How to SEO Optimize Your YouTube Videos

When building a video marketing strategy, search engine optimization (SEO) can be just as vital as story boarding. Before you publish your videos to YouTube, make sure that every piece of copy, tag, and keyword are complete. This video SEO optimization will help your channel’s content outrank your competitors.

SEO Optimize Your YouTube Videos

YouTube’s algorithm uses a number of factors to determine which videos are most relevant to a user’s search. The information that you provide about your videos is the language that YouTube interprets to drive users to your content.

Here is what you need to know about YouTube’s ranking factors and the techniques you can use to optimize your videos for maximum exposure.

When building a video marketing strategy, search engine optimization (SEO) can be just as vital as storyboarding. Before you publish your videos to YouTube, make sure that every piece of copy, tag, and keyword are complete. This video SEO optimization will help your channel’s content outrank your competitors.

Read More: How to Rank Higher on Google in 2021

YouTube’s algorithm uses a number of factors to determine which videos are most relevant to a user’s search. The information that you provide about your videos is the language that YouTube interprets to drive users to your content.

Here is what you need to know about YouTube’s ranking factors and the techniques you can use to optimize your videos for maximum exposure.

#1 Keyword relevance

You create keyword relevance by writing clear and concise descriptors for everything from the video’s title to links that you may include in its description. In turn, YouTube uses this information to help increase traffic to your content by showing your video in relevant search results.

Do this:

Write a great title. The title of your video should incorporate keywords that best describe its content. Next to the thumbnail, this is one of the first things people notice and consider when deciding what to click.

Use video tags. Tags are a part of your video publication that contain all the keywords that relate to your video. While your title contains 2-3 main keywords, you can use tags to provide more information that speaks to your audience and your brand.

Fill out your video description. It’d be a mistake to limit your description a few sentences and a link back to your website. Anything that gives your audience context to your video—such as links to similar content, content summaries, or calls to action— helps SEO optimize your video.

When appropriate, consider using closed captions or uploading a video transcript. Closed captions and transcripts can also contain keywords and help describe your video in a similar way that the video description does.

#2 Quantity and quality of video views

YouTube wants to know how many people are watching your video, how long they stay to watch, and how many times they rewatch it. It’s not enough to generate lots of video views—your video metrics should also indicate engagement and quality content in order to have a positive impact on video SEO.

Do this:

Share your YouTube videos on other platforms and online communities. What audience are you creating content for? Reach them where they are and try techniques such as linking to a video that might help answer a question they have. This helps your business achieve the high-retention views that YouTube values.

#3 Audience engagement after watching

The audience reactions that your video marketing content generates in the form of likes, dislikes, shares, and comments are also essential to creating sustainable SEO value.

Do this:

Include calls to actions. Use calls to action to inspire people to take action, whether it’s commenting or sharing your video. You can place them in 1) your video description and 2) at the end of your video as an annotation.

#4 Channel strength

Your YouTube channel’s following and overall performance also has a great impact on the SEO standing of your marketing videos. Number of channel views, subscribers, total video views, posting frequency, and channel branding all factor into the equation.  

Do this:

Publish consistently. When you publish a video, your subscribers are notified. The potential and continued engagement that comes from a fresh video is a big plus for your channel’s success.

Create playlists. Playlists have titles and text descriptions of their own. Organizing your video content into playlists not only has SEO value, but also encourages people to view similar content from your brand.

Write keywords, descriptions, and tags for your channel home, too. Creating descriptions for your channel will help tell YouTube what makes you an authority in your field.

The information that you provide about your videos is the language that YouTube interprets to drive users to your content. And when it comes to video SEO optimization, it’s not all about the keywords, but the overall strength of your YouTube channel, too.

How to Rank Higher on Google in 2021

Getting your website to rank higher on Google in 2021 can be a tough task. Not only for your home page but specifically when it comes to blog posts. There are over one billion blog posts that get thrown up on the web yearly. Most are mediocre, providing little to no value to your site in the long term.

See, the days of writing generic listicles and hoping they receive infinite search traffic are over. Not only is Google getting more sophisticated in how it crawls content, but users are also getting much more specific with their search queries overall. So, creating something that is mediocre, will lead to mediocre results.

