Oh yes! It’s time to grab your shovel and dig for that marketing video that got buried in the results page.

Follow these SEO tips, and you will see how your video shines in YouTube’s ranking.

Let’s get started!

1) Upload your video on YouTube

Just in case you haven’t done so, we will remind you why it is so important. Simply put, if you don’t upload your video on YouTube you won’t rank in the second largest search engine (behind Google). Why would you do that to your amazing video?

What is more, depending on your topic, if your video is on YouTube you can also get it to rank on Google. Videos are displayed as Google search results because its algorithm understands that the best answer to some questions is audiovisual content. What kind of questions?

• How-to keywords (“how to hang a picture”)
• Reviews (“new iPhone X”)
• Tutorials (“Edit a video with Adobe Premiere”)
• Sports (“Gym class”)
• Funny videos (“Cute cats”)

Try to think of how you can create a marketing video about your product or service that fits these criteria. In this way, you will improve your chances of ranking in Google.

2) Conduct wise keyword research

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process that allows your video to be seen by search engines such as Google and YouTube and rank higher on its results pages.

The first step of this process is to do wise keyword research to know what your potential clients are searching for. Try to brainstorm words that are related to your business. Then, you should research them with the keyword planner tool on Google AdWords and compare how many search queries that set of words has had on average.

You will notice that some of them have hundreds of thousands of monthly search queries, meaning that a lot of companies will fight for them. Your ultimate goal is to rank higher for that set of keywords but it is very difficult to reach that goal from the beginning. Instead, you should try to fit that keyword into a longer and more specific sentence that will be less competitive.

Let’s see an example of this:

Our company, Yum Yum Videos, is an animated video production company and its keyword is “explainer video” which has huge competition:

To rank one of our videos on YouTube, we chose a long tail keyword, “Explainer video styles”, which has a maximum of 1K average monthly searches instead of 100K:

By targeting this medium-competition keyword we have reached the #1 spot on YouTube. The strategy is based on starting with a low-competition keyword and in the long-term you will reach the one that has more demand. Check it out:

3) Invest in YouTube Ads at the beginning

Investing some money into YouTube Ads will guarantee you some views. This initial boost will allow your audience to like and share your video.

Once you have seen some progress, it is better to stop investing and see how your view rate grows organically, giving your brand more credibility.

Following this strategy, our video nowadays has reached 250k views organically only with a very limited budget for ads at the beginning of its campaign:

4) Use your keywords

Now that you have found that set of perfect keywords, use them to describe your video. Remember that YouTube search engine can’t watch your video (yet) so leverage this data to know what your video is about. So let’s help YouTube!

Title

Use the long tail keyword that you have found. Be brief and clear about your content. Brian Dean, an SEO expert, suggests that you may get a slight video SEO boost by putting your keyword at the beginning of the title.

Video description

Write a paragraph telling the viewer what your video is about. Use two or three keywords without repeating them too much. And last but not least, add a link to your web page! Remember, that’s why you are creating a video! You should also include the video transcript in which your keyword is mentioned and links to your social media profiles. Check out how we have done it for an explainer video about inbound marketing:

Tags

Use your keyword first and some variations of it later. You can also add tags about other topics that your video covers. Don’t be afraid of using the same tags that your competitors are using. In that way, your video will be added to their suggested video sidebar. These are the tags used for the explainer video about inbound marketing that we mentioned above:

Say your keywords

YouTube can use speech recognition technology to automatically create captions for your videos. That’s another way you can confirm that your video is about a certain term.

5) Boost your CTR

Your click-through rate or CTR is the ratio of users who click on your video to the number of total users who view the results page and is a very important YouTube ranking factor. Try to think about your video’s look in the results page:

Title

Apart from using your keyword, you should write a compelling title that will make people click but without lying about your actual content. If you do so, people will leave your video right away and that is a very negative signal for a YouTube ranking.

Description

The first 125 characters of your description will be displayed in the search results so try to write a complete description of your video with those first few words. This is how it will look on the results page:

Thumbnails

When a video is uploaded, you can choose a thumbnail from the three options that YouTube randomly generates but those are probably not the best ones. In order to boost your CTR you should create attractive thumbnails stating clearly the topic of your video. For example, between these four options we chose the upper-left image for our video:

6) Create a high-retention video

YouTube has already made clear that this is a very important ranking factor. The longer your audience keeps watching your video, the more trust YouTube has in its quality and the higher it will rank.

So, how do you make people keep watching your video? Here you have the golden rule: high quality. No matter how perfectly you optimize your video’s data, if it is boring or lame nobody will keep watching it and this will harm your ranking in YouTube. Nothing is more important than the beginning of your video to retain your viewers. The topic should be stated as clearly as possible but don’t show all your cards too soon!

Ask questions that your viewer wants to know but don’t answer them immediately. Tell them what you’ll explain later and they’ll keep watching through the whole video. To hook in the audience, you need to keep them interested. Check out how a high-quality explainer video can be educational and entertaining at the same time:

7) Engage your audience

Comments, likes, subscription requests, and shares have a drastic impact on your ranking. First of all, tell your viewer to like and share your video. This is the simplest way to go and it costs no money. You can also remind your viewers to interact with an image at the end of your video like this:

Comments are also a great signal that your video is engaging the audience and they will help you to rank higher. So, why don’t you ask some questions directly to your viewers and encourage them to answer by writing a comment? Let’s say you sell ice cream. You could create a video showing how you make your product and then ask them what flavor they would like next. Don’t let them speak alone! Answer every question and comment so they feel connected to you.

8) Add a call to action

Adding a call to action can be used to achieve many goals. But when it comes to ranking higher you need more views and subscription requests. After analyzing 1 million YouTube videos, Backlinko found out that videos that result in new subscribers have an advantage in the YouTube search results.

If you are a YouTube partner, you can add an end screen with up to four elements in which you can encourage subscriptions to your channel, promote your website or other videos and playlists. It will look like this:

If you have a Google Ad account you can also add a call-to-action overlay to encourage people to subscribe, that will look like this:

Or leverage the power of YouTube cards to suggest that people watch other videos or links. They will be displayed as a sidebar like this:

9) Embed your video

It’s quite difficult to make YouTube rank your video on the first pages right from the beginning, that’s why viewers have to find it somewhere else first. Therefore, you should wisely embed your video anywhere you can: on social media, on your blog and other influential blogs as guest posts. This will affect the number of views on your video and also help you rank higher.

To wrap the post up…

First, you need to get discovered among an almost limitless amount of content. Do some wise keyword research to know what your potential clients are looking for. Don’t trust your gut, trust Google AdWords!

Use your long-tail keywords to optimize your title, description, and tags. However, always remember the golden rule: no matter how perfectly you optimize your video’s data if it is boring or lame, nobody will keep watching and YouTube will harm your ranking. So while optimizing is important, create an engaging high-quality video is a must.

Remember that YouTube’s algorithm also pays close attention to your engagement signals such as likes, shares and subscription requests so be straightforward and ask your audience to reward your video. Harness the power of every YouTube feature to make it easy for them

If you have already uploaded a video without taking SEO into account, try your best to optimize its data. And then get down to work and start planning new video content by following this guide. Don’t wait! Start driving up your ranking today!