Ever since Google purchased YouTube in 2006, people have wondered just how much a business can do to help increase their online visibility utilizing the platform. In today’s post, I want to address this and share some tips on how to improve your YouTube SEO and increase your overall visibility and branding.
**Before we get into YouTube, I do want to point out one thing: Increasing your YouTube visibility is a great way to showcase your business and can be very beneficial in driving website visitors through the platform. However, if you are looking to use video to improve your site SEO, it would be wiser to use a third-party platform, such as Wistia or Vimeo Pro. These will allow you to host the videos on your own servers, and drive traffic directly to your website.**
Anywho, back to YouTube…
Here are five tips to build your YouTube presence and SEO value:
- Build Great Content. Never. Never, ever build content for the sake of building content. It doesn’t matter if it is a blog post, white paper, or video. Teenagers create videos for the sake of making videos. Leave that to them. When creating video content for your YouTube channel, make sure that it is entertaining, educates, and solves a problem for your viewers. Think about your ideal customers – the ones that you actually WANT to see your videos – and create videos that they will want to see. A great practice is to find out what questions they are asking and use your videos to answer those questions in a visually entertaining way.
- Do Your Keyword Research. Just like traditional SEO for your website, video SEO should start from the ground up, and the foundation of any SEO campaign is solid keyword research. Figure out what search terms people are using to look for information, and incorporate the appropriate keywords int he video title and description. Some important things to consider:
- Video titles should be under 66 characters.
- Video Descriptions are limited to 800 characters, but only the first 30 characters are visible in YouTube search results, so make sure you include primary keywords in the beginning.
- Use Relevant Keyword Tags. Tags are a great way to help YouTube associate your videos with other, similar content. For example, if someone is watching a YouTube video on the declining lemur population, YouTube will look at the tags of other videos to choose which ones to place down the right side, and when the video is done. It is important to note:
- Tags can be 120 characters. Use multiple keywords to ensure you get enough exposure.
- Use tags that include keyword phrases related to your topic.
- Transcribe Video Content. One of the most underused optimization techniques in all videos in transcription. More than likely, if you are creating a video to promote your business, you are not just sitting in front of the cameras and spouting off all willy-nilly. Write a script for the video, and then upload it. Google will use this for captioning and it will help the search engines understand what your video is about.
- Share & Embed Your Videos. Every time you post a new video, make sure you share it. Blog about, it, share it on Facebook, tweet it to your followers. Use whatever social resources you have to ensure people know that the video is there. Additionally, make it easy for others to share your videos and place them on their own blogs and websites. Turn on the embed option in YouTube, and place the code anyplace you use the video (like, in your blog post), so people can easily grab it.
This is not the end all, be all list of how to have your YouTube videos seen on the search results, but it is a great start, and easy to implement. Have you got any more tips on optimizing video content? Share them in the comments and let’s have a discussion!
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