The Secrets of YouTube SEO: How to Improve Your Search Results Using the Most Underrated Methods
Introduction: What is YouTube SEO and Why is it Important?
Content creators that implement search engine optimization (SEO) usually apply these digital marketing tactics to a few conventional channels: websites and blogs. With the advent of alternative media channels in Web 2.0, specifically in the form of video and social media, SEO strategies are even more important to stand out in a sea of creators. YouTube is the premier destination for video content that is mass circulated across a viewership of over 3 billion viewers a year or just over 35 percent of all mobile internet traffic. For this reason alone, it is imperative for individuals, brands, content marketers, and content creators to seriously understand what is under the hood of this mass media vehicle so that they can make the most of their time spreading their messaging across all of their channels. YouTube SEO is not a complicated subject and resembles the SEO best practices applied to websites and blogs. Yet, there are a few key creative and technical nuances that can spell the difference between being on the first page of Google search engine results or not ranking at all. These underrated, underutilized Content SEO and Advanced SEO practices will help you rank higher on YouTube and Google by customizing your work to make search algorithms work for you. This guide is by no means a comprehensive YouTube SEO 101 guide so if you are looking for that please search elsewhere. Rather, these strategies and tactics will help an average creator become a great creator.
YouTube Content SEO
A lot of Youtubers focus on very specific niches like gaming or music without realizing the value of quality over quantity. This is why the YouTube algorithm comes to ding their ranking. At first, these content creators tend to produce hundreds of low-quality videos that don’t necessarily rank very high, they attain a small following, and a few viral vlogs or comedy sketches later the best creators are shot into superstardom or to the moon for investing fanboys. Think Mr.Beast, PewdiePie, <place your favorite YouTube influencer here>. Considering the odds of you joining this elite group of superstars are quite slim, the best any content creator can do is plan strategically before every content post and focus on quality over quantity. The first 48 hours after a video is published is the window of when it will be ranked so publish accordingly.
Are you producing videos for evergreen topics? Evergreen topics are topics that stand the test of time and will be true today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and into the next decade. These topics can even be timeless and solve real-world problems. Here’s a great example, “How to walk your dog the right way”. It sounds like a subject that is very niche, but the key here is that it is solving a real-world problem that will be a problem for dog owners until dogs are no longer a man’s best friend. There is a myriad of evergreen topics that you can think of and there will always be someone searching for your answer. The key to a successful video is thus evergreen and uses strong keywords.
Google tends to rank higher video results for these keywords in the title and description:
How-to keywords
Review
Tutorial
Any keywords fitness or sports-related
Funny videos (cat videos and skits)
Are you having trouble figuring out what would be a great topic to make a video about? Trending topics are those that have shown consistent growth over a period of time and tools like Google Trends can help you decide whether you want to invest your time in making a video. How much traffic is there at any given time for a specific search and how competitive is it?
Can you figure out some of the low-competition keywords that will be useful in building out your Title and Description sections? You can use SEMRush, NP Digital, AHRefs, Moz, Tubebuddy, SpyFu or any other keyword search tool to select topics that are trending up/down and worth making a video about that can stand the test of time.
Google and Youtube ranks videos higher with titles limited to 100 characters, descriptions limited to 5,000 characters and tags limited to 100 characters. Limit yourself to 5 quality tags and don’t go overboard or Google and YouTube will ding you in the rankings.
Does your video get to the point in 30 seconds or less? If not, you will see higher bounce rates which will lower the ranking of your video. Think about these three parameters that will have an outsized impact on your impressions.
Click-through rate or how often your video is viewed on YouTube per 100 impressions (2-10% is standard).
Audience retention rate or how many of your viewers stick around for the video (50-60% is standard).
High-quality audio and HD video. The top creators invest thousands of dollars in audio equipment like
Blue Yeti and video equipment like Canon EOS 1DX Mark II and Logitech Pro 9000.
YouTube Advanced SEO
What are the advanced tactics of YouTube SEO? In short, these are the technical SEO and off-page SEO tactics that are often ignored after a YouTube video is published and not given a second thought. Ignoring these advanced SEO tactics can spell the difference between being an iconic YouTube influencer of your entire generation or a one-hit-wonder. Let’s see the importance of each and what you can do to increase your crawlability.
Technical SEO
You should upload “closed captions” for each of your videos as this allows Google’s crawlers to get more information about your video in the form of a transcript. The more data you add to your video, the more you can rank in search. Closed captions or subtitles can be uploaded with your YouTube video in the form of a .scc file or you can use YouTube Studio to auto-sync a transcript, type manually or auto-translate.
You can also add bits of information to your video in the form of timestamps, video chapters, interactive forms, YouTube cards and calls-to-action in your videos. Timestamps are links that point to specific part of your video and video chapters break up a video into sections with their own previews. Both of these techniques will make your video more organized not only impacting crawlability but also audience retention so you kill two birds with one stone by doing this.
If you are conducting YouTube video advertising, interactive lead generation forms can be added to YouTube video action campaigns when operating a video advertisement on YouTube. YouTube cards and calls-to-action can also be added to the campaign to link people to external websites. When combined with branded YouTube content, you are unleashing the full power of on-brand SEO.
Off-site SEO
The third piece of this SEO pie is off-site SEO, which is your videos’ ability to gain momentum. It can mean the difference between being a YouTube sensation this year, a decade from now, or never. In essence, it is all about building your community of followers off of YouTube so that you will have more followers using a powerful marketing tactic called word-of-mouth.
An annotated Subscribe button will notify your followers where ever they are on the internet by sending a message to their phone or inbox. They are connected to your ecosystem of videos and this is how you get repeat visitors to your YouTube channel increasing your traffic and your relevance on Google and YouTube search.
Share your videos on social media pages like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat and LinkedIn. This will drive more visitors to your YouTube video and increase your traffic.
If your video is informational or connected to a personal blog or company page, create blog content off of YouTube and link out to your website. By bi-linking these pieces of content you are increasing your crawlability. Reach out to third-party website hosts that want to feature your video content on their site and that way you can get quality backlinks to the video in the form of video embeds. This will also increase crawlability of your content.
Finally, never underestimate the power of Influencers. If you can somehow have an individual point to your YouTube video or channel you are creating immense traffic as their followers can eventually become your followers by association and help in your community building.