Don’t Forget to SEO Your YouTube Videos

Video is one of the world’s most compelling and highly converting content formats and is well worth some extra SEO effort. When we talk about search engine optimisation for YouTube videos, we don’t mean performing SEO on the actual video, just make that as awesome and fit for purpose as you can. What we mean is when you upload to YouTube it is extremely important to remember that YouTube is a search engine to, it’s just focussed around videos.

Choosing keywords As the platform can’t view the video to determine if the content is any good or relevant for various search terms, the engine relies on your data input at upload. This is all based around keywords exactly as you’d expect. Keep in mind that YouTube searches tend to differ slightly from a standard search engine search and your keywords should reflect that. Users are often more specific and will search using slightly more complex terms or phrases. Eg. “Easy Online Tutorial for Wordpress Blogs”. Identify a niche for more traffic It’s also worth keeping in mind, depending on your business type, that certain video centric content pieces have become very popular. The ‘unboxing’ video being one of the most commonly used. This is essentially a product review, but online users just love to see exactly what you get when you open the box for the first time. Styling your reviews this way can play off a nice YouTube centric niche. Optimising descriptions When using your keywords, it’s pretty simple. Your video title and description should contain the main keywords or phrases you think will best match your video audience’s needs. The primary keyword should be prominent in the title. Aim to keep the character length to a minimum while still getting the keywords in. The description must be unique and should function much the same way as SEO friendly web copy. Keywords should be included throughout but make sure you’re writing for the user. Your video description should stand as a decent piece of writing on its own. Final thoughts Once the video is live, YouTube will look at it’s click through rate from when it does appear in various searches to determine how well it matches up to search queries. It’ll also take into account subscribers, likes and comments left by YouTubers and viewers. Be sure to treat YouTube much like social media in a sense that you should also make the effort to reply to comments left and engage with your audience, even the negative ones. More content is always a winner.If there’s one thing recent search trends have shown us on YouTube particularly, it’s that it’s well worth being direct about who your video is intended for. For example, if you’re a UK business and traffic from the UK is of most value to you, it is often worth adding ‘UK’ into the keyword selection to help ensure the views you do capture are relevant.