YouTube SEO Tips – Actionable Tips to Rank Your Videos on YouTube
July 24, 2020
Rudra Kumar
There’s been a seismic shift happening the world over when it comes to media consumption. As eyeballs move online and videos become the choicest form of digital media, even global multi-platform media and entertainment companies like Mashable now makes a strategic shift towards video.
As per the Visual Network Index (VNI) study by technology giant Cisco, by the year 2021 82% of all IP traffic will be videos.
This is the Zettabyte era ladies and gents, where video content is ruling the roost and promises to get bigger and better from here onwards.
The biggest beneficiaries of this surge in video consumption are businesses who have found a new way to reach out to potential customers, engage with the existing ones, and get a spike in website traffic and sales in the process. If you already have lots of videos or are planning to produce video content in the future, you need the power of video SEO to drive the right results for you.
Let’s cut to the chase and see how you can drive maximum mileage out of your video content repository by following these top video search engine optimization (SEO) tips that will also help you in your video SEO strategy.
Top 8 YouTube Video SEO Tips to Optimize for Search Results
Let’s be honest! The quality of your video must be top-notch for it to achieve the desired results. That is, it must evoke a strong emotional response from the viewers and should offer something to them in terms of takeaways. Your videos can then be supported by a robust SEO strategy that can help drive maximum viewership and engagements on it. Here’s are top YouTube video SEO tips.
#1. Don’t Forget to Build Quality Backlinks
Getting high quality backlinks (inbound links) is a good strategy to get your videos ranked higher in search results. For instance, embedding your video on a relevant blog is one way of doing it. You must therefore try and get other users who have high domain authority websites to embed your videos in their website content or blogs.
#2. Put Some Effort in Improving Social Signals
Social signaling is naturally a big part of social media interaction with likes, shares, tweets and retweets driving traffic with work of mouth that marketing can’t buy. Marketing video content on social networks and driving engagements needs to be part of a comprehensive SEO strategy. This can be done by marketing the video on social networks and driving engagements on that post. Watch this video where Matt Cutts reiterates the importance of social signals in organic SEO.
#3. Meta Data Optimization is Important
Metadata is the HTML code in a webpage that offers a concise summary of content to search engines. When creating descriptions of video content, remember to research your terms carefully before creating your on-page description. Optimize the on-page metadata on all videos with the right set of keywords and don’t forget to include it in the title, description, and tags.
#4. Leverage the power of YouTube Cards
Looking to drive actionable results from your YouTube marketing efforts? YouTube cards are a must consider as these can help drive interactivity on your videos by helping you integrate a call to action e.g. pointing the viewers to a specific URL. There are 5 types of cards on YouTube that you can consider: Channel cards, Poll cards, Link cards, Playlist cards, and Donation cards.
#5. Add Compelling Video Thumbnails
Thumbnails are not just stills of a video but are a robust marketing tool that’s also easy to use. An enticing thumbnail improves the clickthrough rate or CTR of the video which sends a strong signal to YouTube that the video is being liked by your viewers. Doing so will have a positive impact on the ranking of the video.
#6. Don’t go Black-Hat.
Keep your metadata relevant to the video that’s presented. Even though people click on clickbait, people hate clickbait. Why? It promises and doesn’t deliver. Most of all, most people no longer even look at clickbait. It’s blocked by their browser’s adblocker. More than that, Google and other venues are cracking down on shady ads by the millions.
#7. Closed captioning for video helps to bring in a larger audience
The narrator’s voice is automatically transcribed in the video’s original language using a YouTube algorithm, or the creator can upload a transcript. This is an excellent addition to the video, allowing hearing-disadvantaged viewers to use the content. Transcribing into another language opens the content to an even wider viewership.
#8. Check out your competition.
Check what your closest competitors are doing with their videos and where they are promoting them on social media such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Also, videos with a similar content type tend to be grouped and offered to viewers. If you don’t see content like yours offered along with your video, then there’s something wrong.
There are a lot more YouTube SEO tips that can fine-tune your strategy but working with a professional is the best bet to get all your bases covered. Ask an experienced SEO marketer what their best SEO tips for YouTube Channel in 2020 and get your marketing into gear.
Video Content Marketing – Keep the End Objectives in Mind
While evaluating any video marketing agency for YouTube Video SEO, you must have the expectations clear from the outset. The best YouTube SEO agency will typically deliver to you the following measurable benefits:
- Improving video rankings – Any video marketing strategy is set for failure if it doesn’t help you achieve high search rankings
- Increase in subscriber base – Once you have outsourced your video marketing to an expert SEO company, you must keep a close eye on the subscriber base on your YouTube channel. There should be definite increments in the subscriber numbers and that’s one effective way to track the ROI from your video marketing efforts.
- Boost engagements – An effective YouTube SEO strategy will get you good organic engagements on all your videos published on the YouTube channel. Google factors in the like/comment/share numbers in ranking the videos.
- Drive sales – Did you know that you can drive traffic to your website by including URLs in the video description?
Conclusion
There’s been a phenomenal interest in videos by internet users the world over and there lies an immense opportunity for businesses to attract potential customers and engage the present lot. That’s already started to happen to some extent.
For instance, Live Videos, are being used by brands in different ways like streaming Q&A sessions, resolving customer concerns, handling product launches, product demos, etc. Some of the popular platforms enabling this shift to live video streaming include the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Periscope, and Instagram.
If you haven’t already, now is the time to think about video SEO for YouTube Channel and get the right engagement on the video assets that are probably lying there unnoticed by your potential and existing customers.