SEO For YouTube: How To Optimise Your Videos For Higher Rankings
If you want to get more views on YouTube, you must optimise your videos for SEO.
Without doing this, you might struggle to get your videos in front of more eyebrows.
In this post, l will share with you some few strategies that you can use to rank your videos higher on YouTube.
These includes:
1. Keyword Research
Before producing any content, you should do some keyword research – so as to find low competition keywords with a decent search volume.
This is so crucial because this helps you to direct your time and energy on topics that you can potentially rank for – and avoid those which are highly competitive.
Using tools like Tubebuddy, you can do some keyword research – and the tool will assess the competition levels i.e. based on the size of your channel.
Thus, it is so crucial to do keyword research, so that you can know exactly what people are searching for – as well as the competition levels.
2. Optimise Your Titles & Descriptions
Assuming that you've done your keyword research, recorded your video – and you're about to upload it, it's important to optimise your title and description for YouTube SEO.
The reason being that, YouTube is a search engine – thus, it analyses your title and description to better understand your video – hence, knowing exactly where to rank it.
Thus, it's important to put your keywords in the titles and descriptions of your videos – but you should not overstaff the keywords.
Tools like Tubebuddy & VidIQ helps you to optimise your meta data i.e. through providing some actionable tips that you can implement to make your video better.
Another important thing which l need to address is that, you should try by all means to write detailed descriptions – since this helps a lot with SEO.
I know most YouTubers writes short descriptions like; ‘like & subscribe' or ‘l hope you enjoyed the video', or something along those lines.
This is bad for SEO – since this does not give YouTube enough information about your video.
Thus, you must spend some time writing more information in your description tab.
3. Utilise Tags
Another important thing is to use tags in your videos.
You can put hashtags inside the description box – since this also helps with SEO.
But if you're using tools like Tubebuddy or VidIQ, you'll be given some suggested tags which you can use for your videos.
And you can also ‘steal' your competitors tags – so that you can also compete with them on the search.
Just to add on this issue, you must also utilise the channel tags section – which allows you to enter some few tags related to your channel.
This helps YouTube to better understand your channel i.e. what do you specialise on – or maybe, which videos to expect from your channel.
To access this feature, simply go to your channel settings – and follow the directions given.
Bonus Tips
(i) Make Use Of High Quality Thumbnails
As obvious as it sounds, most people do not take their thumbnails seriously.
But thumbnails have a huge impact on your CTR – since people likes to click on a video that looks promising.
And if you have poor quality thumbnails, you'll have a low CTR – which will further affect your rankings – since low CTR indicates that people don't like your video.
Thus, you should work on your thumbnails if you have a weakness on this issue.
And nowadays, we're blessed to have some free tools like Canva – which helps you to create high quality thumbnails in just a matter of few minutes.
Thus, there's no excuse for not having a nice thumbnail – since this tool comes with some premade templates that are 70% done for you.
(ii) Encourage Your Subscribers To Engage With Your Videos
Engagement is also a huge factor when it comes to YouTube SEO – since it shows whether people are liking your videos or not.
Thus, it's very important to encourage your viewers to engage i.e. through encouraging them to smash the ‘Like' button or to leave a comment.
That way, your videos will have a higher engagement rate – thus, they'll be pushed higher on the search rankings.
You can also check how Graham Stephan gets more engagement on his videos – because he knows exactly how to make people engage with his vidz.
(iii) Upload Consistently
Another important factor is consistency.
YouTube favours channels which uploads consistently over those that do not.
If you upload videos once in a while, you might struggle to rank – even if your videos are better than those of your competitors.
For this reason, you should try by all means to set a publishing schedule and you must stick to it.
That way, YouTube will slowly favour your channel – and eventually rank your videos better on the search results.
(iv) Specialise In A Specific Niche (Don't Go Too Broad)
Another important thing is to stick to a specific niche – rather than just trying to cover every single topic.
This allows your channel to develop some authority in that niche – because YouTube will trust you as a reliable source for that niche.
For example, if you upload more videos related to weight loss, YouTube will give you higher priority for keywords related to that niche – ahead of channels which tries to cover everything.
Thus, you should try by all means to stick to a specific niche (although you might divert here and there just to experiment).
Wrapping
I hope that you've gained some value from this post, since l tried by all means to highlight some of the most important concepts.
I had to condense this information into a blog post – since there's a lot of things to cover on this topic.
There's literally 8 week courses which are entirely based on YouTube Concepts – which proves how huge this topic is.
But you can use the few tips shared in this post to boost your YouTube SEO game.
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