Everything You Need To Know About YouTube SEO To Rank

According to Alexa traffic rankings, YouTube is the second most visited website on the internet, trailing only Google. Unfortunately, many digital marketers still treat it like any other social media platform. But, like your website, success on YouTube is about optimizing your content, not just posting it.

It’s not difficult to find videos with millions of views and videos with almost none that are nearly identical. A few factors frequently determine success and failure.

When it comes to YouTube SEO, much of the work can be encapsulated into a process that you can apply to all of your old videos first, and then to each video as it is published. And you’re about to find out how.

Read this if you want your content to appear at the top of YouTube’s search results for the keywords you care about.

What Exactly Is A YouTube SEO Strategy?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the constantly evolving practice of designing web content to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs). To draw traffic and expand your audience, your content must be optimized for search since it is frequently the entry point.

For YouTube SEO to be effective, your channel, playlists, metadata, descriptions, and videos must all be optimized. This is in contrast to Google, which determines rank based on backlinks and other factors. Both inside and outside of YouTube, your videos can be optimized for search.

The basics of SEO for YouTube videos, like using keywords in the channel name, meta description, and tags, may be familiar to you. But by making videos more accessible, you can improve YouTube SEO even further.

Because videos can’t be viewed by search engine bots, they must be properly indexed using the text data that goes with them. Transcripts closed captions, and subtitles are all essential components of a YouTube SEO strategy because they improve user experience, engagement, watch time, viewership, and SEO.

Here are seven suggestions for increasing views and improving your YouTube SEO.

Keywords

• The words or phrases that best describe the material on your page, video, or post are known as keywords. For the best results, people will enter the keyword or phrase into Google or another search engine like YouTube.
• College, Boston University, BU, Boston University data science, Boston University freshmen year, etc. are some examples that come to mind.
• As many users customize their searches by asking questions of their smart assistants (Siri, Alexa, etc.) or search engines, SEO experts are also encouraging the use of questions as keywords. As you write all titles, descriptions, and tags, it is crucial to keep this in mind.
• On YouTube, hashtags can be used as keywords. Improved hashtags will give related video posts on the platform more visibility.

Improve The Video Title

Once you’ve chosen your keyword, you can use it to optimize your video in a variety of ways to raise it in the YouTube search results. Including the keyword in the title of your video is one of the easiest ways to achieve this.

However, a keyword won’t be sufficient to give you a significant YouTube SEO boost gave that 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (!). Your video’s title must be interesting. Users of YouTube need to receive a message saying, “Click me!”

Making a promise is a great way to do this. Are you going to impart knowledge to your audience? Are you going to keep them amused? Inform them of the upcoming video. The top YouTube videos for this keyword all claim that they will teach their viewers something new, and of course, they all exactly use the keyword.

They do, however, have some additional descriptions. The title “Instagram Hacks” or even “I Will Teach You Instagram Hacks” is insufficient to generate views.

Although Content Is King, Consistency Reigns Supreme

Content is king, but you need excellent content that stands out from the competition if you want to compete with all the other creators in the competitive, fast-paced world of YouTube. 

While becoming a viral sensation is fantastic, keep in mind that YouTube is about more than just views; you also want to develop a subscriber base and maintain relationships with viewers.

How would you go about doing this? by creating high-quality content and regularly publishing it. Regular posting will only harm you and cost you, subscribers. Ensure that you post every day if you pledge to do so. Never miss a week or post a late video if you post once per week at 9:00 a.m. on a Tuesday.

The Influence Of Playlists

YouTube playlists are an underutilized promotional tool. While most businesses create playlists based on dates, content genres, products, and other broad categories, to fully utilize this feature, you must go deeper.

Use keyword research to determine what people are searching for in your niche, and then create playlists around those topics. If you don’t have a lot of content, you can even make playlists out of other people’s videos to direct viewers to your YouTube channel page.

The First 48 Hours Are Crucial

The algorithms used by YouTube are infamously harsh. Make sure you have all your optimizations prepared before you upload a new video. Start strong or don’t start at all. Never release a video with the intent to optimize it later. 

It will be difficult to make up lost ground if YouTube is unable to understand what your video is about or if it isn’t gaining any  

While it is possible to correct inefficiently optimized videos in the past by changing the titles, descriptions, tags, thumbnails, transcript, and other elements, much of the harm will have already been done after the first 48 hours. Once the algorithm has determined that your content is unworthy, it is incredibly difficult to recover from being buried.

Provide Multilingual Subtitles

Similar to how English captions make your videos more approachable to viewers, translations expand your audience and boost your YouTube SEO. The reach of YouTube is extensive.

More than 2 billion users who are logged in watch YouTube every month around the world, but only 16.4% of visitors to YouTube’s website are from the United States. Foreign language subtitles enable international and non-native English speakers to enjoy your videos.

Search engines will also index your translated caption files, and your video will show up in their translations of the search results. You have a better chance of ranking higher because there is less competition for non-English keywords, which can be crucial for a YouTube SEO strategy.

Always double-check your translations for accuracy, and if you want high-quality subtitles guaranteed, think about working with a vendor.

Make Use Of A Captivating Thumbnail

The choice of the video thumbnail image greatly impacts the click-through rate. Use high-quality, contrasted images with a 16:9 aspect ratio. The photos with close-ups of the face are the best. YouTube users can choose which frame represents their video’s thumbnail.

In addition to the three screenshots that YouTube will offer, you can also select another frame from the video or upload a picture of your own. If you need ideas for images, use websites like Canva, which has templates for YouTube video thumbnails.

The choice of the video thumbnail image greatly impacts the click-through rate. Use high-quality, contrasted images with a 16:9 aspect ratio. The photos with close-ups of the face are the best.

YouTube users can choose which frame represents their video’s thumbnail. In addition to the three screenshots that YouTube will offer, you can also select another frame from the video or upload a picture of your own.

Wrapping Up

If you want to increase your YouTube views, subscribers, and rankings, you must devote time to video optimization. The best part, without a doubt, is the low entry barrier to becoming a YouTube SEO practitioner. Simply start checking off all of YouTube’s boxes, and you’ll be well on your way!