Top 10 Secrets & SEO Tips for YouTube
Every month, 2 billion users log into YouTube and on a daily basis, watch over a billion hours of video. YouTube ranks second in global internet engagement, surpassing Facebook. YouTube is the 2020 content train and it has arrived. According to Alexa Rank, visitors spend an average of 14 minutes a day on the video site. This translates into an amazing opportunity, with immense competition.
If you are a big-picture thinker or a creative, you might think of search engine optimization as a meticulous, left-brain endeavor. And perhaps before 2020, it used to be. What you’d be surprised to discover is that SEO is actually a lesson in defining your brand more clearly.
Let’s take a closer look at the how to build a better presence on YouTube. Although it takes actionable steps, it’s pretty intuitive once you get going. By the end of this article, I hope that you will be going Aha! I sincerely hope you come away with a clear understanding how you can take actionable steps to improve your SEO, and enjoy the process!
I divide the process in 4 key components: Brand Vision, Audience Building & Engagement and Innovation. These 4 prongs work hand in hand with SEO, and I call it “SEO magic” because if you get them right, they will work together to produce the best results for everyone in the relationship — brand, search engine and customer.
BRAND VISION
1. Start with a vision, then listen.
In the movie Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner character hears a voice telling him, “If You built it, he will come.” This line of thinking is onto something — if you want to develop something great, start with a vision of what you want to create, while focusing on what you can offer. But here’s the catch and a spoiler alert: it took more than building an amazing field to get the players to come.
You want your YouTube strategy to optimize your content, so your message reaches the right people. While there are many tools that can help you — the content itself should give your audience a message that it needs and wants to hear. In this way, we first need to listen to our consumers to build tailored content. What follows is good SEO. Intuitive, right? It’s the basics of marketing.
SEO TIP: Solutions that consider your audience’s unique needs & demographics are an important part of YouTube SEO.
2. What problem will your YouTube channel tackle?
An audience will be more likely to follow your YouTube channel if your video content helps your audience solve problems. Describe your channel with key topics and words that you will explore. In doing so, you should keep a few things in mind in regards to SEO — relevance.
This is a good time to consider trends in your industry or consumer insights. The last thing you want to do is create hours of useless video content. Research key words, trending topics, and resources that match well with a video format. Consider how your brand can create a niche to solve consumer problems using video. When designing your platform, think of YouTube as a personalized channel for your users. According to YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan in a 2018 CNet article,
“We focused a lot in last several years on machine learning and artificial intelligence to learn what our users like and make,” Mohan said. “Our job is to give them a steady stream, almost a synthetic or personalized channel,” Mohan said (CNet, Solsman 2018).
SEO TIP: Try using a free keyword search tool for content ideas such as Soolve.com or Google trends.
3. Define A Purpose. Do you want to entertain, inform, teach, review, or give a different view? Once you have a problem to tackle, define a purpose. In the beginning stages of SEO development for YouTube, consider your ideal audience and how you can expand its reach to other related topics, or ways of presenting your offerings. One important component of finding your particular niche is to either bring a different angle, or find a different way to say it. To find inspiration, you might want to look at what other industries are doing successfully.
SEO TIP: Vidyard offers a “Video Inspiration Hub” where you can find inspiration from sample video content.
CHANNEL BUILDING
Once you have an idea of what you want your channel to look and feel like, you can start thinking of individual content videos. Then, you need to follow through. Establish an online presence with a defined intent.
4. Setting up your Channel. Once you have this big picture in place, start with the nuts and bolts of your channel. Taking the time to set up your channel’s properly is key — this includes all the channels attributes like metadata. Think of your channel as a true arm of your branding strategy and treat it as such. Think of your channel’s components as assets and invest where you can. Set up a schedule to post regularly. Here’s the place where a few small SEO hacks can go a long way — focus on creating a clear description of what you can offer to reach relevant users.
SEO CHANNEL TIP: Make sure to use key words for your audience in the title, tags, and description of your content.
5. Visual Impact matters. Once you have a theme for your channel, visual branding makes a big difference in SEO, as it commands attention and establishes distinct brand positioning.
Are you a free-flowing creative or an expert demonstrator? Key items like using a logo or artwork for your channel draws interest and establishes who you are as a brand. Another element is taking the time to create visual thumbnails for your content videos. According to Roberto Blake, on YouTube Creators, creating a thumbnail theme for different types of content, such as product reviews or teaching, might help to brand individual components of your channel. Another idea is to establish a brand collaboration with an artist, cartoonist, photographer or musician who can breathe life into your brand.
SEO TIP: Artistic collaborations can enable cross-posting of content and provide backlinks, further driving engagement, helping SEO.
6. Learn from the best. Video should include relevant information that makes it easy to navigate and keeps the user engaged at all times. Their videos include an in-depth description and clickable timestamps to skip to areas of interest in the video. Secondly, they link their social media and subscription links for all their channels by type (kids, women, men, etc). They also give a link to more videos.
SEO TIP: Review different successful channels to see how they keep you engaged in watching their videos until the end.
