If you are an avid digital marketer then you should know the fact that more than 100 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Given this one obvious question is: “How do people get to watch your video and not millions of others?” And the answer is Video SEO.
I bet most people lazily upload their videos and want one of them to go viral. But it happens very rarely or in worst cases not at all.
However, if you spend time optimizing videos for SEO, your YouTube channel will get more traffic than your competitors.
Let’s jump into how your YouTube SEO can help you get more traffic.
Introduction to YouTube SEO
Before diving into how to optimize YouTube videos, let’s first introduce some of the most important ranking factors used by YouTube.
It’s not as complicated as Google’s famous 200 ranking signals, but YouTube’s algorithm is not a joke either. I know there is a lot of information to process, so let me give you a cliff note of the most important signals used by YouTube:
- Title tag information
- Audience retention
- Describe keywords in tags
- label
- Video length
- Number of subscribers after watching
- Notes
- Like and dislike
At this point, it’s time to show you five ways to use these signals to increase video traffic and ultimately drive website traffic.
Write a long video description
Keep in mind that YouTube and Google cannot watch or listen to your videos yet.
This means that they rely mostly on the text surrounding the video to understand your video theme. That’s why it’s painful to see such a short video description:
Why is it so criminal?
Well, the more YouTube knows about your videos, the more confident you can rank your target keywords. But more importantly, YouTube uses keywords in its description to rank super long-tail keywords.
Optimize video keywords
Keywords rank videos higher on Google. Although Google gives YouTube videos an inherent advantage in SERPs, this only works for specific keywords. These keywords are called “video keywords” because they often show video results on Google’s homepage.
People searching for “cute cats” don’t want to read articles like “10 reasons why cats are so cute.” They want to see cute cats playing, eating, and sleeping!
On the other hand, people looking for “ankle sprains” want to read information about symptoms and treatments. In a similar pattern people searching for website design services in Orange County, are not looking for why they must have a website for the business, they are actually looking for services providers whom they can trust. Google knows this and shows these searchers a block of 10 text articles.
Before determining keywords for your video, check if there are video results on the homepage. If so, you should consider this as a keyword because you have the potential to make your videos rank on Google and YouTube.
Get more videos to watch from the online community
Online communities like the Quora and LinkedIn groups are ideal for driving traffic particularly if you want to drive traffic to your website design services in Orange County. The point is that most communities are not friendly towards someone dropping links to their content everywhere. But they are generally open to people who share useful YouTube videos like you!
Because video views and quality are one of YouTube’s most important ranking factors, getting views from your target community is truly amazing. Just find a question in the community, and your video can help answer it. Then provide some value and advise people to watch the video if they want more information.
Encourage subscriptions and links
Since YouTube’s algorithm does not use backlinks, it has a strong influence on user experience signals. If people like watching your video, expect it to get viral. Subscriptions and likes are the two most valuable user experience signals used by YouTube.
When someone watches your video enough to subscribe to it, it sends a strong message to YouTube, telling you that there is a killer video on hand. Likes are less critical but still matter a lot. You can improve these two user experience signals by asking.
At the end of the video, people are urged to take action and encourage them to subscribe. Make people like, comment, and subscribe to every video.
Create keyword-rich playlists
Don’t mess up your YouTube channel. One easy way to get more YouTube search traffic to your videos is to organize your videos into playlists. Keyword-rich playlists give YouTube more in-depth information on the subject of your video. As we saw in your description, more text-based content = more views.
Once you have ten videos in your YouTube channel, organize them into clear playlists to make it user-friendly.
These SEO tips will help you drive traffic to your website. Master them and implement them while creating your YouTube channel and give a great UX.