SEO for YouTube: do you know how to put your videos at the top of searches?
I've spoken several times here on the blog about the advantages of investing in SEO strategies for your website and also for your blog content. But, if you usually produce videos for YouTube, know that this technique can help you too.
YouTube, today, is the second largest online search engine in the world, behind only Google itself. Therefore, it is important to understand that it can enhance your digital marketing strategies.
But, how to apply SEO methods to your productions on the platform?
Although simple, this is a technique that requires a lot of attention to detail. This is because it is the details that will indicate the success of your efforts.
First of all, I need you to think about the following question: What catches my attention when searching for a video?
With that in mind, it's time to understand the advantages of SEO strategies for YouTube. Do you want to appear in the top positions of the platform's search results?
Read on and learn how to win first place!
What is SEO for YouTube?
If you follow our blog, you already know that SEO techniques are essential for increasing your reach and also attracting organic visitors to your website.
Therefore, this strategy is made up of several methods that facilitate the ranking of your website through optimization for online search engines. Therefore, it is called Search Engine Optimization (Search Engine Optimization, or SEO).
Through it, you can indicate to Google the relevance of your content, making it appear to more people searching for a certain keyword.
What many don't know is that this feature is not limited to ranking websites and blogs. You can apply SEO tactics to your YouTube channel.
As it was purchased by Google, YouTube uses the same resources to deliver relevant content for a given search. This way, when the user searches for something on the platform, the AI searches and delivers videos and channels that can answer their question.
In fact, there are many variables in the choice criteria, but features such as search history make the experience more personalized. Additionally, there are some factors that can determine whether your content is relevant to that particular search.
Among these factors, we can mention:
- Pay attention to the title fields;
- Good use of tags;
- And good descriptions.
If your video meets these requirements, you will certainly achieve good positions in the search engine. But, you need to apply them in an optimized way so that they are relevant to your audience and to YouTube.
Want to know how to do this? Follow the text and check out the tips I brought for you!
Why invest in SEO for YouTube?
Well, if you've made it this far, you're looking for ways to optimize your video content, or you're thinking about starting to produce for YouTube. Regardless of your goal, there are many reasons to persist with this idea.
Firstly, as I said earlier, YouTube is the second largest search platform in the world. Second only to Google itself.
But, that's not a difficult position to achieve when you have over 1,9 billion active users every month. With so many people consuming content on YouTube, it seems easy to gain your audience's attention, right? Wrong!
We need to understand that when demand is high, supply follows. The internet itself is a chaos of content, and YouTube would be no different.
Every minute, around 500 hours of content appear on the platform, totaling more than 2 billion views per day.
So the right question here would be: How much of this am I losing to my company?
Starting to understand YouTube
To apply the SEO techniques that I will teach in this text, you need to understand certain features of the platform. For example, knowing how videos are delivered to users is essential.
This is because, when we work with content production for the internet, we think about organic, paid, referral traffic and other common means for the segment. But when we analyze YouTube, some changes are visible.
See the three main ways YouTube uses to deliver its videos!
Recommendation
YouTube recommendations follow a pattern that prioritizes the user experience. Therefore, if you want your video to appear as recommended content, you need to pay attention to a few points. Between them:
- Create original content;
- Apply best SEO practices;
- Use attractive titles and thumbnails;
- Invest in promoting your social networks.
This way, your content can appear as a recommendation from the platform, increasing the number of hits to your video.
External
As we saw previously, promoting your content on external platforms can enhance its delivery to recommended YouTube videos. But, this method alone is a strong traffic generation tool.
Therefore, using the advertising technique through external links can further enhance your reach. Furthermore, it can function as an efficient link building strategy, making your content even more relevant to the search platform.
Search traffic
Finally, we have search traffic, which is what we seek to increase with SEO strategies. In this method, we reach the audience through search engine search results.
The more optimized the content, the easier it is to appear at the top of the results, where users search for the answer to their question most frequently. In other words, they rarely tend to look for the lowest results.
With the exponential delivery of content in these searches, understanding how to keep your video at the top becomes essential to obtain results with the content you produce for YouTube.
The moment has come! Now, let's understand how to gain more search traffic for your channel through YouTube SEO strategies. Continue reading and check it out!
SEO for YouTube in practice: essential tips and techniques
Ok. Now that you know how YouTube delivers videos to users and also why we should invest in SEO for YouTube. We need to understand how to apply this in practice.
Throughout the article, I mentioned some essential points for your content production. Now, let's see how they will impact your video and how to actually do them.
Check out 3 rules for achieving good rankings in YouTube searches!
1. Research your keyword
Just like for blog texts, SEO for YouTube requires a good keyword research. This is because it is through them that the search platform identifies your video as an “answer” to certain searches.
Therefore, you need to insert keywords in fields such as: titles, tags and descriptions. Thus, making content ranking simpler and, consequently, in favor of your channel on the platform.
To define the best term for your content, you need to ask yourself how someone looking for that video would search for it. Here at Beatz, for example, we use a line of priorities, which are:
- Relevance to the persona;
- Search volume on the main search platforms;
- Difficulty ranking based on competition.
The first is defined through a research process that aims to understand how the persona communicates and also how they consume certain content.
Furthermore, the reasons for creating a persona for your planning go beyond identifying how they would search for your content. Check out our video with reasons to invest in an ideal customer.
2. Write good descriptions
As the name says, in this type of text you should be as descriptive as possible. Therefore, tell the viewer what your video is about, and comment in the description on everything that the brevity of the title does not allow you to say.
It is also important to remember that the description can be a means of persuading your audience, increasing engagement and giving positive signals to the platform. This is because the initial part of your text appears in search results.
Therefore, it is necessary to introduce the most important information at the beginning of the text, so that it is seen by the greatest number of people.
Furthermore, the description is a tool to facilitate the analysis that the platform carries out on published videos, that is, the more descriptive it is, the faster a good position for your new video will be determined.
You can also invest in CTAs (Call to Action), that is, calls to action, encouraging your visitor to subscribe to the channel or directing them to your website, blog or page that may be interesting.
3. Transcripts and subtitles
In addition to accessibility, subtitles and transcriptions can be decisive for the ranking of your content. This is because the platform's algorithm understands codes and texts, so these elements can make content analysis easier.
In this way, increasing the chances of achieving a better position in the surveys.
To do this, you can use Google's automation tools, which can include timing, transforming your transcription into subtitles, making your content accessible to those who have hearing impairments.
If you want to apply this resource in your next productions, just follow the platform instructions!
Now that you know how to optimize YouTube…
In this article, you saw all the details about optimizing content for Youtube. But, how about learning even more concepts to improve your strategies even further?
So, if you want to learn everything about the art of SEO for YouTube, you need to keep following along our blog. This way, you stay on top of the best techniques for SEO and content!