The chances that you have heard about the importance of SEO in today’s day and age are very high. SEO most certainly is important for your digital marketing efforts to make headway with consumer searches. The focus of this article is to address optimizing your content for a search engine you might not have yet considered.
Google, Bing, and many other mainstream search engines usually take the spotlight. This leaves platforms like YouTube marketing, for example, on the outskirts when it comes to SEO efforts.
No matter the nature of the topic or current subscriber count, everyone has the ability to implement strategies that help their videos rank well. Growing your search traffic and dominating your niche is possible! The terms and tools are slightly different, like videos, playlists, and channel rank, as they are specific to how YouTube works.
The following statements are made directly from their explanation of their discovery and search ranking algorithm:
“Videos are ranked based on a variety of factors including how well the title, description, and video content match the viewer’s query.”
What they are telling us is that title and description keywords matter. They are also saying the search intent needs to match the user’s search query. Essentially, driving engagement from a search query is exactly how you gain rank on YouTube.
Take note that none of the optimizations will work the way you need if your videos don’t engage your audience. So, quality and audience-engaging video content come first, then keywords come second.
In order to determine which keywords will work best for your video to gain exposure, a concoction of ideas is best. This is because YouTube marketing does not have a keyword research tool. You can do this by combining suggestions from Google Trends and YouTube suggestions themselves. There are also Chrome extensions that will supply you with related queries and the most used tags for insight.
Identifying the viewer’s search intent is next up on the list of importance. Also called keyword intent, knowing the reason why a viewer searches with the words they do can help your ranking strategy. Following their insight, you can adjust your keywords to get in line with popular searches.
To do this, search for the keyword you want to rank with and analyze both the angle and content of the top 3 results. Does your target viewership want in-depth informational videos, list-type videos, or silly banter about your topic?
You can increase your exposure and watch times by matching the style of content people are looking for.
Lastly, there are some concrete variables you have to work with that every video you publish calls for and is directly related to YouTube’s structure. This is called on-page video optimization. You utilize title, description, tags, and thumbnail information to help provide context to your video and achieve those click-through rates you want. Here are some quick tips for utilizing those variables effectively:
- Use the main keyword for your video in its title
- You want to keep the title length under 60 characters
- A catchy title goes a long way for viewer engagement
- Video thumbnails are valuable eye-catching real estate
Follow these tips for the most concrete SEO strategies for optimizing your content on YouTube marketing to increase your engagement and view time. That is if you are already providing creative, relevant, and informative content!
If you are looking to start, grow, or further optimize your channel, give OCGnow a call today at (904) 600-3600 and schedule a FREE evaluation of your current online presence for getting a baseline to use as a launchpad for your success!
