Surely you’re tired of reading and hearing, basically everywhere, that content is the king of the Internet, so that’s why we’re not going to talk about it right now.
But, did you know that there is also a queen of the Internet, which has its own charms that are impossible to resist?
We’re talking about online videos, which are already being called the present and future of digital marketing. Users are spending more and more time watching videos; they’re not only doing this but also:
78% of content consumed on social networks is audiovisual content, therefore it’s something your brand can’t afford to pass up.
The reason is simple: videos are entertaining, shareable and easily consumed. In addition to this they also increase conversion rates, foster engagement and are economical (being that you can make them for free).
In fact, 9 out of 10 Internet users watch videos of brands they like, 65% visit the brand’s website after watching a video and furthermore, its calculated that in 2018 online videos will make up 84% of all Internet traffic. That’s a lot!
So, if you still haven’t included videos in your content marketing strategy you should consider it; also, if you’re creating your own videos you need to be getting the most out of them. And this is where YouTube SEO comes into play.
Fact is, since we’re talking about videos we can’t forget about the greatest audiovisual platform: YouTube, the world’s third most visited site and responsible for the existence of more than 32 million videos currently on the platform.
Uploading videos to YouTube is all fine and dandy but, what if you could also optimize them so they’d appear in the first few search results and could gain more traffic, conversation and therefore more money?
This is exactly what we’re going to teach you about with these 10 foolproof YouTube SEO techniques that will help you get your videos to the top of YouTube and Google. Yes, a two for one!
Once you finish reading this article you’ll see that YouTube SEO is relatively simple. If Justin Bieber was able to make himself known through his videos without having a clue about positioning, then you can also do it, right??
Why should you include videos in your marketing strategy and use YouTube SEO?
YouTube is the second largest searched engine used in the world, just behind Google; and both are curiously owned by the same group ever since Google acquired the video platform in 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars.
Today, YouTube receives one billion monthly individual visitors who perform 3 million monthly searches and upload 100 hours of video every minute.
Not only that, but if YouTube were a country, it would be the third largest in the world just behind China and India, and in fact every 1 out of 2 people who connect to the Internet are on YouTube.
Just image everything you can accomplish if you design a good strategy for YouTube!
That being said, more and more small, medium and large sized companies know the potential of online videos and are betting more on video SEO to achieve better results since it’s an economical option within reach of any business no matter how small.
Soon you, too, are going to know how to use YouTube to optimize your videos in order to grab hold of the first few search results and reach many more people.
10 steps you should be following for YouTube SEO and getting you videos among ‘the most viewed’ on the platform
In order to appear in the first few spots on Google and YouTube, uploading a video to your channel and putting a catchy title isn’t enough, instead there are a series of YouTube SEO techniques necessary for you to know so you can get the most out of video marketing, whether it be to attract more traffic to your website, increase your visibility, become known, increase engagement, generate more leads, increase conversion rates or whatever other objective you have set.
Below, we’re going to share the 10 techniques you must apply to do well on YouTube:
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Take care of your YouTube channel’s appearance
First impressions count, so tend to your YouTube channel’s design and make it attractive and pleasurable to look at.
Choose a user name that identifies with your brand and with what you want to transmit, the same goes for your profile picture and cover photo.
What’s ideal is for you to choose a responsive design, meaning, one that’s adapted to different types of devices, and also try to make a good channel description with keywords related to your niche or market sector.
Additionally, you can put an opening video in the upper part of your channel so it will be displayed to new visitors who have not yet subscribed to your channel (in fact, this is a highly recommended option that more and more brands are utilizing).
The video should be brief, introduce your channel to your audience, and engages or invites users to subscribe by inserting several notations.
Here you have multiple examples of well-designed profiles, RedBull being one of them as it’s the brand with more than 5.000.000 YouTube subscribers:
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Create play lists
Having all your videos classified and listed on various play lists is going to be very useful for organizing your information.
Not only this, but playlists also appear in search results which, if you use them to group different videos in addition to facilitating replays of all the videos on this list, you will also be helping your channel appear in YouTube results which can increase your visibility.
Ikea, for example, has various playlists on their channel, among them are “Fix this Kitchen” and “Get Design & Style Tips” so users know what to watch based on their interests.
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Research your audience, and don’t lose sight of your competition!
One of the advantages of YouTube SEO is that it’s very simple, among other things, because the platform provides you with various reports and statistics on your visits; age, gender, and location for example.
All this will help you to know who has seen your videos and who your audience really is so you can get an idea on how to continue.
Analyzing your competition will also be very useful to you since not only will you be able to see what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and how things are going for them, but you can also see what keywords they’re using to position their videos.
On of Steve Jobs favorite quotes from Pablo Picasso was this:
“Good artists copy; great artists steal”
We already know that stealing is illegal, but staying close to your competition in order to get some good ideas will help you advance and know where to direct your efforts.
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Define your video’s keywords
One of the most important steps for obtaining success in YouTube SEO is taking the necessary time in researching what your keywords are going to be, thus playing it safe when you optimize your video.
There are numerous ways to do this, for example, checking out what the most common searches are in your sector by using YouTube’s search, or you can even use Google Trends to compare various similar terms searched for and see their trends. There is also Google AdWords Keyword Planner for seeing how many monthly searches a specific words have.
