YouTube SEO: How To Optimize YouTube Videos for Search

We’ve all watched YouTube content at some point in our lives. Whether for funny cat videos, viral memes, or informational how-to videos that potentially taught us more than our actual college degrees, YouTube is more than just entertainment- the mega-platform provides a huge opportunity for brands to connect with their audience in authentic ways.

82% of adults in the US say they use YouTube. As the popularity of video content continues to rise, it’s an excellent place for brands to speak to their customers. In fact, YouTube is the second-largest search engine after Google, and Google also owns it. This means that content published on YouTube is highly discoverable through Google search, giving brands an opportunity to reach users actively searching for related content.

Learn more about how using videos for search engine optimization can help grow your business.

Not only will publishing YouTube videos increase your brand’s visibility and reach, but a long-form video content strategy will also establish your brand as an authority in its vertical. By consistently providing valuable and engaging content, you’ll develop a strong connection with your audience and build brand loyalty over time.

As part of your search engine optimization strategy, a well-executed YouTube plan will ultimately drive business growth and sales by channeling relevant and engaged traffic from YouTube to your content (talk about high-quality viewers!). Once on your channel, these viewers can be directed toward conversions, which may include signing up, making a purchase, or taking another desired action on your website.

In today’s competitive landscape, refining the content and quality of your videos is one of the most important things you can do to optimize YouTube videos. Keep reading to learn how to develop a top-notch production strategy aligned with your overall marketing goals.

Yes, you are ultimately using YouTube to build your brand and increase sales. However, you don’t want your content to be overly promotional. These days, consumers are hyper-aware of business goals and objectives. When communicating a sales message, it’s important to do so tactfully and in a way that provides entertainment or value, particularly on YouTube.

If you’re interested in utilizing YouTube videos for SEO (which, just in case you missed the first section of this blog post— you definitely should be), you want to make sure individual videos all tell an engaging story with customer needs and preferences front-of-mind. If your messaging is overly promotional, viewers are less likely to watch your videos for very long, which will negatively impact your overall YouTube SEO strategy by telling YouTube and Google that your content is not worth ranking higher than other videos in your niche.

Picture this: You’ve just created a fantastic YouTube video. It’s funny, informative, and potentially even binge-worthy. However, without a clear call-to-action, you’re missing out on a huge piece of the marketing funnel puzzle! While videos lacking a CTA can still be great for brand-building, you ultimately want to take advantage of the opportunity for viewers to take action while actively engaging with your content. So, make sure to include a strong CTA in your video and video description that is aligned with your marketing strategy, such as:

• “Leave a comment to let us know what you think!” to enhance viewer engagement.
• “Make sure to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button!” to encourage audience retention.
• “Use the promo code on our website to buy now!” to convert.
• “Sign up for our newsletter on our website!” to generate leads.

CTAs are a powerful and necessary tool for connecting with your audience and driving desired outcomes, so don’t leave the goal of your video up to debate!

Imagine your brand’s YouTube videos as your digital storefront. Just like a polished, well-kept physical store attracts customers, high-quality videos make a strong impression on your online audience. Well-produced YouTube videos will enhance your brand’s image, improve brand credibility, and increase engagement with your audience. Not only that, but the Google and YouTube algorithms favor higher-quality videos, so investing in the quality of your video content will improve your brand’s discoverability from a technical video SEO perspective as well.

Not a video production expert? No problem! You can work with a video production partner to help you optimize your YouTube content strategy and drive the results you’re looking for. And no, it doesn’t have to cost you your entire marketing budget, either! There are plenty of affordable video production agencies that can produce cost-effective, top-notch content for you. Learn more about pricing details for corporate video production here.

A successful YouTube marketing strategy isn’t as simple as creating great content and publishing it to YouTube! It’s important to learn a thing or two about how to optimize your YouTube videos when publishing so that you can rank higher in search results and meet your campaign goals.

