Increase your visibility on YouTube channel with these SEO tricks

Did you know that YouTube is one of the most crucial search engines on the internet? More than 2 billion people use this platform each month to watch videos and queries for some exciting content. In some parts of the world like Africa or Asia, YouTube is the dominant search engine thanks to its voice search option and illiteracy.

As Aleh Barysevich from Content Marketing Institute says: "Most people consider YouTube as a social media platform, which it is, but it also behaves a lot like a traditional search engine. Visitors enter their query and get a list of videos ranked by relevance.. "

The key lies in the word relevance. That's the reason why you should always take care of the SEO optimization of your video content if you want to reach as many people on YouTube. Luckily, the available SEO tools which already work on Google could be used on YouTube, too: definition of proper keywords, moderation of content, clever insight into available analytics...  

Here is some valuable advice for SEO optimization of YouTube video content.

Find the right keywords for your video

A process of good SEO optimization begins with the definition of the right keywords. If you are planning to publish a video with simple recipes for cooks beginners, make your list of potential keywords that you will use for the video title, description, and tags.

If you don't know which keywords could perform best, use YouTube's own autocomplete feature visible in the search window. Start simply by typing a phrase that is connected to your content. It could be a phrase "recipes for"and the search suggest feature will list some suggestions. You will maybe notice that YouTube suggested some phrases like "recipes for dinner", "recipes for lunch", "recipes for cakes ", "recipes for beginners "...

This is an excellent way to define your keywords. Why? The suggested phrases are the most common sentences people type in when searching around your topic. With these suggested phrases, you are sure that they are popular. If YouTube recommends them, they indeed are. Google is, after all, an owner of YouTube, and the same SEO principles of Google apply to the YouTube platform as well.

Examine the keywords of your competitors

Apart from autocompleting feature offered by YouTube, there's another cool trick. Examine what keywords have been used by the owners of the most popular videos in your niche. These videos have also become popular thanks to their optimization. 

Do the following:

1. Click simply to your competitor's video with the high number of views and find out around which keywords it is optimized.
2. Discover and analyze the words used for video title and video description.
3. Copy those words and put them on your list.
4. Follow the spirit of a famous and practical motto: talent borrows, genius steals.

Choose one more feature when deciding on your keywords – YouTube analytics. Click on your previously published video and go to the "Traffic source: YouTube search "option in the Search part of YouTube video analytics. There you will be able to see which keywords your visitors typed in to reach your video. Some words and phrases will not surprise you because you already put them there as keywords, but some might do so. Include in your list of potential keywords precisely the words and phrases your visitors used, no matter how different they seemed from your idea of keywords. Remember that for good SEO optimization, it's more important to find out what people will type in, much more than you being creative or sounding cool.

Play on low-competition keywords

At the end of the selection process, you'll probably wonder which keywords to choose? An expert for SEO optimization and YouTuber Backlinko has a piece of advice for you if you still don't have many followers on the YouTube channel. Play on so-called low-competition keywords. "If you swing for the fences and go after competitive keywords, your video is going to get buried in the search results. Instead, you want to find keywords that don't have a lot of competition, "recommends Backlinko.

You'll detect them by simply typing in your keyword in the Google search engine. After you type "recipes for beginners site:youtube "in the upper part of the screen, you'll see the number of pages with this keyword. If the number is too high (130 million in this case), try to find an option with a lower number. We tried "recipes for dummies," which scored 10 million pages. It's 13 times less than the previous phrase. When you are thinking about naming your video, you should better use the second phrase for the title or description or tag if you aim to get closer to the top of the search list.

Tag your videos smartly

Experts for YouTube SEO optimization recommend smart tagging of videos. Use tags to help YouTube's algorithms put your videos in the right category. If you want to have a peek at what your competitors do, it's going to be a little bit difficult since you cannot instantly see the tags of their videos like you can do for video titles and descriptions. But there is a way.

If you have technically good knowledge, open the HTML source code and try to determine which tags your competitors use, especially if their videos get a higher Google ranking. You can also use available browser extensions like vidIQ Vision for Chrome, enabling you to view tags of your competitors' videos. 

Create videos that will be viewed in their entirety

To make the best rankings for your videos, make sure people will gladly watch them. In their entirety, if possible. Such highly watched videos YouTube calls High-Retention Videos. And this parameter is of great importance for YouTube since its algorithms award the videos that keep visitors on the YouTube channel as long as possible. We could say that the Audience Retention parameter is as much important for YouTube as the average time on page, bounce rate, and backlinks is for Google optimization. 

If you are asking yourself how to create videos that will be watched in their entirety the answer could be:

1. Be direct, creative, and interesting.
2. Try to keep the audience's attention the whole time.
3. Avoid boring introductions.
4. Get straight to the point. If your video is slightly longer, use the "open loops "technique to keep your audience's attention.

To do that, announce what you will display next in your video in an attractive manner. In the case of "recipes for dummies," you can attract viewers in this way: "Stay with us. We are going to uncover a splendid trick for glazing of the famous Croatian Masterchef ".

Motivate people to comment, moderate their comments

Moderation of comments is another vital segment of good SEO optimization on YouTube. Many YouTube account owners think that visitors' comments do not influence ranking. But algorithms track everything. Here's the equation: you get a better ranking from YouTube the more comments from visitors you have. Each new comment sends a signal to the YouTube algorithm that you produce good content that successfully engages your visitors.

Always reply to visitors' comments. Encourage them to communicate with you and ask for feedback. Ease the tense situations with humour, be grateful for compliments and good comments. If there's no other way, block haters who comment indecently. Don' let your channel become a battleground for useless trolling.

YouTube video optimization doesn't end here. On the contrary, many other techniques can improve your ratings, such as the number of subscribers to your channel, video sharing on social media channels, CTR (click to rate), the length of your video...

In addition to that, do not neglect good old Google. You should use its popular Keyword Planner feature for thorough research of keywords that'll be used for video titles, descriptions, and tags. Remember, Google is still the most popular web search engine and the most essential SEO optimization tool.

References:

https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2021/01/youtube-seo-tools-video-rankings/

https://backlinko.com/how-to-rank-youtube-videos