Do you know over 2.6 billion people use YouTube every month? Does it find you thrilling? I am sure you did but stop, the the fun is not over yet.
Johnny Donaldson-Mr. Beast is the world’s richest YouTuber in 2024 with an estimated net worth of $100-500 million. His videos consistently get millions of views without any paid promotion.
Do you wonder how? The answer is YouTube SEO. It’s not about the magic formulas but how you can optimize videos that rack up millions.
The good news is getting ranked on YouTube is easier than you think. It just requires some elements to be optimized and used in the right way.
Like other SEOs, you don’t need tactics or other technicalities for YouTube videos.
Let’s jump into the shoes of a professional YouTuber and find what elements or factors you should optimize for video ranking. Ready?
What is YouTube SEO?
Whenever you hear about SEO, your mind clicks Google SEO. But in actuality, Google is not the only platform, YouTube is also considered one of the biggest search engines. Not as big as Google.
But still, if you go for it, you boost your online presence and conversions.
When you do Google SEO, what do you get? Massive traffic, more clicks, conversions. In the same way, when you optimize your YouTube videos, you boost your visibility and establish yourself as an authority.
In short, YouTube SEO is the data-driven strategy of optimizing your videos for organic traffic and ranking higher in YouTube search results.
It includes various factors keyword research, title and description optimization, thumbnails, etc.
Factors of YouTube SEO:
YouTube SEO is different from regular SEO by many factors, but still, they come to meet at some point.
Relevancy: It refers to the alignment between the video content and search queries. Believe me, if you solve the user problem half of the SEO is done.
User Engagement: It refers to the actions and interactions the viewers take while watching your videos.How often do viewers engage with your content? The more the engagement rate the more will be the chances of rankability.
How Does YouTube SEO Work?
YouTube is itself a big platform that has specific guidelines and algorithms.
Like Google when you search for something the bots strive to show you the best relevant results.
The algorithm analyze your videos on various elements to rank your videos not only on YouTube but also on Google.
Think about when you frequently watch videos about cooking tutorials the algorithm prioritizes, recommending cooking-related videos to you.
Search history and viewer personalization play a crucial role in shaping the algorithm.
The algorithm always prioritizes user experience at the top. Your videos must have the stamina to attract viewers.
Otherwise, there is very little chance that your videos placed at the top of the search. But the question is how robots crawl your videos.
YouTube crawlers obviously don’t come and watch your videos. They crawl it on various factors like relevant keywords, how clear and optimized the description is, the metadata, and the tags used.
By analyzing all these elements together, robots can rank your videos.
YouTube SEO Checklist:
Find Your Target Audience:
Firstly you have to choose your niche. Niche is the specific topic that you want to focus e.g. cooking, DIY ideas, daily vlogging, etc.
After selecting your niche you have to identify your targeted audience. The target audience is the group of people that follow you, and most likely want to watch your videos.
They may be dictated by age, gender, interests, location, or a myriad of other factors. Identifying an audience is the most crucial step in everything that needs engagement.
Whether it’s marketing, making videos, communities, etc. For example, if someone likes to watch animated movies, they don’t go for Hollywood movies.
I always say that the audience is the real asset of your channel. If you ignore them means you are going towards the downside of the hill. Once you know whom to target it becomes easy for you to interact with them.
Find the keywords for YouTube SEO:
YouTube Keywords are the specific terms that are used to provide information about your content. They are the helper of YouTube that help to understand what type of content you upload.
They are the main drivers of your channel if you don’t optimize them properly you are unable to reach your target audience.
One more thing to pay attention to is keywords for YouTube are different from the keywords that are used for other search engines.
Brian Dean suggested using Google to search for keywords and enter the term to see if any YouTube video comes in the search results.
For example, if you search for “how to make coffee” you see that there are YouTube videos present in the results.
If you are stuck and can’t find the right keyword, don’t worry there is a solution present. Head over to the channel of your competitor in your niche.
To analyze, simply go and click on the “Description” tab. Let’s say your keyword is “Digital Marketing 101”.
There is a list of keywords present so you can choose and use it for your channel.
You can also use SEO tools Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, TubeBuddy ads Moz Keyword Explorer to find channel keywords without any effort.
The approximate length suggested by most of the SEO experts is “5-8 keywords” to avoid keyword cannibalization.
