Ever given a thought to the inherent importance of spreading your brand across the web? If yes, you’re on the right path! Now, there’s a good chance of considering several different social networks to market your brand’s offerings including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn — this is pretty impressive.
But what about YouTube?
As the second largest search engine after Google, YouTube is a platform that can serve as a hub for your business’s video content — this especially true if you have an active YouTube channel.
According to Google, users watch up to 5 billion videos every single day, and the platform gets over 30 million visitors per day! Moreover, a whopping 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute. These stats are clear indicators of what YouTube can do for your business — it can turn out to be a powerful marketing tool if you play your cards right.
Look:
Your company cannot afford to miss the huge marketing opportunity hidden behind a simple video. The thing is, the act of uploading and marketing your videos on YouTube can boost its visibility on both YouTube and Google Search.
What could be better than presenting your products or services to a platform that sees more than 800 million unique users each month?
Here’s the thing:
It’s never enough just to create and upload video content — you need to figure out how to optimize your channel so that it can be easily reached, watched and shared.
The good news is, this post will explore some foolproof YouTube SEO tips so you can easily rank your videos and possibly earn from them.
Sounds good? Let’s dive in!
Search For Relevant Video Keywords
Are you familiar with SEO? If yes, you should know that the entire process begins keyword research. The very first thing you should know is that Google favors YouTube videos in the SERPs. However, it only applies to those that have certain keywords. Keywords? Well, they’re known as video keywords because they typically have video results on Google’s first page. In essence, your video stands the chance of ranking high in Google’s SERPs if it has “video keywords.”
In a nutshell, your first target is to optimize around video keywords — doing this will help drive targeted traffic to your video right from Google’s first page.
Need a little help with keywords Google use for video results? Here are a few you’ll want to keep in mind:
- How-to Keywords
- Funny videos
- Tutorials
- Reviews
These are just a few general video keywords Google recognizes. Essentially, you still need to do your homework to get the ones that relate to your video.
So how can you find these keywords?
The very first thing you would want to do before deciding on a keyword for your video is to check if there are video results on the first page. In essence, your target keyword should garner a reasonable amount of searches per month on Google — 1000 or more is great. For the most part, a keyword that receives at least a thousand searches per month is sure to get a decent amount of searches on YouTube, and that’s huge.
Trying to figure out how to get this information? Just use Keyword Suggestion Tool — simply enter your keyword and get relevant results including monthly search volume, KEI, suggestion bid and more.
Ensure Your Video has Elements of SEO
Now that you’ve found your video keyword and created your video, it’s time to figure out how to get the most SEO value from it.
Look:
It’s critical to upload your video with YouTube SEO in mind.
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Title
For starters, you would want to include your full keyword in the title of your video — this is crucial for ranking. So how long should your video title be? Well it depends. However, it’s sure to be an excellent idea to make it at least five words long, and this should work great for SEO.
Moreover, placing your target keyword at the beginning of the title can give a slight boost to your video SEO.
Here’s an example to consider:
As you can see, the keyword Bike Parkour comes first.
Filename
It’s also important to include the keyword in your video’s filename — it’s all about renaming your video as your keyword. Once you do this, the search engine will get a better idea of your video’s content, and that’s great. For example, if you’re looking to rank for the keyword “hair growth tips,” your video’s filename should be hair_growth_tips_video.mp4. Pretty sure you get the point.
Description
You should know that Google and YouTube can’t watch or listen to your video — it’s basically your job to describe your video in such a way that they’ll be able to determine or understand its content. This is critical.
Look:
Your video has a higher chance of ranking when YouTube knows more about it.
Here are guidelines you’ll want to follow if you’re looking to make the most of your description:
- Be sure to add your keyword in the first 25 words
- Embed your link at the top of the video
- Let your keyword appear 3 to 4 times
- Be sure that description is at least 250 words
Tags
It’s great to add up ten to twenty tags per video — just be sure to avoid irrelevant phrases or duplicate content. Essentially, tags give you the chance to add those relevant keywords that couldn’t naturally fit in your title or description.
Note: Be sure to include your most important keywords first before other relevant ones.
Get Real Video Views
Want your video to rank for competitive keywords? We’re pretty you do! Well, just do the needful — get a whole lot of views! Just so you know, fake views won’t cut it here — YouTube has a way of detecting them.
So how can you get real views?
Here are some foolproof strategies to consider:
Funnel Traffic from Quora and other Q&A Sites
Everyone knows Quora — it’s one of the most popular sites where people are desperate for answers. Other sites like Yahoo! and Answers are also great, but we recommend you start with Quora.
Here’s the thing:
You wouldn’t want to head to these sites and start pasting links all over the place without linking to YouTube. Videos are sure to huge there since people are desperately looking for information.
As usual, you only have to search for a question on your video’s topic.
Here’s an example:
Once you find a relevant question, be sure to answer it and add a link to your video — it’s as simple as that. It’s also an excellent idea to embed the video to your answer.
Tip: it’s really important to interact with your followers – comments means A LOT.
Place Your Videos in Blog Posts
Another great way to boost your views is by embedding your YouTube video into your blog post. You could do this when you write for your site or guest post for another site.
Let’s assume that you’re writing a post on “How to groom a dog.”
You can write a particular point and embed a YouTube video to explain better.
Note: The example video is just a random screenshot from YouTube.
Conclusion
And that’s it! These are just a few methods to apply if you’re looking to give your videos a boost on Google’s SERPs. It’s now all up to you to follow and implement them accordingly — good luck!
About the Author: Diana Ford is a digital marketing specialist. She been blogging for several years, her writing expertise spans across online marketing, SEO, social media, and blogging. In addition, Ford does outreach marketing, product reviews, and online marketing guides at AssignyourWriter.