When talking about SEO, we talk a whole lot about Google. But what about other search platforms. And I’m not talking about Bing or Yahoo. I’m talking about what we usually think of as apps: Youtube, Spotify, etc. Because these are also search engines in social media form. And since we’ve been talking about social media and SEO, I thought it would be fitting to talk about YouTube SEO.
With videos being such a popular content type, paying attention to Youtube, Youtube shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels, etc. is going to really keep you up to speed in a fast-moving world. But for now, let’s just talk about YouTube and how you can optimize your video and your channel. Naturally, you must start with keywords. A good rule of thumb is to start typing in the beginning of your key phrase and see what YouTube autofills. These are going to be great keywords to use. You can also look at other popular videos similar to your field (find the dropdown menu and click to sort by “Most Popular”). Once you’ve got your keywords down, use that phrase to rename the video file and add it subtly into the title of the video.
After that (like a meta description), you’re going to want to optimize the video description and try as best you can to be concise. Get your point across within the first hundred characters. You also want to categorize the video based on your industry/field that way it can end up as a “watch next” suggestion after other, more-popular videos in the same industry.
Now, let’s get a little more into the meat of the video itself. First of all, you need a good, customized photo for your video’s link, one that well represents the content of your video. But even more importantly, your video needs to have a high audience-retention rate because according to YouTube, this has an enormous impact on ranking. Audience retention to YouTube is like backlinking to Google. It’s a big deal. You can optimize all you want but if no one sticks around to watch the video, what’s that going to do for you? It’s no surprise that YouTube favors videos that keep people on YouTube. Other important ranking factors include user commenting, subscribing, CTR, likes/dislikes, and length (apparently longer videos outrank shorter ones).
There’s certainly a lot more to YouTube SEO than just this but these are some of the basics and some of the ranking factors that YouTube looks for.
3 Responses
This is a very interesting application to social media.
Cool post! I never thought about the fact that the youtube marketplace has its own SEO rules and guidelines.
You’ve got some really great information here on how to optimize a YouTube video’s SEO. Funnily enough, I almost never use YouTube’s search functionality. I usually either watch recommended videos from folks I subscribe to or otherwise I basically just use Google to find videos. I think it’s easy to forget just how many search engines there are aside from Google, Bing, and Yahoo.