Search Keywords with YouTube:
Using search engines for keyword research is the best way to find the most relevant keywords.
In short, you just have to type the phrase in the search bar and YouTube will generate a list of the most relevant and popular keywords.
For example, if I start typing “Content writing” it will autogenerate a list of keyword suggestions for me.
These are the keywords that people are searching actively, and you should pay attention to them.
Optimize the Title of Your Video:
I am sure you are already familiar with the term title. Writing the title for YouTube is the same as you did while writing content.
Writing an eye-catching title is always been a very tricky task. But the good news is it’s not anymore.
You just need three things to pay attention to while writing optimized headlines for your videos.
- Focus Keyword
- Emotional cues
- Solution of a Problem
When you solve the problem of audience in the title half of your SEO is already done.
For example, when you see the title of the Iman Gadhzi video you easily get what is the benefit of watching this video.
Make sure the headline is close to the search term and add the focus keyword or related term at the beginning of the title.
Last but the least, the ideal length of title. Alicia Collins the manager of HubSpot suggested keeping the length under 60 characters to avoid cut-offs in search results.
While there is no limit to the length of a title, shorter titles tend to perform better.
Writing Compelling Description:
The description is a detailed explanation of your title. It is the combination of relevant keywords that compels the viewer to keep watching your video.
In addition, it helps YouTube to find and crawl your videos through broad keywords.
The good news is you can write the description up to 5000 characters but only 120 characters will be shown up in the search results.
Add the focus and relevant keywords with valuable information that describes your video.
Make sure you write a description with a strong CTA that nudges the viewers to click on the video.
For example, if you see this description it clearly shows what the video is about and nudges viewers to watch it.
Add Relevant Tags:
YouTube tags are words or phrases that an algorithm uses to find what your content is. Tags work similar to hashtags but they are different.
They help YouTube to categorize your video and are literally the most beneficial feature of YouTube.
Tagging allows you to reach more audience and increase the click activity.
A research by Backlinko confirmed that there is a direct correlation between tags and YouTube ranking.
Think of it as you search for something, and YouTube shows you the exact results what a satisfying moment it is.
However, use tags that are super relevant to your content. You can use the close variation of your primary keyword or LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords.
Avoid using too many tags, 10-12 tags are the sweet spot, so that you can easily go with the algorithm.
Create High-Retention Video:
Watch time matters when it comes to ranking or monetization of YouTube channels.
For example, if people click on your video but don’t continue to watch, this indicates that your content is not worth staying long.
This impacts negatively. Obviously, YouTube wants people to stay long so they take action (click on ads), and if your content does this YouTube will automatically promote your video.
This end is called “Audience Retention” which is the biggest element in YouTube ranking factors.
In specific terms, the amount of time people spend on watching videos is “Audience Retention”.
Look at this video, it is 5 years old but still present on the top of search results. How? The simple answer is “High-Retention Video”.
It puts so much valuable information that makes people not only watch it until the end but also interact with it.
Ways to Create High-Retention Videos:
Encourage People to Comment:
If you ever worked on Google SEO you know how much commenting is crucial for good engagement rates.
Just like Google, YouTube also prioritizes content that gets a lot of comments and is popular.
Brian Dean analyzed 1.3 million YouTube search results and found that comments have a strong impact on ranking.
The more comments you get the more likely your video ranks high in search results.
The best way is to end your video with an open-loop question to start the discussion. It encourages people to go down and write their thoughts.
Ask People to Subscribe:
Why is said ask? Literally, it helps to boost the subscribers when you ask people to subscribe at the end of the video.
If they find your video helpful they will surely hit the subscribe button without any second thought.
Subscription is a HUGE ranking factor on YouTube.
That means whenever you publish something it notifies them to go and see your content.
I would suggest asking for only one metric like a subscription for better results.
Share on Social Media:
Analyze and see how many people were sharing your video on different social media channels.
If someone shares it, it strongly messages the YouTube that the video is valuable and people simply love it.
Think you don’t want to share content that is of low quality and irrelevant. Right?
That’s exactly what your audience also does they share the video only they like.
Make sure to publish content that brings social shares and boosts your channel ranking.
Send them through Emails:
This is the most effective way you can say to bring eyeballs to your content.
Build an email list, send your video with an encouraging description, and you will get thousands of people to your content within a minute.
