JARVEEPRO

In 2021, the video format has not lost any of its power and is still one of the best things to implement your marketing strategy. So far, YouTube is the second most-visited site in the world, only behind Google, which owns the platform. As the fact that YouTube is a search engine, video needs to be optimized to the same degree as ordinary web pages.

Google search and YouTube use different algorithms to rank content.

As a marketer, it's important to try to make your videos rank higher on YouTube. Optimizing video can not only improve YouTube ranking but also greatly increase the chance of appearing in Google search results and increase traffic. It's not easy to take the best practices of Google Search SEO and apply them to your YouTube content.

If you want to learn more about YouTube optimization to improve brand awareness, read on.

What is YouTube SEO?

YouTube SEO is the process of optimizing your videos, playlists, and channel to rank high in YouTube’s organic search results for a given search query. This often includes optimizing your video and meta descriptions, thumbnail, transcript, tags, links, CTAs, and so on.

The platform has more than 2 billion login users every month, so when YouTube SEO is completed correctly, it will provide you with countless opportunities, which can help you improve the ranking, increase brand exposure, and views as well as traffic to your website.

Why is YouTube SEO Important?

Every minute, 100 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube. The site gets up to 30 million visitors each day. If you want to find a video, the first place you go is probably YouTube.

Besides being the largest video resource online, YouTube is also the second-largest search engine (right behind its parent company, Google).

If you can tap into the traffic and publicity YouTube offers, you could instantly shoot to the top of YouTube’s search engine results. But I won’t lie: competition is fierce. There are millions of high-quality, impeccably edited videos with carefully crafted SEO.

Like Google, YouTube uses ranking factors to determine which videos end up at the top of each search results page (SERP). YouTube looks at your video’s number of views, how long users watch it, and how many positive ratings and comments it has.

For good measure, they also throw in the number of channel subscribers, how many times your video appears in a user’s playlist, how often it’s added to a favorites list or playlist and how many times it’s been embedded on a website.

To get the high numbers YouTube is looking for, you need to optimize your content so people click through and push Play. 

It’s a lot to consider if you’re trying to get your YouTube channel on the front page of  YouTube searches. But hey, now that you know what they’re looking for, you can give it to them.

BasicTips For Ranking Higher Your Videos on YouTube with SEO

• Have a Focus Keyword

Whether you’ve already posted your videos to YouTube, or you haven’t even pressed record yet, creating a focus keyword for each video will really help your rankings. All search engines work by matching the users' search terms with the most relevant results–and YouTube is no different!

If you like old YouTube videos, watch them again and try to find out the main theme. Ask yourself: what's the point of this film? What are the keywords?

For any video in the future, it's easier to choose keywords before you start. In this way, you can use the keyword research tool to help you find the most popular search terms to use.

• Include Keywords in Your Title

Your title should tell viewers exactly what they can expect to see in your video. That can be harder than it sounds.

Is your title too long? People lose interest and ignore you. Is your title too short? People don’t know if it’s what they’re looking for and they ignore you.

Ideally, your title should have around 120 characters—enough to tell people what they’re watching, but not so much they overlook it.Include Keywords in Your Title

Your title should tell viewers exactly what they can expect to see in your video. That can be harder than it sounds.

Is your title too long? People lose interest and ignore you. Is your title too short? People don’t know if it’s what they’re looking for and they ignore you.

Ideally, your title should have around 120 characters—enough to tell people what they’re watching, but not so much they overlook it.

• Optimize the Description

When writing a video description, weave in your vital keywords naturally. As long as the description is fluent and isn’t forced, you’ll be OK.

If you overuse keywords in the form of spam (this is called "padding" and poor etiquette), it will damage your chances of climbing up the YouTube SERP.

In the following example, the description uses several keywords, but they can work together without being forced.

When writing a video description, be sure to include a link to your website or blog. For Google ranking purposes, linking YouTube to your site is considered a reverse link (which means your site will use more Google juice).

The description of the YouTube video is truncated near the third line, so make sure you put the link at the top of the video description.

• Include the Right Tags

After placing your keyword(s) in your title and description, you also want to put them in the ‘tags’ section. Tags are for YouTube’s reference only, so your viewers won’t see what you include. Feel free to add as many variations of your keywords and search terms as you can think of. If we stick with the ‘YouTube Hacks’ example, here are 7 you could use:

YouTube Hacks

YouTube

Hacks

Life Hacks

Social Media Hacks

Social Media

Social Media Tips

Notice that they don’t need to be super-specific. 

• Customize the Video Thumbnail

Your video thumbnail is the face of your video. It’s the first thing viewers look at when your video comes up in search, so it really has to wow them.

Customized video thumbnails outperform YouTube’s automatically selected screenshot every time. Grainy screenshots from the middle of your video don’t instill faith in viewers that your video is the one to click on.

Take the time to create a custom, attractive thumbnail that conveys what your video is about. For best results, your thumbnail should have a 1280 x 720 resolution with a 16:9 aspect ratio.