Do you know which social media site is the best for driving engaged traffic to your website? Find out in this week’s episode of “Let’s Talk Video!”
Today’s viewer question comes from Patrick in Newport Beach, CA. He writes:
Hi Mr. and Mrs. Geffner,
I’ve just secured my own YouTube channel for my business and I plan to start posting videos on a regular basis. Can you give me some tips on how to improve my video SEO on YouTube, so my videos will rank higher in searches and more people will be likely to find them. Thanks!
Thanks, Patrick. That is a great question and we have a few quick tips that will definitely help your video SEO on YouTube.
Watch the full episode below to see our answer:
In general, improving your video SEO on YouTube mostly comes down to using keywords properly. One very important thing to take into consideration is that Google, which is the largest search engine on the internet owns YouTube, which is the second largest search engine. And one of Google’s biggest missions is to make sure to provide search results that are most relevant to what people are actually looking for online.
In other words, you can’t just create a video or an article, and add a bunch of keywords to it, to try to fool search engines into thinking that your video content or your web page is about a subject that it’s not really about. That’s why keywords and other search tools exist: to help viewers find what they’re looking for faster, and to reward the content creators who are providing the most valuable information, by driving traffic to their content.
Here are 3 quick & easy tips for improving your video SEO on YouTube. These are things that you should do for every single video you upload to your YouTube channel.
Tip #1: Maximize your target keywords
Target keywords are the words or phrases that can best be used to describe your video or written content, that are most likely to match up with what people are searching for online.
For video, the most important place to include your target keywords is in your video title. The title is the first thing that people will see and use to make a snap judgment about whether or not to watch. It’s also the first metric YouTube will look at when deciding whether or not to include your video in search results when someone is searching for that topic.
Also, the same is true for the actual video source file. Before you upload your video to YouTube, give your video file the same name that you plan to title it on YouTube. Don’t use a default file name or call it something generic like “video.mov”. Naming your video file the same name as your video title will improve your video SEO because it helps reinforce to YouTube that your video is indeed about what you say it’s about.
Tip #2: Include a written transcript of your video content
Next, depending on the length and purpose of your video, you may want to consider including a transcript of your video in the video description area. If you’re doing educational or how-to content, where you’re looking to rank high for certain search terms, having more mentions of your target keywords within your written transcript will help let search engines know that your content is indeed relevant to what people are searching for.
Another great suggestion for improving your video SEO is to add your transcript to the closed captioning tool on YouTube. YouTube automatically generates a transcript in the closed captioning area, but often it’s not 100% accurate. You can either edit the one that’s already there, or if you have a text file of your video script, you can upload it directly to YouTube in the video manager. This helps both with video SEO and of course also helps those people who are actually using the closed captioning function on YouTube.
Tip #3: Provide tags for each of your videos
Tags are words or phrases you can enter into the tags area in the YouTube video manager, to describe what your video is about. You can enter your target keywords as tags, as well as any other descriptive words that are relevant to the content of your video. Always remember to add the most important tags first.
Not only do tags help in search engine discovery, but they also help YouTube to find related or suggested videos that will appear on the right side of the page while viewers are watching your videos on YouTube, and directly in the video player after your video is finished playing.
Thanks so much for your question, Patrick. We hope that advice will help you to improve your video SEO on YouTube! Please keep us posted on your progress.
If you enjoyed this video, please leave us a comment below. Tell us: how has posting videos on YouTube helped to support your business growth?
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