8 YouTube SEO Tips To Drive Traffic & Boost Video Ranking
Videos have become more consumable content than text. There comes the need for video SEO to get the most out of content marketing strategy and makes a business scalable.
Speaking of videos, YouTube is the number platform that most brands capitalize on. After Google, it has become the second-largest search engine with over 2 billion users. So, apart from taking your best chance on social media, YouTube should also be your main focus to reach out to a greater audience, and increase sales and leads.
However, most creators aren’t well versed in video SEO techniques and often wonder how to rank YouTube videos fast. Here in this article, we are going to walk you through a youtube SEO tips to drive traffic and help you stand out from competitors in this very highly competitive digital world.
8 YouTube SEO Tips To Rank Your Videos
If you don’t know how to optimize videos for youtube search, implement these 8 tips to do it:
1. Research for the Right Keywords
Every SEO strategy starts with keyword research. By targeting the right keywords, your videos are more likely to appear when users search those keywords. Conducting keyword research will help you come across the list of keywords and allow you to choose the relevant keywords according to your niche.
There are keyword research tools you can use to pick your niche keywords. It’s recommended to pick those keywords that are less competitive but have high search volume. The chances are, your video would achieve higher SERP ranking on those keywords that your competitors must be losing their opportunity on.
Once you’ve selected your keywords, you should know how to add those keywords to your content. Make sure to optimize your title, tags, and description by adding keywords to them.
There are both paid and free tools available that provide keyword research opportunities. Moreover, you can go through your competitor’s content, find their most viewed videos, and know what keywords they are using.
2. Optimize video title and description
There is a great significance of title and description in the SEO. Users get a clear idea of the subject simply by seeing the title of the video. So, whether it is Google or YouTube, search engines consider titles and descriptions important from the SEO standpoint.
While your video title and description should be eye-catching which makes users click on the video, they also should’ve keywords in it. YouTube recommends that you add the most important keywords in the first couple of sentences of your description with an ideal length of 200 words. On the other hand, your title should be completed within 60 characters.
Based on the research, using an exact keyword match in the title may or may not help you rank for that term. Keep it clear, concise, and compelling but don’t use clickbait. Clickbait creates a poor user experience and may violate Google’s policies. Also remember, whenever you’ll change or update your YouTube video descriptions, titles, captions, or thumbnails, YouTube will re-evaluate the video. So, take your time and get it right the first time.
3. Never Take Thumbnails for granted
Visuals attract more than texts. Your thumbnail has the power to draw users toward your video and end up clicking on it. So never take your YouTube thumbnails for granted and use best design practices to craft a customized image that grabs people’s attention. This will eventually affect your YouTube ranking.
Check out competitors’ video thumbnails and get an idea to create yours best possible so that you can stand out from the crowd. Having a custom thumbnail present in your search engine results doubles visibility and traffic.
The resolution of the images that YouTube recommends for thumbnails is 1280×720 pixels. Following all the parameters, your images will appear in high quality across multiple viewing platforms.
4. Add transcriptions and closed captions
Captions and transcriptions help users to understand what the video is about. They can help boost YouTube search optimization by highlighting important keywords. YouTube’s algorithm isn’t able to read images and videos but can read text and code.
Transcripts and captions help even those users who cannot activate the audio and the impaired people. To make your captions & content more specific for viewers, you can add timestamps in the video.
The other benefit of making a transcripted video is to make it get picked up by other search engines apart from YouTube, something like a blog. The process of uploading your captions is simple. All you need to do is select your SRT file and video language.
5. Add video hashtags to increase reach
Hashtags are considered the most effective strategy to help increase content reach. Using hashtags helps users discover your video if they search through it or even follow it. YouTube allows you to add hashtags above the video title and description both. Keep in mind when adding hashtags, don’t overdo it. Overly hashtagging could affect your video rank. The ideal number to go with is 2-3 hashtags that are most relevant and describe your video.
6. Make Longer Videos
Watch time is one of the most important essentials when it comes to YouTube SEO. Creating longer videos allow users to watch your video longer than usual and tends to eventually increase watch time.
There are viewers who look for in-depth and more complete content. It’s best to strive for 20-30 minutes or even longer to fulfill the needs of your viewers. Look into your analytics to know more about your audience’s average watch time & session time.
However, YouTube gives more importance to relevance rather than the video’s length. If your focus is consistently making quality videos, don’t worry about your video’s length.
7. Focus on user engagement
Engagement is a key performance indicator in SEO. The videos you’ll create should engage your viewers to extent that they leave a comment, like, share or subscribe to your channel. The more these engagement metrics you’ll earn from your videos, the more chances you’ll have to rank higher in the search results.
YouTube cares most about how you can keep people on its platform. When going through the analytics, focus on watch time, session, user intent, and growing subscriber base to make sure you gain the best results from your video content strategy.
8. Submit a video sitemap
Sitemap arranges and helps discover a video by the search engine crawlers. By submitting a video sitemap to Google Search Console, you can improve your video SEO. Create a separate video sitemap or add video entries to an existing sitemap.
Entries in a video sitemap must include a video title, description, play page URL, thumbnail, and raw video file URL, and must match the information included on your site. Another piece of information you can add is the video duration, rating, view count, category, and live status.
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With a team of YouTube SEO experts, we help brands and businesses to achieve the best quality results. We leverage these tricks and techniques to help improve video traffic, and ranking, offering engaging, and helpful content that serves the viewer’s needs. The more helpful content you offer users, the more search volume you will get to your business and YouTube channel.
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