Build Links:
For the maximum results in SEO, you have to generate links. Whether it’s regular SEO or YouTube SEO.
It helps in building authority and makes you stand out in your niche.
The best practice for boosting ranking is to link both your YouTube channel and your videos.
You can get links by sharing on Facebook with compelling descriptions, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, etc.
This will directly drive tons of traffic and boost your engagement rates. Trust me it’s just a game of numbers.
The more likes, shares, and subscriptions you get, the more chances YouTube will rank your channel at the top of search results.
Create an Eye-Catching Thumbnail:
Some things are just to make you different and stand out, to take people’s attention.
The thumbnail is one of them. It does not directly affect the ranking, but it’s important to get more views and clicks.
For example, you can see how the title and thumbnail stand out from other search results.
Length of YouTube Video:
On average people spend 19 minutes on YouTube every day and what if they stick around your video and then step forward to the channel?
In short, longer videos always rank better than short videos. Why?
Because longer videos have more potential of grabbing people’s attention it allows you to flaunt easily throughout the video.
As I mentioned earlier, the audience retention factor, longer videos are best to increase the watch time.
Now the question is how long should be the video?
There is no specific spot, you can increase the length until you focus on creating high-quality content.
However, the average length found on the top ten YouTube videos is 4 minutes to 20 minutes.
Content is the Foundation:
Yes, you read the most crucial element of this guide.
No matter what SEO trick you use until your content is not valuable people will never come back.
Content is the core of successful SEO so make sure to add so much value, that it stands out from others.
Analyze the Performance Report:
Analyzing the performance of your videos is always the key to improving and refining your strategy.
YouTube provides you with the complete progress report of your channel.
To see the report go to YouTube Studio click on analytics and find which videos perform well and which areas need improvement. (Image on phone)
Look at the Watch Time Report:
User behavior matters a lot when it comes to ranking. YouTube keeps an eye on videos that people most like to spend more time on and get more clicks than others.
This indicates to YouTube that this video needs to rank, as people like to watch it.
To see which of your content people like to watch and how long they spend time on it.
Go to the left side of YouTube Studio, navigate to analytics, and click on “Watch Time”.
If your watch time is not constant but spikes or drops, you should investigate the reason.
Review the Audience Returning Report:
The audience returning report is next to the watch time. This actually provides you the detailed information about user behavior.
As I talked about this earlier how much user behaviors impact the ranking of your videos?
This shows you the top-performing videos, and how much people love and stick around your content.
This report is useful for finding the audience retention data also, as it tracks every second changes.
User Engagement Report:
As YouTube provides you with a handful of reports and a user engagement report is one of them.
It is actually the user engagement reports that tell you the number of viewers, likes, and subscribers you have.
In short, it tells you about the overall performance of your channel. I would suggest checking these reports regularly you so can easily avoid any sharp drop in any of the statistics.
Frequently Asked Questions About YouTube SEO:
What is YouTube SEO and why it is important?
YouTube SEO is the data-driven strategy of SEO to optimize every element of YouTube videos to improve their ranking. It includes keywords, optimizing titles, descriptions, and tags, and creating high-quality videos. Without optimizing these factors you are unable to rank high on YouTube search results. Millions of people create videos on YouTube but very few of them generate revenue. The answer is simply they spend time optimizing these elements before publishing videos.
How to do YouTube SEO more effectively?
Simply follow the above steps and work on your channel. Conduct keyword research, analyze user behavior, and create valuable and helpful content.
How do I check the SEO score on YouTube?
To check the SEO score you can install the extensions of “TubeBuddy” and “VidIQ”. They will show you the complete SEO report of your YouTube channel.
YouTube SEO: Final Thoughts
YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google.
But luckily, it is the easiest platform to work on. It does not require any deep knowledge and tactics to grow on.
You just need to make high-quality information plus entertainment-rich videos and a handful of elements to optimize.
Like other platforms, you have to struggle hard to get views and turn them into leads.
Surprisingly, YouTube is different it is easy to get views, and countless eyes, and stands out in your niche.
You don’t need a huge amount of money for the production of videos. There are YouTubers who started with pocket money and successfully established it.
How?
I already shared the tips above in detail, I try my best to add everything you need to know about YouTube SEO so you don’t need to worry.
Just read thoroughly and implement these strategies to get effective results.
By the way, what is the best tip you found to stand out on YouTube?