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Every minute 300 hours of videos are uploaded on YouTube. Do you feel like every YouTube video your business uploads gets lost like a needle in a haystack?
Well, using Youtube SEO best practices will be the magnet you need for your videos to be easily found in a haystack. Let's find out how you can stand out and reach your target audience through YouTube videos in this blog:
Why does SEO matter to your business?
6 key tips to boost your YouTube SEO
Why does SEO matter to your business?
In this digital era, visibility matters the most to your business to fairly compete with similar businesses. SEO provides you with that visibility to reach out to your target audience while boosting your revenue and sales. SEO also helps your business to build up trust and credibility amongst potential customers. Additionally, both SEO and Google Ads work harmoniously together in an excellent way to make your business rank on the top tier.
If you want to promote your business with the help of your videos, it's beneficial to work on your SEO skills and you can reap visibility on YouTube for a long time! If you decide to embed your Youtube Video in your website, it is also important to learn about the SEO checklist to optimize your website.
Tips to boost your YouTube SEO
YouTube’s search bar results are based on several factors including location, relevance, engagement, view count, and the quality of content. What can you do that will make sure that your video ranks high up on YouTube’s search results?
Here are our tried-and-tested SEO tips:
1. Optimize keywords in the video title
Heard this phrase float around before? What even are the keywords that everyone's talking about? To simplify things, a "keyword" is a word or phrase that people are searching for.
So not only do titles play a crucial role in determining whether people will click on your video or not, they also play a role in making sure your video is found when people search for a topic. This means your video title must have "keywords" that will help you get higher search rankings.
Since you want a higher engagement, you should keep your relevant focus keywords within the title. Your title can be a question as well as an answer to a problem that people generally lookup on the internet revolving around your content or line of business.
Now, this depends on the kind of video you are creating as you cannot randomly select a title due to its high-interest factor, doing so can backfire and tarnish your company’s image. Its 2021 stop click-baiting. Even well-known YouTubers work on their title to date, take MKBHD, for example, his title here evokes curiosity amongst the viewers.
2. Optimize YouTube description
You must start your YouTube description with focus words to crawl it upwards in the ranking. Your Youtube description helps the search engines understand and know your video better.
You can be creative with a detailed description full of keywords but make sure you are not spamming as the video might lose its relevance and might now land to its correct audience.
The character limit for your YouTube videos is 1000 words but most of it is hidden after the first few lines until the viewer clicks on “show more”, so make sure to load your important links and keywords in the first few lines to generate more click-throughs.
A perfectly optimized YouTube video description increases the chances of YouTube pushing and suggesting your video. YouTube description is the best section to keep your product and company links to boost your business.
3. Create high retention videos
Audience retention is pivotal for your videos to do well on YouTube. You need to keep your audience hooked throughout the videos as YouTube primarily determines its rankings based on the audience retention length.
If people spend a long time watching your video YouTube learns that it is providing value to the audience and it will help people find your video more easily. YouTube's algorithm believes that if your videos are interesting then people are bound to engage in the form of comments and this will get your engagement up leading to a higher ranking in the search results.
This algorithm helps creators push the quality of their videos by making them interesting and creative. You have to keep this in mind while initially conceptualizing your videos.
4. Add YouTube tags
YouTube tags are yet another way to input phrases and words that suit and describe your video most appropriately. They’re like the relevant hashtags you would use on social media to boost your post’s visibility.
They’re the keywords you want to focus on and target. Unlike YouTube description, you need not write whole sentences but rather just input the tags according to the video.
5. Customize your thumbnail
When you open YouTube, what's the first thing you notice about a video before reading its title? The thumbnail.
A thumbnail gives the first impression of a YouTube video and it's a huge deciding factor based on which one clicks to watch the video (we all do judge a book by its cover...consciously or unconsciously!).
When you create customized thumbnails you need to keep in mind that the thumbnail should entice the viewer at one go. You need to create compelling thumbnails that stand apart amidst a lot of other videos that turn up in the search results. You will find many YouTube thumbnail maker tools online, where you can customize your requirements and they're ready to use in minutes.
You can play around with using your brand colors but do not amplify them across the thumbnail while you can feature images that make it clear what the video is about. Your YouTube video’s thumbnail helps the viewer decide whether people would be wanting to invest time in watching your video.
Avoid filling it up with too much text, the idea is to crack the right amount of balance between all the elements of your thumbnail to create a perfectly professional-looking thumbnail that gets you the most amount of views. Learn from Mr. Beast when it comes to creating interesting thumbnails.
6. Embed your videos in blog posts
Embedding your videos into blog posts that are about similar topics to that of your video can increase the view count by plenty.
Avid blog post readers are mostly hooked on articles and embedding your video in a blog post makes it easier for the reader to watch your video as it is mostly a part of the article’s content.
Another advantage of having your video embedded in a blog post is that you can improve your SEO ranking across the web with more words and relevant content helping your potential target audience find you even faster!
While embedding a YouTube video to a blog article the placement of the video matters a lot. It's suggested to put up your embedded video on the company’s blog to ensure that the potential consumer stays in the same ecosystem.
It's convenient and non-intrusive like this one right here:
Remember to edit your videos smartly
Everything that you’ve learned so far in this article has been towards getting better YouTube SEO but let's not forget that YouTube recognizes videos that are well made through their engagement.
Looking for a fast and easy way to make your YouTube videos? With Clipchamp video editor, you can trim, merge, add text or motion graphics, filters and transitions and even GIFs in a simple drag and drop timeline style editor.
Want to learn more advanced Youtube SEO tactics? Head on over to 10 SEO tricks to make your YouTube videos rank higher.