If you want your videos to rank high in the Google and YouTube algorithms, keep reading for the top SEO strategies for YouTube that will optimize your videos for search and discoverability.

Stand out from other videos in YouTube search results by creating scroll-stopping thumbnails! And no, we don’t mean clickbait, but depending on your business, that may or may not be a wise decision.

You may decide to create a thumbnail template so that all the videos on your channel look cohesive, and users can eventually begin to recognize your unique and consistent branding. Visual consistency can be a powerful SEO tool that builds brand awareness and drives traffic to your YouTube channel!

Some of the most important YouTube SEO tips you’ll come across involve crafting exciting titles and descriptions that are keyword-rich. This will not only make your videos enticing enough to drive clicks, but it will also optimize them for search.

YouTube keyword research is a crucial step for improving your search engine and YouTube rankings. You want to include a few valuable keywords in the video title and description to help YouTube understand what your content is about so that your videos appear at the top of search results.

There are a number of keyword research tools you can use to discover and select related keywords to optimize your video details. Some popular platforms include SEM Rush and TubeBuddy.

Another way to use keywords to improve your YouTube videos for search optimization is by adding chapters/timestamps to your description so that viewers can skip around your video to the parts that they are most interested in. This provides an opportunity to add more keywords to your description in a way that also improves the viewing experience.

Adding relevant hashtags and tags is another best practice for YouTube SEO.

Similar to gaining insights from titles and descriptions, YouTube uses tags to better understand your video’s content and deliver search results to the appropriate queries. Tags are essentially words and phrases that you fill in to provide YouTube with some context. The first few tags are particularly important, so those should match the same keywords that you’re striving for in your keyword title and description. After selecting the first few tags, you should use a combination of broad vs. more targeted tags to help searchers find your video. While broad tags convey the general topics discussed in your video, targeted tags are more specific to the content of your video. With this approach, you’re more likely to appear in search results for users searching for something both general and specific.

Hashtags work similarly to tags and yield similar discoverability benefits. While hashtags also help YouTube and searchers understand the context of your video, the key difference is that hashtags can lead viewers to your video from other videos that use the same hashtag. Protip: While using hashtags can potentially move viewers away from your content and into a hashtag page— you can prevent this by using branded hashtags rather than general keywords that other brands are using. Branded hashtags encourage users to continue discovering your content, rather than competitors’ related videos, and they are a neat way to organize your videos rather than just using playlists.

Closed captions and subtitles will help optimize your YouTube channel since they provide a text transcript of your video’s content. This transcript is what search engines like Google use to index and rank your video for specific search terms spoken in the video, significantly enhancing your video’s discoverability in search results.

Closed captions and subtitles also increase the accessibility of your content for those who prefer or require subtitles, leading to improved user engagement, a lower bounce rate, and overall a better impression of your brand.

Categorizing your YouTube videos increases the likelihood of your content appearing in playlists geared toward your target audience.

Once you start uploading your incredible videos, you’ll want to keep an eye on your video’s performance over time. Videos often continue to gain views and engagement long after their initial upload, so don’t be discouraged if things seem slow at first. Optimizing your YouTube strategy is a learning process, and there are lots of different ways to track your success. Check out our blog post about how to measure the ROI of video production efforts to learn about the metrics you should focus on based on your marketing goals. Consistently analyzing your data over a long period of time will help you make changes to your content strategy that will ultimately increase the performance of your videos.

Once you’ve established your YouTube strategy, it’s important to make sure that everything is aligned with your overall marketing goals. Utilizing other marketing platforms that your brand already has established will help promote your video content and drive results. Here are a few tips:

• Include videos in relevant parts of your website. Not only does this make your website more engaging, but video content can improve the SEO of your site.
• Share your video content across social media to amplify the reach of your YouTube efforts. For even greater visibility, consider boosting your social media posts through paid advertising to ensure a wider audience gets eyes on your videos.
• Add links to your YouTube videos in email communications to notify subscribers of your new content.