Using videos in your marketing strategy, whether you are a freelancer, a medium-small company, or a large and very structured company, is perhaps the pillar on which to build the foundations of your digital marketing.
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It is a real trend in very strong growth, already for some years, to be honest. But it does not stop growing, which is why implementing the use of the video format, today more than ever. When optimizing your YouTube SEO, consider creating informative videos that cater to popular search queries, such as finding the Best LLC Service, which can attract a targeted audience and enhance your online presence.
Why SEO is important for YouTube?
Today YouTube is the second most visited “website” in the world: a giant and a real “search engine”. It is owned by Google, which incidentally holds the record of the most used search engine ever. In other words, YouTube is the second most used search engine in the world, just to understand. That’s why YouTube, like Google, requires that the content you publish is optimized through what is called SEO for YouTube.
What is SEO in YouTube: the basic techniques
We would like to share with you various techniques, from the most obvious to the lesser-known, to create a successful channel and place your videos at the top of the YouTube search results.
Techniques that can be quickly summarized as:
- Insert the main keyword in the title
- Enter the main keyword plus the related ones in the description
- Rename the video file using the exact keyword
- Rename the video thumbnail using the same keyword
- Say the keyword several times during the video, especially in the first 30 seconds
- Insert tags directly related to the keyword
- Insert hashtags within the description.
These are factors that YouTube considers important but not really fundamental for SEO positioning.
The main ranking factors on YouTube
Total time watched
It is the main and the most important factor. If you think of YouTube as a company whose purpose is to produce profits, you understand well that its final purpose is to entertain users on the platform as long as possible to show them more advertising. Because that’s exactly how YouTube monetizes. The more we are able to keep users glued to our videos, the more YouTube will reward us.
Audience Retention
It is another very important factor, which indicates the percentage of video viewed by each user (therefore the average among all users). This parameter indicates the degree of interest in a particular video, such as soft tutorials, food, education, etc.
Session Time
The session time corresponds to the time each user spends on YouTube after viewing one of our videos. YouTube does not care that the user necessarily spends time on your channel. If your video pushes users to further investigations, YouTube will reward it (The principle of “watching time” also applies here).
CTR or Click-Through Rate
This is how often viewers watched your YouTube video after seeing it in search results. The more times people click on your video after seeing an impression, the more chances you have to accumulate viewing minutes and feed the Watch Time metric.
Channel Authority
YouTube seems to be a rather democratic platform, in the sense that it does not consider the number of subscribers to a channel to be extremely fundamental to give organic visibility to its videos. However, in certain terms, YouTube distinguishes an authoritative channel from a channel that is not, taking into account factors such as:
- Creation date (age of the channel)
- Consistency in publications
- Number of brand searches (how many types the channel name directly in the search bar).
In this practical guide on how to do SEO on YouTube, we will focus on how to do good keywords research. Read on if you can’t wait to start getting your hands dirty!
How to do an SEO Keyword Research for YouTube
Just like Google SEO, video optimization also starts with thorough keyword research.
In this step, it is crucial to find the most relevant keywords to your niche and the keywords that users use to search for a comparable product or service to yours.
We will also see the most useful tools for our purpose, but first, let me tell you something that seems obvious but is not.
The most important keyword research tool of all is, guess what, the brain. The real step after obtaining the data is the correct interpretation of the data. Not for nothing, Google and YouTube have always emphasized the importance of what is called “search intent”, or the reason why a user performs a certain search on the web. You, for your part, must transform yourself into a sort of psychologist, train the brain to enter the minds of users to try to give them the right answer to the intentions of the research, rather than to the research itself.
5 Tools for SEO in YouTube
Let’s move on to the tools, and here is a list of 5 tools to do SEO on YouTube.
- Google ADS: One of the most trusted tools for this online business because it provides tons of keyword variations along with competitiveness rates based on the top search terms you enter. The free version offers you an inaccurate but still powerful data estimate. To have more complete data available, you must have spent at least $ 1 on advertising on Google ADS. Well, I’d say it’s a bargain, right?
- Google Trends: This is a great tool for analyzing search trends and comparing keywords based on their popularity. It is very useful to give you an idea of what is happening in your reference product sector at the moment. The search tool shows you how the monthly number of searches changes over time and estimates the popularity of the keyword in a given geographic area. Google Trends is also very useful when you have found a list of keywords and want to compare them to each other in terms of popularity.
- Answer The Public: This tool provides a free basic version and a paid PRO version. Just provide the argument, and the tool itself will generate all the explorations of the keyword (which the tool is going to fetch directly from Google), expanding it for the different user search intentions.
- YouTube Analytics: A tool integrated with every YouTube channel, it allows you to know exactly what users type to search for you and for which keywords your video is positioned. YouTube Analytics offers you great ideas to optimize existing videos or to create new content.
- VidIQ: It is a freemium extension for browsers and YouTube, widely used by brands and creators of video content. VidIQ helps to understand the reasons why your competitors’ videos are successful, to identify factors that make videos viral, to analyze the engagement rate. It provides you with the search volumes of the keywords on YouTube, which are the most used tags, and helps you in the construction of the right title and the right description.
Conclusions
SEO on YouTube, from a purely technical point of view, is relatively easy. But the hardest part of video SEO is engaging your audience. Just think there are YouTubers with millions of subscribers who never bothered to apply SEO optimization techniques to their videos. They have gone viral because of making themselves known to a vast audience for the simple fact of knowing how to entertain, involve and thrill people. If you’re looking for how to download YouTube videos for personal reference, then you can follow this guide.
Anyway, with the basic techniques, 5 SEO tools and appealing content, you will definitely be able to push your channel towards infinity and beyond!