How To Optimize YouTube Videos For Search Visibility
One of the goals of creating content is getting it in front of as many sets of eyes as possible. Aside from creating great content one way you can make sure this happens is by optimizing your videos specifically for search.
Believe it or not YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. And like all search engines YouTube looks for things like keywords, text and tags when trying to find relevant videos related to a search query.
Just as you would spend time optimizing your website for SEO you want to spend time optimizing your YouTube channel and videos for YouTube SEO! Here are a few ways to make sure your videos can be found in search…
Write Specific Titles With Keywords
Before you get to writing, decide what your keywords will be. What would someone search for to find your video? How would they get there?
Do a little searching and research of your own before settling on a few. You can even do a search on YouTube yourself and you will see the search bar auto-populate with the most popular searches.
Once you have determined a few keywords, craft a specific video title with a keyword or two. You must get specific here! If you are too general your video will get lost in a sea of videos with the same generic video title.
If you are creating a video showing how to change a lightbulb don’t title it “How To Change A Lightbulb” because that is way too generic. You want to drill down to another layer of specificity. Try “How To Change A Lightbulb In 90 Seconds” or something similar! Find what makes your video different or interesting to viewers. What will they learn from it?
Also don’t be afraid to write a longer title if you need to -- in this case brevity is not essential. The important part is to make sure you are getting across what makes your video unique and interesting.
Write A Detailed Description
Did you know you have space for a whopping 5,000 characters in the description for each YouTube video? That is quite a bit of space -- use it!
You may think the video is self explanatory or that a sentence will suffice but this area is crucial for SEO and you should use as much of it as you can.
A great way to utilize this space is to fully summarize your video in a few paragraphs with hashtags and keywords. All of this will help get your video seen when someone makes a relevant search.
If you don’t have a lot to write you can always copy and paste a transcription of the video in the description, this will serve as a great summarization as well.
Regardless of what you choose to do you should always include outbound links for people to learn more about your business, other relevant content, and a link to join an email list. Links are a great way to convert watchers into leads that can be nurtured in other ways down the line.
Use Tags
Each video uploaded to YouTube is allowed 500 characters of tags. Tags are essentially like hashtags, a way to add categories to a video. If you add a video about changing light bulbs you could tag it “how to video” and “lightbulbs” and “home improvement” and “home diy” etc.
Tags are very important to SEO because this is one of the main ways YouTube sorts videos based on content. Tags are very similar in concept to keywords.
When choosing tags you want to choose the absolutely most relevant ones possible. The more accurately they reflect your video the better. If you choose a bunch of generic tags your video will get lost in a swath of other very generic videos.
Use as many tags as you need but don’t be afraid to hit the limit! There is no penalty for going right up to the 500 characters.
Add Subtitles
If you want to add even more crawlable text to your videos consider adding subtitles or closed captioning to your videos. This can easily be done with tools like Happy Scribe and are also a great way to make your videos more handicap accessible.
As far as SEO goes the more crawlable text that can be indexed by search engines the better and the better your content will perform in search.
Final Thoughts
YouTube is more than just a place to watch videos, it is also a very powerful search engine many small businesses are missing out on. Once you get over the fear of creating a video, (it’s not scary!) you will see that approaching it more like Google and less like Facebook is the best way to get your content seen and your business discovered.