How YouTube affects your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategy
YouTube is the number one video streaming site in the world with over 100 hours of videos being uploaded every minute. Billions of videos with billions of viewers watching at every minute of the day make YouTube one of the biggest platforms for video production. With it being the biggest, it can also be threatening. There’s plenty of videos to choose from so what’s making people watch yours? The length? The title? The upload date? The tags? It’s none of these things and all of these at the same time.
It all revolves around how you optimize your videos for YouTube SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The different options, settings, and how you deliver your video is what sets your content apart from the content getting millions of views. Consistency, first impressions, and timing are also details to take note of. These details may seem arbitrary or just for organizational facts. However, they’re how YouTube distributes your videos to its millions of viewers.
Keywords/Titles –
This is a factor that constantly changes but also somehow remains consistent. The words in the title of the video often decide how many people are going to click the video. You’ll often see the word the uploader wants you to see the most of in caps. “NEW”, “EASY”, “QUICK”, “MUST SEE” these sound like terms in a stereotypical advertisement for products, but there’s a reason advertisers use them. They catch eyes and they appeal to interests. When users search a how to video then see the term “QUICK”, they click it because they want the fastest route to solving their problem. You as an uploader have to know what in your content the people want. Your actual video title can be on side whilst the other side contains SEO fodder. For an example “EXPERIMENT Glowing 1000 degree KNIFE VS COCA COLA”. This video has over 70 million views. The capitalized words are keywords here. For further clarification on how you should pick out your keywords you could always use Google’s Keyword Planner. The number of searches recent times for anything you type can be generated so you can plan your title accordingly.
Time/Length –
While the internet is a fast moving and constantly growing platform, content creators must pace themselves correctly when trying to acquire an audience. Depending on the content the length of the video alone could scare potential viewers away. YouTube favors longer videos. It’s an indisputable fact since they changed their monetization algorithm. Before, a short video with a substantial number of views would garner a relatively large payout. Now however, YouTube is in favor longer videos for keeping users on the site longer. Paying more on how long they’ve kept users on the site than how many people watch. Depending on the subject matter of your video however 10 minutes might be much too long, and under a minute could be too short. The best thing you can do is find a balance, set checkpoints at times like 5 minutes and review if your video is dragging too much.
Descriptions –
Unlike the length of the video, the length of the descriptions is advised to be always lengthy.
If you put many of the keywords that you found after doing research into your description, YouTube is more likely to rank it higher in the search engine for those topics. It ranks it all by relevance. You should also have links to social media and your website in the description so that users won’t have to go searching. Convenience, consistency and keywords should be the basis of each of your video descriptions.
Sharing –
When the video’s over encourage viewers to share and like. Most professional YouTubers do this knowing their loyal fans probably do it every time. It doesn’t hurt to remind them however since new viewers can also help out in the sharing process. Having a substantial number of thumbs up will place your video higher. The higher the video the more people will watch it since they don’t want to have to scroll for too long. It’s almost as if you have to scroll for more than a page for something you’re looking for it doesn’t exist. You can also share the video yourself and encourage those you share it with to also share.
It might be tedious to place effort into all of the concepts listed above, however the way YouTube’s search and scaling algorithms work are strict. If you want to keep ahead of the game and get viewers then the different tools and strategies must be implemented.