But great posts, on the other hand, provide consistent traffic to your website through search. If you create enough quality pieces you’ll eventually get them in definitive “one positions.” This is where Google considers your post so strong that they have an excerpt of the post visible in search.

These are SEO gold.

The key is to look at the types of questions your customers have. Then see if you can provide a better answer than a piece of content that’s sitting in the coveted one position on Google. And if you don’t get the number one spot, it’s okay–even being on the first page will push consistent traffic to your website.

Now it’s time to get to work.

In this post, I want to go over some actionable tips that can help your blog posts rank higher on Google.

1. Put In 2X The Time You Usually Do

Seriously.

If your blog posts aren’t ranking high there’s a strong possibility you’re not putting enough effort into your content. This means researching, writing, editing, and coming back to work on your post. High-quality content isn’t something you can do in an hour–it often takes 20-30 hours to be done correctly–this is the beginning point of improving your Google search rankings.

That’s why I want to talk about this idea called, “disproportionate results,” where you put two or three times the effort into something and it produces returns greater than 1:1. This method will ring true in many aspects of your marketing, business, life, etc. The key component is to put in twice as much work into the things you are producing, and you can yield much bigger results.

See, most writers are playing the quantity game, and that worked a decade ago. However, for long-lasting results, you have to look at making the content as valuable as possible.

If you’re answering a question for your reader, make sure you answer it completely. This means you need to be informed on your post. Take time and research points and articles that could bolster your blog into a high-quality piece of content.

The most overlooked piece of getting a blog to rank high is the promotional side of it. If you write a post, hit publish and expect people to flock to your content you’re dreaming (unless you’re an established brand). To promote your post make sure it’s put into a social media publishing schedule. 

You’ll also want to look for places where you can reach out and see if people will backlink to your content. This type of content is called linkbait. Link baiting consists of you creating content that people would want to use as a source in their own material.

The more quality links you acquire, the higher chance your content has to rank. You can see who’s linking to your content in Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools).

Once you’re here, look for pieces of content which are already getting some links. If something has a few links, it’s worth exploring what types of sites link back it. Once you’ve identified them, look for similar sites that could benefit from your content as a resource.

2. Change Your Titles to Exactly What People Are Searching For

We wrote a post on the death of Vine and quickly saw we were getting some traffic from Google for people searching, “RIP Vine Meaning.” At the time our post was titled, “RIP: Vine Closes its Doors” and was ranking fifth in Google.

Once we saw this traffic coming in we changed the title of the post to match the query more directly. This made our blog post rank higher.

3. Use Internal Links to Build Up Cornerstone Content

Cornerstone content is the content you deem to be the most useful and highest quality on your site. Use internal links back to this content wherever you can in other posts for phrases/words relating to this piece of content.

For instance, we run a weekly marketing show, and we’re based as a Los Angeles social media agency, so whenever we mention it in another piece of content we link back to it. This helps tell Google which content is important and gives the crawler another path back to this piece of content. Yoast (WordPress plugin) has a great post on cornerstone content I recommend reading.

4. Add To Your Older Posts to Keep them Fresh

If you have a post that’s dated but ranks high, it’s not a good idea to throw that SEO work down the drain. Instead, look for ways you can optimize/rewrite the content to fit in with the times now.

5. Do Your Keyword Research

Use a tool like Google trends to make sure you’re targeting effective keywords that match your potential customer’s search intent.

That was a mouthful.

Basically, you want to make sure you’re picking the best possible keyword to write about. Here’s a quick example showing that people are using the word “blog” more frequently than “article” when it comes to SEO.

To do this head to Google.com/trends and examine the popularity of different keywords that pertain to your business. Start with customer service requests you receive in your daily operation and see how you can answer those questions through content.

SEO isn’t rocket science, but effective SEO is hard work. Use these five tips as well as others you pick up as SEO evolves to get your posts climbing in the SERPs (search engine results page).

If you’re looking to rank higher on Google, feel free to reach out to us for a free consultation.