SEO is complicated. You can study all the right things to do, employ all the industry insights, avoid all the common pitfalls, and still find that your videos aren’t ranking on Google, YouTube, or ChatGPT. If you’re still not doing the numbers you’d hoped for, what’s actually going on?
This is exactly why people seek out YouTube SEO companies to manage this side of their channels. If your YouTube SEO isn’t working, it might be due to a lack of alignment between search intent, metadata, and viewer engagement with your video.
This article will look at some of those issues and how you can avoid them.
What Some People Get Wrong about YouTube SEO
First, let’s look at some easy fixes. Here are some small mistakes you want to be sure to avoid:
- You’re not optimizing your keywords and metadata BEFORE you upload the video. SEO research and your video SEO needs to be implemented into the YouTube video strategy, the video upload, and and the video and thumbnail metadata before you ever upload.
- You’re not optimizing after your video is uploaded: After you publish, study the performance, YouTube analytics, YouTube search traffic sources, and keywords and THEN further optimize your video to improve your performance.
- You’re only focusing on keywords: Keywords are important, but they’re far from the only piece of the puzzle. If your video isn’t delivering on what you’ve promised in your title and thumbnail, then viewers won’t stay and engage.
- You’re using generic or copy/pasted metadata: It takes work, but you need to research in your field to understand what metadata, keywords, and phrases are important and what engages potential viewers. You also need to specialize metadata for each of your videos.
- You’re ignoring titles and thumbnails: These two things are your first impression and the reason why people click. They need as much attention as any other part of the process because if viewers don’t click, they’ll never see your video.
SEO is a shifting, multidimensional problem. Outsourcing the optimization of this complex field is one of the benefits of hiring video SEO experts.
Key Questions for Effective Video SEO
Now that you know how YouTube SEO works, let’s explore some questions you can ask yourself to make sure each of your videos is accomplishing the basics. Without getting the basics nailed down, your content will never be able to soar.
Intent
Ask yourself what the point of your content is. Audiences have desires and your videos should meet them. What question are you answering? What curiosity are you satisfying? What difficulty are you easing?
Once you’ve answered this question, make sure your audience knows the answer and that the payoff is delivered quickly. The title of your videos and the hook and intro of your video should match their intent, and viewers shouldn’t have to wait five minutes for you to explain how to unclog the drain they came to you to help them fix.
Viewer Engagement
Is your audience clicking on your video? What’s your video Click-Through-Rate? How much of the video are they watching aka view duration? Do they comment on the video? Do they like it? Do they subscribe to your channel? Once your video has been up for a while, ask yourself these questions and use the answers to shape your future content.
If the answers to the above questions are ‘no,’ not only will your video be deprioritized by YouTube, your content is failing its audience. Your channel should be driven by the desire to succeed, but it should also be driven by serving your viewers (see the above section on intent). If users are leaving your video after ten seconds, something is wrong.
By the way, YouTube does not count a view unless a viewer watches for a minimum of 30 seconds which is why you must confirm the value of your video within the first 15 seconds and deliver with value of the video within the first 30 seconds.
You should also use the answers to these questions to reshape the video metadata and the actual video format and editing itself. Check all the facets of a video that’s performing well, and see where you can replicate success.
Basic Checklist
Here are some additional questions you should always ask about your videos:
- Is the title descriptive, compelling, and clear?
- Does the thumbnail tell a story or create curiosity?
- Does the first 15 seconds confirm the value you intend to deliver in the video?
- Does the first 30 seconds of the video deliver some of the value of what you promised in the thumbnail, title, and hook?
- Are the captions accurate and uploaded separately as an SRT file?
- Is the topic of the video clear and aligned with a specific search query?
- Is this video pulling in views from the YouTube Search traffic source?
- Are the views that are pulling in YouTube Search traffic source from the keywords that you want to rank for?
- Can you improve the video click-through-rate by optimizing the thumbnail and title?
- Are you using hashtags in your YouTube video description?
By centering content intent, viewer engagement, and these simple questions, one by one, you can cross off reasons your YouTube SEO might not be working.
Systemizing
Regardless of the size of your business or brand, every corner you round down matters. Create a personal checklist for your videos to make sure they’re hitting the basics. With the time, energy, and money you save by following a structure for every video, you can spend more time optimizing.
You can download our free YouTube upload checklist on our free downloadable resources page.
Check out our video that will help with perfecting your upload:
Of course, that’s a lot of work. This is where SEO video experts can help.
Hiring the Problem Solvers
The experts at grouphugs specialize in making YouTube SEO work the best it can from beginning to end. We can help you use every tool at your disposal to make the most of your videos and engage the audience you’re after!
