We know YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google.
So many bloggers have realized the importance of YouTube marketing for their blog to get targeted traffic, here competition is very less compared to the text-based content marketing.
It doesn’t mean we don’t any competition at all in YouTube, as I said before people started concentrating on YouTube to market their blog as well to earn some decent amount of money from YouTube Adsense monetization option. so we have to face competition among YouTubers.
If we optimize our videos according to YouTube’s policies then ranking becomes easier for us, so many people will think that just uploading the video will bring views and traffic to our blog which is not true.
Today I want to share some YouTube SEO tips which will increase our video rankings to get maximum views and desired traffic to our blog.
7 Tips for YouTube SEO Optimization
Before moving to our topic, I am assuming that you are making good quality videos which will retain viewer for a longer period on your videos, like video, audio quality, and relevant content, because viewer retention is one of the major influence factors in YouTube SEO.
All these tips will improve organic search results for our videos.
Now we will jump into our topic.
1. Keyword Research
Knowing about the keywords which users are searching for in YouTube for our selected topic is very important in getting high impressions, later I will share how to get good CTR(click through rate) from those impressions.
As a blogger, we know the importance of the keywords in search engine results, we are habituated to do keyword research before writing articles on our blog, we have to implement same procedure here to choose better keywords for our videos.
YouTube autocomplete is the best way to find out which long tail keyword phrases people are using to find videos if we know those keywords and search volume then ranking becomes easier by using those keywords.
Here you can check YouTube autocomplete suggestion for YouTube SEO tips
2. Video Description
YouTube search engine algorithms crawl our video titles and description to find out the information about our videos to display results to the user queries.
We have the option to write the description about our video up to 5000 characters, so many YouTubers are neglecting this option to spend time on description, if we utilize this option then we can add so many LSI keywords in the description text for better impressions.
If we look at Mr. Pat Flynn’s YouTube Channel then we can come to know how much time he is spending on video description.
Here is the screenshot of his video description
3. Tags
Tags are another source where YouTube search engines crawl to know our video information, we are allowed to add tags to our videos up to 120 characters, choosing the right keyword tags will improve our ranking.
Here is the article ultimate guide to proper YouTube Video Tagging by Anny Smarty which gives great insights about tags.
We can use popular hashtags as our tags in our YouTube videos, so we have to find out all the popular hashtags in social media platforms related to our video, Twitter and Google Plus is the best source to find out trending hashtags.
Here is the screenshot of my tags which I included in my recent video.
4. Add Sub-Titles And Captions
Subtitles and captions are used to reach the wider audience, YouTube allows us to add subtitles to our videos by our own if you are not interested in spending time on writing subtitles then we can us an automatic captioning option of YouTube which uses speech recognition technology to translate our audio speech into subtitles.
If we enable this option for our videos then our videos can rank on multiple languages and countries.
5. Cards & Annotations
YouTube considers viewer engagement as one of the ranking factors for our videos, cards and annotations are useful to engage and encourage our viewers to take some actions, Like “visit our website”, “subscribe to my channel”, “share your opinion in comments”.
YouTube cards look very attractive compared to the annotations, so try to use a decent amount of cards based on your video length, don’t overuse cards.
Here is the screenshot my YouTube video cards
6. Thumbnails
Thumbnails do not have any direct SEO benefit to the YouTube videos, but these are attractive images will help us to improve CTR, as I said before we can get impressions by using all the above tips, but CTR is possible only because of the thumbnails we are using for our videos.
YouTube allows us to add images(Thumbnails) up to 2 MB with a resolution size of 1280 x 720, using high-quality professional look thumbnails will increase CTR.
7. Organize Playlists
Playlists help us to organize our videos according to the topic it even helps YouTube to display suggested videos for the viewers.
Another advantage with playlists is it improves user retention for more than one video if a user watches more than one video on our channel, automatically user watch time increase on our video, YouTube thinks this activity as one of the ranking factors.
8. Social Media Promotion
To improve our YouTube video rankings we have to use social media platforms to get views, YouTube even considers social signals as a ranking factor.
After uploading the video, we should share our video on all social media platforms to start initial traffic traction, once we get external traffic sources from various platforms, YouTube starts promoting our videos on different channels as suggested videos.
Conclusion
If we take care of all these YouTube SEO tips for our videos to optimize the video according to YouTube algorithms, we will get good views and traffic to our blog automatically.
I request you to kindly share your opinions, thoughts, experiences about this topic in the comments section so that readers can learn more insights about this article and it adds value to content.
If you have any doubts regarding YouTube videos, please be in touch through the contact form, I will try to help you in this regard.