YouTube SEO: Important Criteria For Optimized Videos

YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google! That’s why you need to pay attention to your YouTube channel and your YouTube videos to be SEO-friendly. When presented effectively, YouTube videos allow you to discover your audience or increase your reliability.

However, in order to be successful in this popular platform where your target audience is constantly searching for something, it’s not always enough to take great videos. There are some steps that will help you optimize your videos in order to rank high in both Google and YouTube search results.

We have been aware of how important website and blog content is to stand out on Google. I have already written an article on this topic before: Is Blogging Still Good for Companies in 2019? But, what about videos? Do you know how to make your brand or products stand out on YouTube, the second largest search engine?

Short info about SEO: SEO is what we call the efforts to be well ranked by the search engine. SEO is actually the abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. We use SEO for YouTube as well. In general, the content that is optimized is called SEO-friendly content. In the world of content marketing; be prepared to encounter words like SEO-friendly blog content, SEO-friendly YouTube video.

In this article, we will focus on the text that will highlight your YouTube videos, and we’ll take a look at what you need to follow to reach more users with your videos. Even though we will not be mentioning them, let me remind you that a high-quality profile picture and high-quality videos are a very important part of YouTube SEO efforts.

Let’s take a look at where you may need to do SEO for successful YouTube content marketing.

Is your YouTube channel SEO friendly?

A professional YouTube marketing strategy requires the channel to be well described. Search engines act according to the user’s expectations and behavior. Therefore, while doing SEO for your YouTube channel, you should know who your target audience is and work to address this audience.

Carefully fill in the channel descriptions before starting work for individual videos. In the section where you give information about the channel, it is useful to explain what kind of video content you would like to share on your channel after briefly introducing your company, brand or yourself. The channel description is of great importance in terms of your rank in the results pages of search engines. Don’t forget to include the keywords in an organic way, which we will talk about in more detail soon.

Find out your keywords

The first step of YouTube SEO efforts is to find out keywords as we do when preparing SEO-friendly content on the website and blogs. You will need to use keywords in the video title, tag, and description. Apart from this, when you start searching for keywords, you will also get ideas about which subjects you would like to take videos.

When determining keywords, the most important thing to consider for small companies is avoiding generic expressions. You can include generic expressions in your keywords. But be sure to choose low-competitive keywords that are addressing a more specific audience.

As a content creator, I have met many people who take the number of keywords used in an article into consideration to check if the content is SEO-friendly. However, this is not the right way to use keywords. If this were the case, we could just write the sentences with keywords added randomly, which wouldn’t make sense.

It is important that the keywords form the frame of the content to be written and that the content written by using these words benefit the user.

Make sure each YouTube video is SEO-friendly

Assuming that your channel is SEO-friendly, now it’s time to optimize all your videos. For this purpose, we can list text parts to do SEO as video title, description, tags, and subtitles. These sections will allow YouTube to index your video properly.

YouTube video title

Think of when you are on YouTube as a user. The title is probably the most important thing that will make you click on a video. Among many results, the user sees your title first. A clear and engaging title will motivate the user to click on your video.

It is very important that the entire title does not exceed 60 characters to appear on the result page without being cut. You can also use the keyword in your title to show that the video actually has content that the user is looking for.

Video description

The first 100 characters are very important when writing the video description because the user needs to click on the “SHOW MORE” button to see the rest of the description. Make sure that the most interesting content is in the first 100 characters.

After the first 100 characters of the description, complete your text with useful information. It is suggested that this section consists of at least 250 words. You can then share related links and social media links. This helps you increase the number of clicks that your different pages will get, and the user can interact with you more.

You can add the transcript of your video at the bottom. Because it often contains keywords and is descriptive, it is crucial for making your YouTube video SEO-friendly. You can also use approximately 15 hashtags in this section.

Tags

By adding your most important keywords to your tags, you can make your video related to similar videos. This increases your chances of being listed as a suggestion.

Subtitle

Adding subtitle helps you make your YouTube video SEO-friendly as well as enriching the user’s experience. The subtitle plays a major role in evaluating the content of your video by YouTube. The platform now lets you easily add subtitles to your videos.

In addition, more than 60% of Youtube videos are viewed by users from different countries where the video is shared. So do not forget to convert your video subtitle to different languages.

Final words

As the world’s second largest search engine, YouTube offers a great channel to reach your audience. It is very important that your YouTube videos are SEO-friendly and really offer benefit. In this article, I have tried to help you have SEO-friendly YouTube videos with text content.

You can contact me for further questions and comments here hgizemtas@gmail.com and find me on LinkedIn.