Boost Your Visibility: Top 17 Video SEO Tips for YouTube and Beyond

Video has revolutionized the entire content marketing space. Everyone prefers watching videos over reading lengthy articles. Not only are videos entertaining, but they also keep the audience hooked to the screen till the very last minute. 

As per few statistics by Animationssoftware: 

Every brand or business today, is on its way to promote itself using video content as a medium. As a marketer, there’s no doubt that you would even want to include video in your marketing strategy. 

You create a few videos and start on with it. But, is it just enough? As almost all your competitors will also do so, which means you have to be more unique and relevant in your approach. 

So, how do you outperform your competitors? And get your content on the top of search engine results. 

YouTube SEO is the best way to achieve this. You must optimize your videos on search engines. 

It might involve some efforts, but YouTube SEO makes Google appreciate your content. 

One the organic front, every marketer wants Google to display their videos. Without its help, your video will vanish among millions of other videos present on the World Wide Web. 

However, This Can Be Changed by Following an Seo Strategy So That It Boosts the Number of Views on Your Videos. 

We’ll walk you on how to get it done in the right manner including the 17 important tips that are a must for video SEO, but first let us understand what it means by YouTube SEO.  

What is YouTube SEO? 

It simply means optimizing YouTube. As we are all aware, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and YouTube is a social networking site that revolves around videos. 

By YouTube SEO we mean how you need to optimize your customer-centric videos on your YouTube channel so that it ranks on the top of the search engine results page of YouTube for any search queries entered by the targeted audience. 

Besides, YouTube SEO also allows the videos to rank outside YouTube on search engines like Google and Bing. 

Why Is YouTube SEO so important? 

As per Statista, currently there are around 4.66 billion active internet users across the world, which accounts for 59.5% of the total world population. Roughly, half of the population searches for answers on YouTube. 

Being the 2nd largest search engine in the world, YouTube attracts 2 billion people who watch more than 1 billion hours of video on a daily basis. This is why YouTube SEO is necessary to make your video stand out as there are millions of videos out there. 

Few YouTube Statistics That You Must Know

How Does YouTube Rank Video Content?  

YouTube has its own algorithm for ranking videos. 

It describes it as a ‘sophisticated real-time feedback loop that matches each viewer to the videos they’re most likely to watch”. 

The algorithm evaluates each video for its: 

The algorithm’s aim is to show the audience what they prefer to watch. It makes them watch more of what they like to watch, which is called audience retention. 

If your audience likes your video, the algorithm will also do so, which in turn will make YouTube pick your video and show it more. Moreover, your audience should not just like your video, but like it so much that they watch it till the end. 

The three factors – title, thumbnails and description which make a video rank are totally under your control, however everything else depends on your viewers. 

If We Throw Some Light on the Above Factors:

Keywords 

It’s a must to have a catchy title that contains a relevant focus keyword/keyphrase. For this, it’s necessary to do keyword research. You can use keyword research tools to find a good YouTube keyword. 

The best part is that Google owns YouTube so you can use the Google Keyword Planner to look for relevant keywords for your video. 

Title 

Make sure the title of your video is not more than 60 characters, and is attention-grabbing. Include the focus keyword in the title and keep it relevant to your title. 

Description 

YouTube suggests you to be more elaborate when it comes to writing a description of a YouTube video. Write it in 1-2 paragraphs, and always add your social media links. 

Thumbnails 

Thumbnails are a very important part of any YouTube video. It gives your audience a still snapshot of the video while they browse through YouTube. 

Upload your thumbnail once you’re done uploading the video. Canva is a great tool for uploading thumbnails. 

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Take a Look at the Top 17 Tips for Video (YouTube) SEO

YouTube keywords are a lot different than the keywords used on search engines like Google and Bing. Often, YouTube keywords begin with ‘How To’. 

Use Google to find different keywords related to your niche. Then, check if any of those keywords show video results. 

For instance, if you look for ‘how to make pasta’, you’ll see dozens of video results for it, and at least one would be from YouTube. 

You can use tools like Ubersuggest to see how many searches a keyword gets on a monthly basis. 

The way you optimize your headlines for written content is exactly the way you do for YouTube titles. 

It’s a must to include a focus keyword in your title while it should also solve the viewer’s problem. Your title should be able to tell your audience about the benefits of watching your video. Always write a clear title. 

One of the best SEO features provided by YouTube is Tagging. YouTube Tags are mainly keywords that can be selected for video, and if they are relevant to your videos, they help a lot in finding your videos on the platform. 

The more carefully you pick your tags, the more views you’re likely to get. Tagging is a great opportunity to use LSI keywords that are associated with the focus keyphrase/keyword. 

10-12 tags are enough for one video. 

If you receive a lot of comments on your videos, it tells YouTube that your content is popular and liked by people. 

