In 2022, ask anyone and they'll tell you that we're living in the era of "content creation"—and when it comes to modern marketing, "video content" is unavoidable. If it's a long-form clip, it goes on a platform like YouTube; if it's a short clip, it goes on TikTok. Of course, anyone currently producing video clips knows that long-form video content usually demands an enormous investment of time and effort before you get even one good clip of high enough quality to publish on YouTube. And even when you do produce quality work, there's nothing to guarantee that the clip will get the viewers or likes you were hoping for.

If you're starting to feel discouraged, don't worry—because in this article we've brought you some YouTube SEO techniques. Trust us: if you read all the way through and try following along, your clip's Watch Time and Viewer counts are guaranteed to shoot up high enough to pull down the moon.

What Is YouTube SEO?

As we all know, video content is no longer anything new. Anyone can easily upload a video to YouTube, which means the volume of video content grows enormously every single day. So how can a brand or marketer make their existing content stand out?

Anyone with experience in doing SEO will already be familiar with this, because YouTube SEO is actually quite similar to doing SEO on a regular website. The key difference is that the optimization process for making a clip easier to find through search only involves optimizing elements outside the content itself—such as the Title, Description, video thumbnail, and other external components. Once you've uploaded a clip, the content inside it obviously can't be edited any further. For anyone who's ready, get set to learn the expert-level techniques that will help your clips rocket to the first page of search results.

YouTube SEO Ranking Factors

The first important thing to understand about the YouTube SEO ranking algorithm is that YouTube uses ranking algorithms in two areas: the Home Page, for recommending various video content, and the YouTube Suggestion Search Bar. There are several key factors that affect this algorithm, as follows:

While it's true that Google's and YouTube's algorithms are similar, that doesn't mean they're identical in every way. Of course, YouTube's algorithm for categorizing video content takes the interactions between the video and the viewer as its main consideration—whether that's:

Did the user watch the clip all the way to the end?
Was the user satisfied with this clip?
Did they leave a comment?
Did they Subscribe to this channel?
Did they turn on notifications for this channel?
Did they watch more clips from this channel?

All of the above are key factors in the YouTube algorithm's ranking.

Identify Keywords: Start by Narrowing Down What People Want to Watch

In SEO, choosing your Keyword is like driving the first nail when building a house. Whether the house turns out sturdy and durable or falls apart later depends on that very first nail. Choosing a quality Keyword helps your video get found more easily through search, increases the chances of persuading people to stay and watch longer, and gets them to hit the subscribe button for your channel at the end.

But the tricky part of doing Keyword Research for YouTube SEO is that there's no dedicated tool for it. So here are our recommendations:

Use YouTube Search If you can't think of anything, try typing into the YouTube Search Bar using the simple principle of asking yourself: what word would someone use to search for this clip? Then look at the list that YouTube's algorithm suggests.

After that, try clicking through to the interesting clips on that list and visit those clips' channels to find ideas and approaches for choosing your own Keywords as well.

Use Google Search This is similar to the previous method, but this time try searching the words you want to use on the SERPs—because Google's and YouTube's algorithms are similar in nature (they're part of the same group of companies). So it's no surprise that when you search text in the Google Search Bar, you'll always find interesting video clips recommended as well.

With both of these methods, we recommend that you observe the Video Tags, Thumbnail, Title, and Duration used by the clips ranking on the first page of search results, because these are key points you can take as ideas for optimizing the YouTube SEO of your own clips. The next step covers tips for optimizing YouTube SEO effectively.

Techniques to Optimize YouTube SEO Effectively

As mentioned above, the fact that YouTube lets video creators set their own Title and choose the most suitable video size could be compared to On-Page optimization in website SEO. These steps are very important for YouTube SEO, because they immediately determine whether the video you invested so much time and effort into will be found and clicked on or not.

Title

The Title is one of the most important things, because it's what people see when the clip appears on various YouTube pages. YouTube allows clip titles of up to 100 characters, but our recommendation is not to make it too long—50–70 characters (including spaces) is the ideal length to create a distinction or try to capture viewers' attention.

Description

When writing the Description, the thing to always keep in mind is that it must reflect the content so that viewers understand it when they read it. Remember that writing a description isn't the same as writing promotional copy. Of course, it shouldn't be too long or too short, and it has to draw viewers in so they feel certain that this is the clip they've been looking for.

Here are recommendations for writing an effective Description:

Write the description in 300 characters (including spaces) or fewer.
It should include at least 1 link that brings viewers to the brand's website or to a page with content specific to that video.

Hashtags

The hashtag function is something fairly new to YouTube's algorithm, but it's very useful for classifying content so users can instantly know which category the content they're watching falls into. It's not hard to do, and you can base it on the Keyword Research you've gathered. To add a Tag, simply go to Edit Video >> Details >> Show More.

Thumbnail

The video cover, or Thumbnail, is no less important than setting the Title. The key point is that the image you choose must not be a "Click Bait" image—a cover image that deceives users—because the result you get back will be more bad than good. So you should choose an image that can attract users, perhaps by selecting one based on the key substance of that video's content.

Playlist

Making use of Playlists is another interesting approach, because most viewers like things that come together as a set, uninterrupted, so they can follow the content continuously without any breaks. What's more, if you can organize that video content into a Playlist category, it also guarantees that once viewers finish clip 1, they'll immediately see clip 2 next. Using this Playlist Video technique will help boost the view counts of other videos on your channel in ways you wouldn't expect.

Comment

Even though YouTube has a function to disable user comments, as mentioned, YouTube's algorithm places heavy emphasis on the interaction between viewers and the clip. So choosing to disable viewers' ability to comment is forbidden if you want your clip to gain more views.

Now that you've read this far, we hope this article serves as a basic guideline for newcomers just starting to create video content on the YouTube platform, so you can apply it to give your clips better search results. We guarantee that if you follow this article, the results you get will definitely be better than before.

Get Digital Marketing Consulting at Relevant Audience

Relevant Audience is a company that provides Digital Performance Marketing Agency services, with the main goal of delivering digital marketing services that help businesses reach the target audiences who are looking for their products or services at the right time, place, and device, through various online channels. Our services cover Search Marketing, Social Media Ads, Search Ads, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization), all the way to Influencer Marketing—and we're also part of the Google Partners program.

For more information

Tel.: 02-038-5055

Email: info@relevantaudience.com Website: www.relevantaudience.com