SEO rankings on YouTube are a vital determinant of the number of views, subscriptions, traffic, and engagement with your content. Unfortunately, it has become increasingly more difficult to improve the SEO ranking for YouTube videos as several businesses have already uploaded video content to YouTube. To increase your visibility and improve your SEO rank, you need to optimize your videos by satisfying the viewer’s interests while differentiating your content from competitors.
How does YouTube SEO Work?
YouTube uses search engine intelligence to provide viewers with the best search experience possible based on available content. When users type their searches on YouTube, the platform robot examine the content available and delivers an order of the best results obtained from the search.
Other factors considered by the YouTube algorithm are browsing history, user search, and engagement. Therefore, businesses can take advantage of YouTube SEO operations and optimize their SEO rankings and placements through strategies such as keywords, descriptions, and titles that align with viewers’ searches.
Let’s explore some tips you can use to optimize your YouTube videos for SEO:
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Keyword-optimized, Creative, and Concise Title
You need to create a creative title as it is among the first thing audience will encounter when they search for your video. A creative title will attract the audience and differentiate your video from other searches.
Before creating your title, you must ensure that you have conducted extensive research on keywords by examining YouTube SEO and selecting keywords with the potential to attract more views to your videos. Afterward, create a title that naturally incorporates keywords that would match what viewers are looking for when searching for your video. You must also ensure that the title matches the video’s content to maximize viewership.
Besides creativity and keywords, it is also essential to develop concise titles. YouTube allows a maximum of 100 characters, but having a brief title of between 45 to 50 would improve your SEO ranking.
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Optimize Your Video Description
The video description provides additional information that describes the content of your video. Although YouTube allows up to 5000 characters, you must ensure your description does not fit all 5000 characters to maintain viewers’ interest. You can optimize your video description using the following strategies;
- Include timestamps for long videos.
- Add transcription section.
- Insert keywords within the first sentence of the description.
- Add social media and affiliate links to businesses mentioned in the video.
- Limit your video to 300 characters.
- Include a call to action (CTA) inviting people to subscribe or download content.
- Add hashtags.
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Tag Your Video with Popular Keywords
Hashtags are a popular way for searching content on social media. Therefore, including hashtags within your video title and description would help viewers to find your content.
You need to ensure that the hashtags contain popular keywords. If you create a video about how to make money online, you can use the hashtag #howtomakemoneyonline.
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Customize Your Thumbnail
The thumbnail image is the first thing viewers see, which greatly affects the click-through rate. According to YouTube, 90% of videos with creative and engaging thumbnails generate greater viewer engagement than those without. Additional techniques for customizing your thumbnail include;
- Using high contrast and high-quality image.
- Upload your own creative image to replace YouTube screenshots.
- Use a still image with few words.
- The thumbnail should align with keywords.
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Categorize Your Video Based on the Topic
You need to categorize your video under advanced options to make it easier for viewers to find your content when searching for specific video categories. Uploading your content with different categories increases your SEO ranking as it will be grouped with similar content into a playlist. There are various categories to select from, for instance, films & animation, music, sports, travel & events, gaming, and comedy.
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Make Videos Longer
Before the introduction of YouTube shorts, short videos did not do well on YouTube. Today, even with YouTube shorts, you may still need to invest in long videos, as most YouTube users still prefer videos of reasonable length.
The length of the video affects the SEO ranking, and viewers love videos that are about 10 minutes. Therefore, videos about 10 to 15 minutes are worth it, as they help you provide complete and in-depth content while keeping the viewer alert.