO strategy?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the ever-changing practice of designing web content to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs). Search is often the gatekeeper to your content, so optimizing your content for search is necessary to attract traffic and grow a following.
Unlike Google, which uses backlinks and other factors to evaluate rank, YouTube SEO involves optimizing your channel, playlists, metadata, descriptions, and videos. You can optimize your videos for search both within and outside of YouTube.
You may know the basics of SEO for YouTube videos, like including keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and tags. However, there’s more you can do for YouTube SEO through video accessibility. Since search engine bots cannot watch videos, they rely on accompanying text data to index them properly. A key component to a YouTube SEO strategy is harnessing the power of your video’s text in the form of transcripts, closed captions, and subtitles, which can positively impact user experience, engagement, watch time, viewership, and SEO.
YouTube optimisation makes your business channel search friendly for both in-app users and users who arrive through regular search engines. Behind Google, YouTube is the second largest search engine, so optimizing your video presence has direct benefits to your SERP rankings.
We’ve identified the top 5 ways to optimize your channel so you can drive as much traffic as possible through videos.
Here are the Tips how you can do it:
1. Research and Find Your Keyword
A lot of content-based marketers make the mistake of thinking that when video is involved, the way they use their text is less important. Just like you would find a keyword for optimizing your blog posts for SEO, you need to have a clear keyword for your video content. This is literally the cornerstone of your strategy when it comes to how to do SEO for YouTube successfully.
Use Google Trends’ YouTube Search feature: Google Trends will show you which searches are popular and allow you to check on YouTube’s platform.
2. Add Your Keyword to Your Video Title
Once you have your keyword in place and your video is recorded, you’re now ready to start optimizing with a few YouTube SEO best practices.
Let’s begin with the title. Directly after your video downloads, you’ll have the chance to give it a name.
Here are a few ways to find a keyword:
Use YouTube’s autosuggest: Type in the basic subject of your content and see what comes up. These are suggestions that people are actively searching for on YouTube.
3. Optimise Your Descriptions
Your Video descriptions are as important as your video titles.
To ensure that your descriptions show off the best qualities in your videos, your agency will optimize your description for your targeted keywords and ensure that it’s long and attractive enough for users.
They will also make sure that all the small details are squared away, like your keyword appearing within the first 25 words of your description.
4. Optimize Your Tags
In YouTube, when you post a video, you can add tags. Tags help users that have never heard of you find you — they’re similar to hashtags on Instagram.
Typically, you should ensure that your first tag is the keyword you’re trying to rank for ultimately. Then, you’ll include different variations of that keyword, and some general umbrella terms for the topic you’re covering.
5. Track your analytics
The only way to know if your YouTube SEO strategy is working is to track your analytics. Metrics can help you understand where your videos are doing well and where they might need some tweaking. YouTube offers several analytics reports to help you track your performance.
YouTube channel analytics showing the number of views in the last 28 days, watch time, and subscribers.
There are many analytics you can track, but every YouTuber should know these metrics:
Watch Time: Watch time is the total number of minutes viewers spent watching your videos. This metric matters because YouTube boosts videos and channels with higher watch times in their search results as watch time is a great indicator of engagement.
Impressions Click-Through Rate: Impressions click-through rate measures the rate at which people watch your video after seeing it on their homepage, recommendation section, or trending section. Impression click-through rates will often spike after you release your video and decline later, but it’s still an important metric to track as it can help you refine your thumbnails.
Card Click-Through-Rate: Cards are preformatted notifications that encourage people to take action while watching your video. Analyzing card click-through rates can help you optimize your card CTAs, timing, duration, and placement.
Unique Viewers: Unique viewers is the estimated number of individuals who watch your videos over a certain period of time. This metric helps you audience your audience size and can be helping in evaluating engagement.
Traffic Sources: The Traffic Sources report shows you how viewers found your videos and which sources contribute to the most engagement. You can use this data to better optimize your video promotion strategy by deciding where to share your content.
Subscriber Growth: YouTube’s Subscribers Report shows you which videos, locations, and time periods gained and lost subscribers. With this data, you can learn which topics resonate with your subscribers and where to target new subscribers.
Monitoring these metrics over time will help you see which videos have the most engagement and the factors contributing to their success. Take note of what sets these videos apart from ones that don’t perform as well—you might notice patterns in the topic, type of video, length, or posting schedule.