How Do You Do SEO for YouTube?
To help you understand the intricacies of YouTube SEO and the services offered by industry experts, we reached out to CEOs, founders, and marketing professionals for their insights. From starting with keyword research to raising engagement with a tailored approach, discover the top eight strategies these experts shared on optimizing your YouTube presence and the results they’ve achieved.
- Start With Keyword Research
- Follow a Comprehensive Plan
- Optimize Your Entire Channel
- Don’t Forget Backlinks
- Leverage Subtitles and Captions
- Write Detailed Descriptions and Monitor Regularly
- Use Tools to Further Refine
- Raise Engagement With a Tailored Approach
Start With Keyword Research
As a video production company owner, I’ve witnessed how valuable implementing SEO for YouTube is for increasing online visibility and reach. This is a service my company includes in our strategy-based video packages.
For beginners, start with thorough keyword research to identify relevant and high-volume search terms in your niche. Incorporate these keywords strategically in your video titles, descriptions, tags, and captions to increase your video’s discoverability.
Using the right tags is also an important step. You’ll want to have at least 30 relevant tags that are related to your video. This will assist YouTube’s algorithm in placing your content in front of the right viewers.
Designing an attention-grabbing thumbnail is another way you can improve your videos’ visibility.
Taking the time to optimize your videos’ SEO can drastically improve your organic reach. I’ve seen channels with very few followers reach thousands of new users largely due to the efforts we took in SEO.
Gabe Roy
Founder and Creative Director, Zest Media Productions
Follow a Comprehensive Plan
To optimize your YouTube videos for SEO, follow these steps:
- Conduct keyword research to identify popular search terms.
- Create compelling titles and descriptions that incorporate relevant keywords.
- Use tags and categories that accurately describe your video’s content.
- Design visually appealing thumbnails that reflect the video’s content.
- Consider video length based on audience preferences.
- Provide captions or transcriptions for accessibility and search engine understanding.
- Encourage viewer engagement through likes, comments, and subscriptions.
- Promote your videos through embedding and sharing, and build backlinks to increase visibility.
- Analyze performance metrics and make adjustments accordingly.
Keep in mind that SEO results on YouTube vary based on factors like competition, content quality, and promotion. Regularly monitoring analytics can help improve video performance.
Josh Amishav
Founder and CEO, Breachsense
Optimize Your Entire Channel
To optimize your YouTube channel for SEO, consider key strategies. Conduct thorough keyword research to identify relevant terms for your target audience. Incorporate keywords strategically in titles, descriptions, tags, and categories for increased discoverability. Create visually compelling thumbnails and provide accurate transcriptions or closed captions for better accessibility and search engine understanding. Analyze YouTube analytics to measure impact and make adjustments for improved results.
Remember that SEO results may vary based on factors like competition, audience engagement, and content quality. By implementing these strategies, you can enhance your video’s visibility in search results, attract more organic traffic, and improve your YouTube channel’s performance. Regularly analyze YouTube analytics to measure the impact of your SEO efforts and make necessary adjustments for optimal results.
Kevin Hall
Marketing Operations, Webserv
Don’t Forget Backlinks
The main services we offer are related to backlinks, such as Pillow links, Diversity links, Niche Edits, etc. In terms of how we approach SEO for our YouTube channel, we try to optimize things like the title, thumbnails, description, transcripts, translations, tags, links, and call to action as much as possible for our videos by including the relevant keywords within them.
Nicholas Altimore
CEO and Co-founder, SirLinksalot
Leverage Subtitles and Captions
One important aspect of YouTube SEO is including subtitles and closed captions in your videos. Subtitles and closed captions improve accessibility for viewers, making your content more inclusive.
Additionally, search engines can crawl and index the text in subtitles, enabling better understanding of your video’s content. While I don’t offer personal services or have specific results, implementing subtitles and closed captions can potentially enhance your video’s visibility and reach a broader audience.
Ben Lau
Founder, Featured SEO Company
Write Detailed Descriptions and Monitor Regularly
Conduct thorough keyword research to identify relevant and high-traffic keywords or phrases that people are searching for. Tools like Google Keyword Planner, YouTube’s own search suggestions, or third-party tools can assist in finding popular keywords in your niche.
Write a detailed and informative video description that elaborates on the content of your video. Include relevant keywords naturally throughout the description to improve search engine visibility. Add timestamps to your description to make it easier for viewers to navigate your video’s content.
Add relevant tags to your video that reflect its topic and keywords. Tags help YouTube understand the context of your video and can improve its discoverability.
It’s important to note that SEO efforts for YouTube require ongoing monitoring, refinement, and consistency. Results can vary depending on various factors, including competition, video quality, and market trends.
Jason Moss
President and Co-founder, Moss Technologies
Use Tools to Further Refine
Similar to Google, keyword research is crucial to YouTube SEO. The words and phrases our audience will most likely use to find content similar to yours are represented by keywords.
The search bar on YouTube also offers related searches as users input, so using various keywords in your video will increase its visibility.
Identifying core, secondary, and long-tail keywords is the first step in performing YouTube keyword research.
The same tools we use for external SEO can also be used for keyword research. This includes tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and SEMRush.
Remember that these tools aren’t directly obtaining data from YouTube.
Unfortunately, there are currently no tools for finding keywords related to YouTube.
Nevertheless, they do capture the general attitude of online searches. Additionally, they help you out when it comes to Google ranking.
Tristan Harris
Demand Generation Senior Marketing Manager, Thrive Agency
Raise Engagement With a Tailored Approach
Yes, we do offer SEO services for YouTube. We have extensive experience with optimizing videos to be seen in YouTube search and related results.
Our process includes keyword research and selection, tagging, video description writing, link building, engagement optimization, and more. We tailor our approach to the specific needs of each client based on their goals.
As a result, we have seen a range of results from increased views and engagement to higher rankings on YouTube search. In addition, some clients have also seen improved search engine ranking outside of YouTube due to the SEO work done on their videos. Overall, our efforts help our clients increase their visibility and reach more viewers.
Darryl Stevens
CEO, Digitech Web Design
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