Below you can see an example of how Google Trends works. In this case, we wanted to see what the trends for “video seo” were on the Internet; here are the results:
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Create interesting, unique and relevant content
As much as videos work well, they still need to be optimized so when your audience views them they do it because they want to find something of value.
This means that you have to create content that is interesting, useful and unique and that is oriented towards satisfying your audience’s needs. Remember, there is nothing more direct than content marketing so try to respond to your audience’s possible questions and concerns in your videos.
If you don’t know where to start, then use Postcron’s content gallery which will help you find the most interesting topics for your audience on social networks.
Furthermore, try to make your videos evergreen, meaning that the content never dies: and before wrapping up your video, add calls to action based on your goals: visiting your blog, commenting or sharing it on social networks. You choose!
And remember, Google classifies videos based on how people interact with them, so the more visits and interactions, the better the positioning.
Basically, Google focuses on the following aspects for determining a videos quality:
Now you know what you should look for!
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Select a “SEO friendly” title for your video
Your title is a key piece for YouTube SEO and one of the most forgotten, thus you must include a keyword -even more so at the beginning of the title-.
Furthermore, a video’s title is one of the reasons people chose to click on it or not, both directly from YouTube and if you share it on social networks or send it via email. Thus you need an appealing and flashy title that calls to action. And above all, try not to exceed 60 characters.
Keep in mind that words such as “advice”, “mistakes”, “how to” and other similar ones peak your audiences interest and make more clickable titles.
For example, if you have a cooking business and know that your audience likes to search for recipes -and that one of the most searched for recipes is homemade pizzas- then the ideal thing to do would be for you to optimize the words “homemade pizza” in your video also bearing in mind the words which work best like recipe or how to.
In fact, in this example you can see how out of the 58,500 results on YouTube for homemade pizza the best positioned are those which contain “how to make homemade pizza” or something along those lines:
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Write a good description of your video
Another essential factor to keep in mind with YouTube SEO is your description, being that it affects positioning more than you can imagine.
The reason is quite simple: since Google can’t hear the videos, it uses the text description to determine a video’s content.
Not just any description will work, you have to take various requirements into account, for example:
- Make a detailed, explanatory and persuasive description of your video’s content with at least 250 words, because even though only the first few lines are visible to the user, what you want to do is get your videos positioned on YouTube. Descriptions are read by both Google and YouTube alike.
- Add your blog or website’s URL in the first paragraph since this maximizes CTR, click through rate, for your site.
- Include a keyword in the first 25 words.
- Use said keyword about 3 or 4 times (don’t go over this amount because Google and YouTube will consider it Spam).
- Add a call to action to tell users that you’d like them to share your video, comment, subscribe, visit your blog or any other action you want them to perform.
FitnessBlender, for example, one of the free fitness channels that does really well on YouTube, they always include complete and attractive descriptions with links and calls to action as shown in the following example:
Our advice is that you invest a little time on creating your description because you’ll be rewarded with positioning.
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Don’t forget to use hashtags with YouTube SEO, you’ll need them!
Hashtags, which in addition to helping you correctly define and position your video, will also help make your video appear in the related videos section in the side bar while users are viewing other videos related to yours; this can lead to new visits for you.
Therefore, include all the hashtags you deem to be relevant, but avoid the ones that aren’t related to your video. How does a user search for you? Think about it, research and add hashtags so that your video is included in a specific search. However: be careful not to “over optimize” it.
Furthermore, it’s important for your hashtags to be updated every so often in order to get the most out of new search behaviors.
YouTube has long since disabled the possibility of publicly viewing hashtags of others’ videos in order to avoid malpractice, but in this example taken from canalyoutube you can see the hashtags used for one of their Pilates videos:
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Upload a personalized thumbnail, you’ll be surprised!
The first thing a user sees before deciding to watch, or not, your video is the title on one hand and the thumbnail image on the other.
And passing up the opportunity to choose an appropriate thumbnail image is a mistake that can lead you to lose hundreds of clicks, thus choose the best image YouTube offers you or if you are a partner, personalize your thumbnail image and upload it so it’ll accompany your video’s title -ideally, the format should be 4:1 and with a minimum of 1200 x 720 pixels-.
Here are some examples of thumbnails we’ve used on Postcron and that help to increase the number of views:
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Share your videos on different platforms
Give your videos wings and spread them on different platforms: through email, on social networks such as Facebook or Twitter and even on your blog or website.
It’s also important for when you’re configuring your video that you allow it to be shared and embedded on any website, so don’t forget to mark your video as public.
Furthermore, make sure you define the right category for your video, you can also include subtitles since Google and YouTube use this information thus you’ll achieve better positioning.
What did you think about these 10 tips for YouTube SEO and getting your videos to go even further in searches and what all this means for your business?
Now you know where to start so focus on your digital marketing strategy, design a strategy for YouTube and apply these tips because, without a doubt, if you invest a little time and effort in applying these tips, every time you upload a video you’ll really see the difference. This may be the beginning of something big and depends on you!
Was this content useful? Are you going to apply this advice to your YouTube channel? Leave us your comments! And above all, feel free to share this article with everyone it might be interesting to, we all have a lot to learn with YouTube SEO!
And if you liked this article, then don’t miss out on these other ones pertaining to the queen of videos that will help you get the max out of your YouTube channel: