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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And remember, Google classifies videos based on how people interact with them, so the more visits and interactions, the better the positioning.
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.
Reduce the number of adverts displayed on a particular video:
As much as we would all like to monetize our videos for income, we should also bear in mind that not all users would love to stand and watch them. Thus leading to a higher bounce rate. Ads should be short and simple and even added to the end of every successful video upload.
I would personally advice not to place ads on videos that are trending or going viral, your channels reputation should be all that matters and with time you would have more views and subscribers.
Final words: Keep in mind that words such as “advice”, “mistakes”, “how to” and other similar ones peak your audiences interest and make more clickable titles. If have any contributions or question drop them in the comment section below.