7. Include Captions. In 2020, YouTube no longer requires transcripts to index videos, and will automatically understand content using algorithms. The Closed-caption feature creates a text-based file transcript of your entire video, thus opening it up to search engines! In a more intuitive sense, an important aspect of creating content is making it accessible to as many people as possible and in as many ways as possible. Accessibility is important on a variety of fronts. First, people may watch video silently for a variety of reasons. Another reason to include captions is translatability. In fact, 80% of views on YouTube come from outside the US, with over 2 billion people in the online population having a first language other than English. In addition, captions improve watch-completion rate. SEO Win! Once you have captions, they can be automatically translated into a variety of languages.
When uploading your video, there is an option for automatic captioning, make sure to enable this feature. An even better idea is to create custom captions. This allows you to ensure the text follows your natural speaking voice and to correct for any errors in translation. Captions provide information about the background sound and speaker. Remember that improving user experience is the key to SEO.
SEO TIP: Make your content accessible to all types of audiences, so your message reaches more people.
8. Be flashy, but follow through. If you want to catch your audience’s attention, you might try some eye-grabbing tactics like arrows and optimized titles. These are fine and mighty, but remember to keep your user’s needs first. Don’t overpromise, or worse yet, shock your audience into submission. No one wants to buy snake oil, we may be curious to look at it, but if it is ultimately useless content, the user won’t be back. It will also lower your SEO ranking if your content and user intent do not match. User engagement is important, especially in the first 5 seconds, so you want to establish your channel as an expert or as a resource quickly, while catching attention. Instead, think of your “hook.”
A good article is one that draws you in initially with an interesting fact, quote, question or image. Good writing rarely gives everything away in the first paragraph, but it does give a good outline to tease the reader to want to learn more. Same with video content. Consider a hook — like creating a great thumbnail photo with a title. Your video should address their search needs right away, and get into specifics later. When designing content, always consider your title. Many content marketers will tell you that titles are a key to traffic. Yes, the internet doesn’t need more clickbait, it needs more useful, high-quality content. Yet, good quality content needs bait too. Clickbait might get someone to press a button, but it will not engage their heart or mind to come to finish watching or come back to your channel. Titles should naturally contain your keywords, as well as draw your audience’s attention. The best titles are resourceful, while also addressing a pressing need. It’s your job to make sure your content stands out.
SEO TIP: Clear headlines and thumbnails help the reader easily decipher between content. Use a catchy title, but deliver what your promise.
9. Consider video attributes — Another thing to consider is format changes. According to YouTube, videos have gotten longer. Compared to 2010, the average length of top trending videos in 2019 was 10 times longer than in 2010. Smart phones are only getting better and more optimized for mobile content, especially video. With YouTubeTV positioning itself as a premium streaming service, we are likely to see even better engagement in the future. With 70% of YouTube traffic being driven by mobile, people have more time to watch video anywhere, and for a wider range of purposes. Consider the image below that drives home how much video will continue to infiltrate our daily lives. A recent cisco report, suggests that video will only continue to penetrate new areas in smart homes, allowing for the increasing demand of video.
Figure 1. Significant demand for bandwidth and video in the connected home of the future
Source: Cisco Annual Internet Report, 2018–2023
With 5G integration on the horizon, this trend will only accelerate as video integrations become even easier.
SEO TIP: Research how different attributes, such as length and device might influence user engagement and interaction with video content. Consider future applications of interactive video.
10. Innovate! Did the image above catch your attention? It illustrates the importance of engaging all sides of the brain and being creative. YouTube content, in essence, is a creative endeavor. In the age of information overload, it’s important to consider what resources and expert advice is already out there. Yet, it’s also important to consider people’s sensibilities — their appreciation for art, their love of music and their passion for living life to the fullest. Great content often challenges our higher-level thinking and love of life — in any domain, whether it be SEO or crafting.
Along this line of thinking, one compelling model for video content creation and SEO is employing Moser-Wellman’s “Five Faces of Genius,” which requires integrating different facets of creativity to approach imaginative thinking. These 5 thinking styles might help guide video content that employs basic principles of SEO by considering the user’s experience of great content.
These 5 faces include:
Sage (simplifies ideas)
Observer (notices details)
Alchemist (connects unrelated domains)
The fool (inverts or celebrates absurd ideas)
The Seer (employs imagery)
Using divergent thinking to drive content creation might yield ingenious ways to drive SEO organically. If something is already out there, how can you spin it in a new way?
SEO TIP: Good SEO consistently finds new ways of approaching how to attract and retain users through unique, rich content.
SEO is a creative endeavor. Ultimately, employing good search optimization practices, allows you to develop a deeper understanding of your product offerings, and forges a closer connection to your audience. It’s a win/win. Win for aligning your brand strategy to customers’ needs and a clear win in SEO! In our next article, we will explore the “Magic of SEO” by looking closer at how Google uses deep neural learning networks to craft user experiences. Sound confusing? We’ll simplify it. We will also dive into how to engage your audience and continue to explore how innovation plays a role in this entire process.
