YouTube is the world’s second-most popular search engine with 3 billion searches per month. It sits right behind its parent company, Google. This is just one of the reasons why YouTube SEO is so important. YouTube is a tremendous opportunity for potential customers to discover your company. For this reason, optimizing your YouTube page is imperative to your marketing strategy. Here are YouTube SEO tips that will help you rank in search.
YouTube SEO Calls for Keywords
One of the easiest ways to boost your SEO on YouTube is to add keywords to the title and description of your video. Make sure your most important 1-2 keywords are included in the title. Those same keywords should be included in your description along with your secondary keywords. This allows Google to find your keywords when indexing your video.
YouTube Tags Add Context
YouTube tags are words and phrases used to give YouTube context about a video. Tags are considered an important ranking factor in YouTube’s search algorithm. Note that your tags should be ordered by level of importance. For example, if your video is a tutorial on using an air fryer, you might consider ordering your first couple keywords like this:
- How to use an air fryer
- Air fryer tutorial
- Cooking with an air fryer
- Air fryer
Structure Your File Names with Keywords
The title of your video file is crawled through the indexing process, so it’s important to remember to include keywords in your video file name. This is probably the most overlooked practice of YouTube SEO.
Encourage Comments
It goes without saying that engagement is good for any social media performance. When it comes to YouTube SEO, views, comments, and likes are all taken into account when determining your rank in search on YouTube and Google. This is true for viewer retention as well. The further along a viewer gets in your video, the better!
Consider Closed Captioning
Captions are also a part of the metadata, which is crawled through the indexing process. These captions give you an opportunity to increase the number of keywords found in your metadata. This means if a person searches for a keyword phrase that was present only in a video’s captions, not in the title, description, tags, or metadata, that it would still be discoverable. There are studies that show that YouTube videos with closed captioning increased in views by 13.48% in the first 2 weeks and 7.32% overall. Closed captions improve user experience because the videos do not require you to use sound.
Use a Compelling Thumbnail
Choosing the right video thumbnail image makes a drastic difference in click-through rate. CTR is another factor considered in the YouTube algorithm and can boost your rank. When creating a thumbnail, make sure you’re using a high-quality photo that accurately describes the video in a compelling way. A 16:9 aspect ratio is recommended for YouTube thumbnails.
Make Playlists
Playlists are a great way to enhance user experience on YouTube. This also gives the user an opportunity to discover more of your videos, leading to more engagement and a better ranking.
YouTube is the world’s second-most visited website right after its parent company, Google.
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