Similarly like Google, YouTube prioritizes videos which are popular. Users’ comments are one of the influential factors that helps YouTube to determine what viewers prefer to watch the most. 

It is always a superb idea to leave a question at the end of your video in order to start a discussion. 

Building subscribers is a huge deal on YouTube. It is one of the main factors that algorithms use for ranking videos. 

To like or comment on a video is a one-time thing, but subscribing means that viewers will watch it regularly. 

Tip: Many YouTubers or content creators ask their audience to like, comment and subscribe together. However, if you wish to work on one metric at a time, focus on building your subscribers list. 

Your video thumbnail might not be used directly by YouTube’s algorithm, but it still greatly impacts your SEO. 

An attractive thumbnail leads to more clicks, and translates to better SEO. 

Make sure you create a thumbnail that stands out and informs people about your video. A lot of users will watch your video just by taking a look at its thumbnail, so this is how important it is. 

This is a great SEO hack for YouTube. 

YouTube is a platform that supports closed captions. So, if you enable the option on the right side of the video, the captions start appearing. 

Captions are meant for users who suffer from hearing issues. However, do you know that they hugely benefit the SEO of your YouTube channel. 

Closed captions are easily crawled by search engines. So, if you use closed captions, you’ll boost your SEO to a huge extent. 

The platform also supports automatic captioning, but it’s not accurate. 

The captions can be edited or can be added too. However, they must be correct. 

For the most effective YouTube SEO, add links to both your channel as well as your videos. These links are useful in telling YouTube that you’re an expert in your niche. 

This is a trick that might not directly influence your SEO, but it’s still worth it. You can rename or edit your filename in a way that it reflects your title or the focus keyword. 

This is the most obvious thing that you can do to improve your YouTube SEO and visibility is to share your videos on different social media platforms. Be it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other social networks, it increases the chances of getting more clicks and views. 

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Facebook drives a huge amount of traffic especially if you add a short & engaging description to your video. Facebook native videos receive more views than YouTube videos uploaded on Facebook. Plus, these have higher watch times. 

Twitter

Same rule applies to Twitter, spreading your message and attracting more eyeballs to it. Twitter says, “Video on Twitter drives engagement”. 

Twitter native videos are powerful, but YouTube videos on Twitter account for more viewers than Twitter native videos. 

LinkedIn 

As per recent findings, people are more on LinkedIn than any other social media platforms. 

And if your videos are related to the field of business, it’s more beneficial. Using video on Linkedin is a superb way to make your company page or personal page stand out on it. 

Many of us won’t be an expert at YouTube SEO right from the start. This is why it’s important to look at what the competitors are doing. 

If you take a peek at other businesses in your industry, you will find the keywords they’re using. 

Try to incorporate those keywords into your own videos and see the changes in your views. It might increase the number of shares too. 

Embedding the videos has two main benefits:

While you write the description of your YouTube video, make sure you include the focus keyword as soon as possible without forcing it. 

YouTube’s bot will recognize your keyword very quickly and crawl it. This will make it rank higher. 

The email list is beneficial for marketing purposes. Sending out email to hundreds of users in a matter of a few minutes can lead to unlimited views on a video. This proves quite good for YouTube SEO. 

We all use Google to find keywords. However, you can even use YouTube to find better and popular keywords. 

Once you type a specific keyword/keyphrase, YouTube will make different suggestions. By this, you get the exact phrases that people usually search for, so you can definitely use these for your own videos on YouTube. 

What do you mean by ‘watch time’? It’s the amount of time spent by people on watching videos. It is one of the most important YouTube metrics for determining a video’s ranking. If people spend more time watching your videos; it means they love what you do. 

Therefore, it’s good to increase your watch time. 

Your audience isn’t the only one who can benefit from your playlists. Even you can too!

Creating keyword-rich playlists can dramatically boost your YouTube SEO, and you would attract higher search traffic. 

Using impactful playlists is one of the better techniques of increasing your view time and audience retention. 

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Conclusion 

There’s no denying that there has been a phenomenal rise in the interest of people in watching videos about every other topic they wish to know about. This provides a huge opportunity to businesses to grow themselves and attract prospective customers, thereby boosting sales. 

Whether its a Live video addressing consumers’ queries & concerns or product launches or demos, video has made it easier both for the brand as well as the customer. It’s highly visible on some of the most popular social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. 

YouTube isn’t just for celebrities. You can also become famous using it. 

All you have to do is work hard towards creating useful and informative video content, and see how people are driven towards it. 

This way you get to direct your audience to your website or ask people to subscribe to your channel. 

If you use the right tips & tricks of YouTube SEO, you can definitely do a lot better. 

Producing videos doesn’t really require a huge budget. You just need a smartphone or camera to capture and an editing software or a 2D animation software to edit and enhance your videos. 

If you wish to stand out as a channel, try creating something unique.