YouTube has more than 1 billion users worldwide. How to stand out among so many people, channels and videos? It is not easy, but today I will explain some tips, some well-known and other true “secret tricks”, which have helped us gain traffic to your channel and correctly optimize videos in SEO for YouTube for more views.
Surely even your mother (or even your grandmother!), who has nothing to do with social networks, knows what YouTube is, right? The fact is that only after Google, YouTube is the largest and most important search engine on the planet, so getting attention on its platform is not easy.
The efforts of an SEO and web positioning consultant are countless, but, unfortunately, many do not know how to achieve that long-awaited SEO positioning on YouTube, and the channels waste clear opportunities to generate traffic, gain trust and, of course! Gain subscribers.
All this is summarised in the loss of money because it is not a secret that having a YouTube channel of some success could leave you with good monetary gains doing what you like. That would be great, right?
If you have a channel on YouTube, you will need to use certain strategies to attract the public to the content you create and make your videos go viral. I’m sure you know that perfectly, so below, I’m going to reveal what SEO tips and tricks could help you place your videos in the top positions of searches and trends on YouTube.
What is SEO on YouTube?
SEO is a set of techniques to get a website to achieve a good ranking on the search engine results page, known as SERP ( Search Engine Results Pages ). It includes a series of techniques and strategies related to the web, from its design, loading speed, content, data, and tags, to keywords and much more.
SEO on YouTube is a set of techniques to get a video or channel to position itself on YouTube.
SEO is a set of techniques applied to position a video or channel on YouTube and achieve visibility, generate traffic and get many subscribers.
In other words, an SEO strategy for YouTube tries to correctly show YouTube all the information that this search engine needs to understand what your videos are about and why they should highlight them for certain user searches.
How Does YouTube Search Work?
Now, a downside to SEO for YouTube is that search engines can’t understand the information in images or videos, so YouTube relies on traditional SEO to understand the information in your content. Video and the data you provide in the video’s title: the description, the tags, the file name, etc.
A great advantage of knowing SEO Marketing, that is, correctly optimizing a web page for Google in SEO, is that it is not very different from optimizing a video for YouTube in SEO since Google owns YouTube. They share a lot of data and algorithms.
Therefore, the data of the video that you index in Google will be quickly considered by YouTube, and if it is indexed correctly, the YouTube search engine will fully trust the textual data that Google shows it.
How to SEO Optimize your YouTube Videos?
Start by searching and analyzing SEO and the best keywords.
Searching for keywords is one of the most important processes in any SEO strategy, and it is no different for SEO on YouTube.
Video keywords will help you better organize your content and focus your YouTube channel better.
You can do it the traditional way; writing something on YouTube and brainstorming all those words that are related. In addition, free tools such as Google Trends or Ubersuggest can help you do this.
Just as Google Autocomplete results are very valuable for keyword research on a website, the options offered by YouTube Suggest (YouTube’s autocompleted function) will also be valuable for your channel, don’t ignore them and make the most of it!!
Name Your Video File Before Uploading it to YouTube
YouTube can’t understand what’s inside the video, so it will rely on the name of the video file you have on your computer to get the first idea.
Before uploading your video file to the platform, the name of your video file tells YouTube much more than you think.
For example, renaming your video file “DSC0127361.mp4” to “youtube -seo-tricks.mp4” gives YouTube a clue about the video you are about to upload.
Choose to name your video with your main keyword, so it will be in harmony with the title of the video and make it easier for the YouTube search engine.
Create an Impressive Title and Use the Keywords
The title is a determining factor for your video to be considered by the YouTube algorithm.
It will be tremendously useful for you to take advantage of keyword research to create video titles that are friendly, meaningful and clear enough to be understood by search engines.
The video’s title must be simple and contain the most appropriate keywords to describe what it is about; no cheating or YouTube will notice!
The impact of the title will define the percentage of clicks your video obtains.
Write SEO-Optimized Descriptions on YouTube Videos
The video description is a great opportunity to engage the audience and provide useful information. Many miss it, but it is advisable to write long descriptions in which the call to action (CTA), links or any extra that you want to include and know that it can be useful to the reader, will be welcome.
It’s not about explaining or transcribing the entire video; that would be spoiling yourself! It’s about being strategic in communicating with your audience.
Don’t be afraid to write and let those first three lines that YouTube shows in the videos seduce your audience and provoke them to read the rest.
Descriptions can help you gain more subscribers, and if they’re interesting, they make people click ‘show more to continue reading. You have 1,000 characters to use in the description, but it is generally recommended to use between 300 and 500 characters.
Spend Time Adding the Dubtitles (CC) of the Video
The Subtitles or Closed Caption (CC) function that you will find from the editor of the video itself, within the YouTube video manager section, is of great help when it comes to achieving greater visibility and better positioning within YouTube and associated search engine, such as Google’s search engine.
Adding subtitles to your video takes a bit of time, but your video will reach the hearing impaired and foreigners using YouTube’s automatic translator.
Using this YouTube technology, at the same time, will allow you to reach a larger group of users, including people with hearing disabilities but also people who do not speak your language, since YouTube has an automatic subtitle translation system into the language. Of the user.
No Automatic Subtitles
The transcripts or subtitles of the video add up when classified in the YouTube algorithm. Still, it is not good to leave it in the hands of the automatic subtitles that the platform generates since they usually contain errors in time and writing. The most appropriate thing is that you edit the subtitles yourself or rely on a program or App that can help you with it.
Translate Transcripts and Subtitles into Other Languages
Being able to globalize your channel must be your dream, and you will get closer to it if you offer the translations of your video in several languages to your audience.
The best thing is that you don’t have to record the video for each language; it would be a waste of time and money! You can rely on automatic YouTube translations or, if you can, even have a translation verified by professional translators.
Assign relevant tags to your video on YouTube according to your SEO strategy
Tags make it easy for your video to be found, but only if you use relevant and popular tags; otherwise, you are casting the net in an area where there are no fish!
Take a little time and do some research! Search and choose the most searched tags by your target audience, with long-tail keywords or phrases.
There are several free and easy-to-use tools with which you can research your niche tags, or why not keep an eye on your main competitors?
Create a Custom Thumbnail (cover) of your Video
By default, the thumbnails of the videos appear as the cover of the video in the results lists since YouTube creates them automatically, selecting a capture of your video. It is very good because it makes the job much easier, and most videos use this automatic method.
But the statistics reveal that those channels with the best performance on this platform are those that upload personalized thumbnails of their videos, use impressive images that attract the user’s attention, are faithful to the content that the video contains, and invite clicks. And view the video.
It is well worth spending a little time creating a personalized, impressive cover image (thumbnail) that attracts your audience’s attention; you will notice the difference!
The size of the recommended images is 1280 x 720 pixels in PNG, JPG, GIF or BMP formats. So let that creativity run wild and make an impressive cover for each of your videos.
Create Calls to Action (CTA) in the Videos
The call to action (CTA), Call to Action in English, is crucial to finish winning over the public and persuade them to do the action you want, such as subscribing to your YouTube channel.
Be as convincing as possible on this and show them the way to become part of your loyal audience with one click.
Remember that the number of subscribers on your channel is one factor that YouTube will consider when positioning your videos in its results lists.