YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, second only to Google. If you’re not paying attention to your video SEO and targeting potential audiences who are looking for you, either by doing it yourself or by hiring a video SEO agency, you’re leaving traffic, viewers, and money on the table.
YouTube SEO works by measuring content quality, keywords, metadata, and video structure. Optimizing these aspects can help you reach the right viewers and elevate your channel for years to come.
Why You Should Focus On YouTube SEO
Given that the world is using YouTube to find answers to their questions, research topics, and research products and people, it’s important that they can find your brand and content. YouTube SEO is what makes showing up to your target audience possible, including ranking videos on YouTube, ranking videos on Google and Google AI Overviews, and ranking videos on ChatGPT. SEO is like networking–it can feel overwhelming, but in practice, it can help connect people who want to find each other and who will both profit from the connection.
Without SEO, your videos will only be found by luck, word of mouth, or advertising. When you use it correctly, video SEO can help the people that want to find your content find it, and both you and your audience will benefit for weeks, months, and years after you publish. So, how do you grow a YouTube channel with SEO?
Key Parts of YouTube SEO
Google search prioritizes the quality of content and its relevance to searchers. YouTube, on the other hand, relies more on metadata and viewer engagement. This means these factors are important:
- Relevance
- Click-through rate
- Watch time
Because of this, YouTube SEO effectiveness is determined by keyword strategy, content quality, and consistent uploads that are optimized for video and YouTube SEO. In order to make sure your SEO is dialed in as effectively as possible, ask yourself these questions about each video you make:
- What is your audience looking for?
- What short-tail and long-tail keywords and phrases would they search to find your video?
- Is your video and video metadata labeled and structured to give them that?
- Will your audience watch the whole video?
- Will your audience comment and interact?
Keeping checklists like this can help each of your videos make the most of YouTube SEO, and they can help you figure out why your YouTube SEO isn’t working.
Building From the Basics
Successful SEO needs to be taken into consideration long before you record your video, and it matters WHEN you upload your videos before you hit ‘publish.’
Keywords
Do your research. Figure out what your audience wants, what their focus is, and how you can provide it. Avoid being vague. Focus on intent-driven language around questions or how-to searches, and put your expertise to the forefront. Create a list of short-tail and long-tail keywords and phrases that your audience would search to find this video in YouTube, Google or an AI chat like ChatGPT. More specific long-tail SEO phrases will help get your videos in Google, AI Overviews, and ChatGPT.
Title and Thumbnail
Include your target keywords and phrases in your title and make sure your thumbnail is high quality. You can’t go wrong with a thumbnail that shows a face, is high contrast, or displays target keywords clearly.
Description and Tags
Your description helps YouTube categorize your video, and it helps potential viewers see at a glance how valuable your content is. Includes the target keywords and phrases in the first few lines of your description, so Google and YouTube knows what your video is about.
Now, always fill out the tags box in YouTube and also add relevant hashtags at the bottom of your description… despite what YouTube says about the keywords.
Subtitles and Captions
Captions are indexed by YouTube and Google, and they don’t register ones that are automatically-generated. For every video you create, upload an SRT file separately.
Ongoing video SEO
Measuring engagement should be familiar to any content creator. Do people click on your videos? Do they watch the entire thing? Do they like, comment, or subscribe? Are you getting views from your target keywords?
With a lot of content, engagement data can only be used to change future decisions. Remember that YouTube SEO can be applied backwards. Because videos stay up and continue to be viewed, every upload you ever make to your channel can benefit from new performance data.
Revisit old videos and study the metadata. Have different tags been working better on your more recent videos? Are the keywords that bring in your audience changing? Each video you create should teach you something about what is and isn’t working, and what you learn can help improve the performance of all your content.
Just like how you update blogs, ypdate your YouTube video tags, titles, thumbnail text, descriptions, and tags and see if it improves your performance.
Making Video SEO Work for You
Maximizing SEO in YouTube videos is an ongoing process with many moving parts. Content creation is so time-consuming that it can be beneficial to focus on your skills and expertise and hand off the optimization to experts who don’t have to start from scratch, understanding its ins and outs.
grouphugs is dedicated to helping you grow your channel and get the most out of your content. We’ve grown creators and communities from zero subscribers into success stories, and we’re familiar with a breadth of fields, from finance to wellness to entertainment.
Save yourself the hassle of learning to be an expert at something new and let grouphugs elevate your videos and grow your reach and views. Connect with us today and learn how we can help your content reach the people it’ll benefit most and help you get the viewership you deserve!
