What is YouTube SEO?
Marketing has grown exponentially over the last few years with new and exciting ways for brands and businesses to better promote themselves to their target audience. With this growth has come tons of different methods that can be used, from social media marketing to paid advertisements, and to successfully compete against your competition, you have to be prepared to use these different methods to your advantage. While many companies put focus on written content that can be designed to target potential customers, video content is slowly becoming one of the best ways to capture the attention of your audience!
Within the realm of video design and conceptualisation, YouTube marketing has grown and with that, you need to learn how to optimise your YouTube videos! YouTube SEO is a way for a business to ensure that their videos are optimised so that they can rank on search engine results pages. Just as you would optimise your website so that search engine crawlers would be able to rank you better, the same needs to be done when it comes to video content.
Why SEO is Important for YouTube?
When you create and release content on your website, you will optimise it so that it is more visible and noticed by search engine crawlers, who are responsible for ranking your web pages on search engine results pages, or SERP. If you are unfamiliar with SEO terms, at this point you may be asking yourself “What are SERPs?” SERPs are the pages on a search engine that show the results based on the query that was typed in. Search engine crawlers go through your content and crawl it, using this analysis to decide which queries your content would be most relevant for. Having a SERP Preview Tool can help you to see what will be depicted when your pages or content is ranked, showing what the user will see when they come across your content! YouTube SEO helps videos rank better on SERPs as search engines have a better idea of what the video is about and what queries and results it would best be suited to appear in!
What are the Advantages of YouTube SEO?
SEO and YouTube help to grow a website organically and reach new customers! As with SEO and content, the main idea of this concept is to develop it in such a way that it reaches audiences that are searching for things that are relative to what you have to offer. YouTube SEO can help your business in terms of ensuring that the videos that you post to your YouTube account get noticed and are ranked on search engine results pages!
What is YouTube SEO Strategy?
As with any marketing tactic, to be successful there needs to be strategy involved in the planning and execution. When it comes to your YouTube SEO strategy, the main goal and purpose of any marketing plan should be to optimise certain features within the content so that search engines are able to better determine the relevance and queries that the information would be best suited to. One of the main things that can impact your strategy is the relevance of the content that you create. relevance is extremely important as you need to ensure that your target audience is interested in the types of videos you are putting out. Coming up with a strategy should be the first step in getting your YouTube SEO marketing off the ground, so be sure to do some research into the different tactics that are available!
What Factors Affect Ranking on YouTube Search?
There are a number of different factors that impact a YouTube video’s ranking. The following are just a few factors to take into consideration when looking to improve your YouTube SEO.
- Watch time: The total amount of time that users spend watching a certain video is calculated to create a watch time. This number is the accumulated amount of time that each person has spent watching your video. For example, if you have a user who has watched a video for 2 minutes and another user who has watched a video for 8 minutes, your watch time for this specific video would be 10 minutes. YouTube adds this watch time up and keeps track of it, ranking those with a higher time better than those with a lower time.
- Retention: Audience retention refers to the amount of the video that is watched by users. This can either be displayed as a time or as a percentage, indicating whether viewers are completing the video or leaving it halfway through. A person leaving without having completed the full video may lead YouTube to assume that your video is not retaining the attention of the audience, which may cause it to be ranked lower. If a video is being watched to completion with 100% retention, it can be assumed that people are finding the content interesting and therefore it would rank higher!
Why is Original and Relevant Content Crucial for YouTube SEO?
You are only going to rank well if the content that you create and release is based on topics that are relevant. When creating any sort of content, you need to make sure that it will be something that will interest your target audience and persona, when it comes to YouTube SEO, this is even more vital. You will be ranked according to searches that are made and that are relevant to the content that you have produced, should you not have content that is relevant to many searches, you will not rank highly. Doing the research into the different topics that are most popular at a certain point in time can help ensure that you create not just good YouTube videos, but also relevant ones!
Which Tools can be used for YouTube SEO?
- Use Ahrefs: Ahrefs is a great tool to use when it comes to YouTube SEO! The most relevant part of the tool to use is the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, which can help you to find the best keywords to use within your content. This YouTube keyword tool does not just help you find the keyword that is getting the most hits, but it helps find relevant information that can be easily slotted into your headings! Using this tool will help you to easily figure out the youtube keyword search volume.
- SEMRush: SEMRush is another fantastic tool to use when it comes to optimising YouTube videos. As youtube SEO algorithms rhythms are constantly changing, with new adaptations coming out and different criteria that are measured, using a tool like SEMRush can help you keep ahead of the competition!
How to Optimise Videos for YouTube Search?
The following are a few youtube SEO tips to consider when you optimise videos for YouTube search!
Identify the target audience of your YouTube Video.
Any SEO Guide will tell you that the first step of the process when it comes to marketing and SEO is to find out who your target audience is. Finding your target audience will ensure that you are able to come up with the most relevant ideas and keywords to use, making it easy for your target audience to find the content you create! One of the easiest ways to find your target audience is to analyse who your competitors are targeting. Competitor research is a great way to find your audience easily and quickly, and with them being your competition, you can be sure that you will get access to an audience that is of high quality!
Select a powerful keyword.
Keyword Research for SEO is important whether you are looking at written content or videos. One of the most important parts of a YouTube video when it comes to SEO is the wording that is used in the heading and title of the video itself. This needs to be written with keywords in mind, and doing research into the best keywords to do is necessary if you want the video to rank well! The keywords need to be well thought out and relevant to the content within the video, so selecting a powerful keyword to use and doing youtube keyword research should be taken into consideration!
