Did you know that you can easily market your YouTube videos by optimizing them for search engines? Much like adding SEO to websites and social media posts, using SEO for YouTube videos can be the key to great success and growth on the video-sharing platform.
If you are trying to boost your views and improve your return on your time investment on YouTube, you should highly consider adding SEO to your YouTube content in order to promote growth.
Let’s discuss how you can add SEO for YouTube in order to make your channel stand out. Think of this article as an SEO ranking masterclass for growth where we will go through the top five SEO tips for YouTube videos!
What is SEO?
Before we go over how to use SEO for your YouTube videos, let’s discuss the specifics of what SEO is. SEO stands for search engine optimization and is the process of adding relevant keywords to your content to allow the algorithms of search engines to know what your content is about in order to recommend it to visitors.
You may be thinking to yourself, ‘Well, YouTube isn’t Google? Why does SEO matter to YouTube videos?’.
Actually, it is! YouTube has a search feature which helps you to navigate YouTube in order to find the videos that you want to watch.
As well, YouTube videos are able to be found through search engines such as Google and so optimization is still important for YouTube videos to improve growth and increase views!
Our Top Five Tips for SEO for YouTube
Let’s dive into our tips and tricks to help you add search engine optimization to your YouTube channel.
- Add keywords to your YouTube video description.
First and foremost, you should be adding relevant keywords to the description of your YouTube video. Optimizing your description will help to inform your viewer on whether or not your video will help answer the question that they may need to be answered.
As well, YouTube bases a lot of its rankings based off of video descriptions and whether or not the description is relevant to your content. By adding your highly searched and relevant keywords to your YouTube video descriptions, you will start to climb up the ranks for search terms and you will be able to retain viewers on your videos.
Pro-tip: Add the keywords that are most necessary to your content in the first 100 words of your description as YouTube video descriptions can be lengthy and many people will not read past 100 words.
- Use SEO-optimized tags that relate to your YouTube video.
People tend to forget about or waste their tags on their YouTube videos by using unrelated or overused tags when posting their videos on YouTube.
However, instead of tagging your YouTube video with throwaway tags that will not help it in the SEO rankings, you should add you’re relevant keywords as tags instead. Stop wasting your precious YouTube tags by tagging your videos with “video” and start focusing on adding your keywords to the tags section to help YouTube guests find your videos and increase your views.
The tags are so so important and you can even be penalized for using inappropriate tags for your content! Making this simple added effort will make a big difference in your YouTube views and impressions!
- Add a thumbnail to your video that has your keywords in it.
You may not have thought about this way to add SEO to your YouTube videos because this is an underutilized way to add keywords to your content.
Double down on your search engine optimization efforts by including your keywords in your video thumbnail in order to tell both the algorithm and your potential viewer what your content is all about. As well, your thumbnail should be putting your best foot forward online.
Contrary to popular belief, many people judge books (and YouTube videos) by their covers! By taking advantage of this useful tip for ranking in SEO, you will likely be implementing a strategy that a lot of other YouTubers pass up and forget about.
- Make sure that your keyword is in your YouTube video title.
Maybe the most important way to add SEO to your YouTube videos, we rank this tip lower on our list because it is the one that you are likely already doing without even thinking about it.
Have you followed countless tutorials on how to craft an intriguing and eye-catching YouTube title? If so, you’ve probably accidentally added SEO to your YouTube titles! Go back through your prior videos and keep an eye out for potential keywords that you may have already used.
If you haven’t been using keywords in your YouTube titles, this is a must-do for SEO optimization on YouTube. Your title should tell your viewers in an exciting way what the video will be about. YouTube also prioritizes keyword inclusion in the title in its search engine results.
- Enable subtitles and closed captions on your YouTube video.
This last tip in our ranking masterclass for YouTube is something that many people are doing for their YouTube videos nowadays for accessibility, but did you know that adding in closed captions and subtitles can help you improve in rank for SEO?
You can upload a transcript of your video which will mean that there are automatically keywords associated with your video because your words are appearing in written form. Many people do not think that this boosts SEO, however, the YouTube algorithm will take any and all written content into account as data!
Conclusion
Now that we’ve gone over our top five tips for SEO for YouTube, which of these five tips are you going to implement to inspire growth and increase views for your channel? We hope that you found this SEO ranking masterclass helpful in your pursuit for search engine optimization perfection on your YouTube channel.