How to Conduct SEO for Your YouTube Videos in 3 Easy Steps

YouTube is not only the biggest global provider of streaming video content but is also effectively the second most used search engine on earth. Second only to its parent company Google. Globally YouTube has had over 1billion unique visits and delivers over 4 billion videos views every single day.

YouTube is not only a search engine, video platform hybrid. It’s also one of the most downloaded and most commonly used mobile apps to date. The big difference between YouTube and other search engines is that YouTube search results are not collected from around the web, it’s search results are only comprised of video’s which have been uploaded to the YouTube platform. So, it does work a little different from that perspective.

Just like any other search engine YouTube has its very own search algorithm to determine how to rank its video content when someone performs a search. Though this is considerably simpler than SEO as you know it, there are some major similarities. If you want to make sure your brands YouTube videos can be found easily via the world’s second largest search engine platform, here’s 3 steps to help guide you on your way.

Step 1: Keyword Selection for Video

Searches conducted for video slightly differ from standard searches. As such your keyword strategy for your website is not directly transferable to your YouTube SEO. You’re going to need to re-evaluate this before you get started.

Not only are habits of video searchers on YouTube different, but as we have moved in to an era where the majorities of search engines employ a universal search approach. Which means displaying results from a number of different media types, websites, news alerts, social media posts, images and of course video. As such there are certain phrases and search query architectures that are more likely to produce video results within a search engine like Google.

Here are some common video specific keyword phrases:

The reason it’s important to be considering ‘video keywords’ like this is that by doing this kind of research upfront you can select keywords which are popular on Google as well as YouTube, meaning you have considerably more potential traffic potential should you succeed in earning top ranking positions. Some of the most popular videos on YouTube get the majority of their traffic from Google and other search engines linking directly to the content and not from users searching within YouTube itself.

Step 2: Keyword Relevant Content

In the same way as the SEO fundamental practise you would apply to your website content, YouTube content needs to be created with keywords and SEO efforts in mind. After all search engine bots can’t view and determine if the actual video content you’ve uploaded is more or less relevant for a user’s search. Hence it arrives at this decision based on the information you provide.

This includes the file name of your video when uploaded, the title and of course the description. Think of these much like image names, page titles and main page copy but for your video.

To-do list when uploading a video and supporting content:

Step 3: Encourage and Support User Engagement

Search engines like to please their users and provide relevant results for their search. As such the perceived popularity of your video content is important as a ranking factor. How well liked, subscribed, average time watched and comments made are all taken into consideration in the same way load time, bounce rate and other factors affect website SEO.

Ways in which user interaction will affect video ranking:

YouTube can potentially be a huge traffic generation tool for any brand or business and there are many businesses who launch primarily through the use of YouTube and video content alone. Whether you’re a new business or an established business looking at capitalising on video content, don’t neglect the significant role YouTube can play and follow these tips to get your natural discovery off to the best possible start.