Table of Contents
YouTube has flourished all the small scale entrepreneurs to making a local stand up comedian a famous star. If you are an entrepreneur or an individual successful through this medium it takes the right tactics and tips to be used in this platform. YouTube has gained a lot of traffic in the recent decade. You won’t see any device without the YouTube app. Moreover, it has become a very popular way of earning by putting various kinds of content in a channel. Some people have become celebrities by using this platform some classic examples are Bhuvan Bam, Lele Pons, Amanda Cerny, etc.
YouTube was initially and individual site brought by former employees of PayPal in the year 2005. Google then bought the website in the year 2006. Since then it has been running as a subsidiary under Google. It gained so much traffic by 2017, that people were publishing 4 million hours of content in that year alone.
Just like a regular website, blogs, need traffic through SEO & SEM techniques, YouTube is no different than others. You can make use of the below mentioned tips and use YouTube SEO for your own channel. Here are a few tips you can use for your own advantage to gain more viewership, more subscribers and more fame:
Tip 1: YouTube Keyword Research
All the SEO processes always begin with the Keyword Research. It is very important to know which Keywords are ranking in order to use those keywords in your video descriptions and get a ranking.
The easiest way to search keywords is to first list out a bunch of keywords which you think are important your video. List down atleast a 10 – 15 keywords. Once you are done with listing out the keywords, I’ll guide you from here to know which keywords are trending. One of the best ways to know the trending keywords are, by using YouTube’s Search Suggest.
You just have to type out the words which you have noted down and YouTube Search suggest will automatically give you the most trending keywords in the drop down. Any of the suggested keywords can be used for your YouTube video. You can use those keywords regardless of the doubt if it’ll work or not because viewers use those keywords to search for a particular video. While Keyword optimization plays a key role in YouTube SEO, one can use the same keywords as the other popular YouTube videos revolving around the same topic. Next time you see a video with a higher viewership, subscriber, the odds are that the video has used popular keywords.
You can use this step in the following manner:
- Open a channel of your niche
- Adjust the settings in the ‘Sort By’ section to Most popular videos
- Select the video you want
- Check out the Keywords used in the Title, description and video tags.
One can also use the ‘Traffic Source tool’ in the YouTube Search in order to know which keywords are used majorly by the users to rank their videos.
After listing down a bunch of keywords, the next step is to pick the best keywords from the list. While picking the keywords, make sure that you pick the keywords with lesser competition speciallly if you are new to the platform and don’t have many subscribers. Using keywords with the least competition is safer as your video might get layered up by other videos if you use the keywords with higher competition.
You can check the Keywords manually as well. Type out the keywords on the YouTube search, then check out the ‘About 1234 results’ section under the search section. The higher the number of results the higher the competition for that particular keyword.
Here is a tip which can earn you extra Brownie points. You can gain more viewership and subscribers if you can get a ranking of your video on Google as well. You can do this by using the keywords which are being used by already existing videos on Google. Google includes videos in search results only for certain keywords.
Tip 2: Post Video Content which has High-Retention
It is also very important to remember the fact that the content you are posting should be interesting. Audience retention, is an important factor to keep in mind. It measures, how long did you manage to grab the eyeballs of the audience with your video.
For example, if you have posted a 2 min video content there are chances that the audience might have watched the video only till 1 min. So, 1 min becomes the audience retention. Hence, it is important that if you are posting a 2 min video you should be able to grab the attention of the audience for a good 2 min in order to gain ranking.
According to YouTube, if your video has a high audience retention, it will rank your video higher in the search results.
Tip 3: Video Comments
Have you ever wondered why YouTubers ask you to leave a comment, like or ask ou subscribe? This is because when viewers leave a comment, it gives a strong impression to YouTube that the viewers enjoyed your content uploaded on their website. On analysing the results, I noticed that comments play a crucial role in ranking a video in the search results which is one of the reasons why all the YouTubers insist the viewers to leave a comment.
Tip 4: Number of Subscribers
Just like the comments, when a viewer subscribes to your channel after watching your content it sends out a message to the video sharing platform that the viewers liked your video hence leads in ranking your video in the search result.
Tip 5: Video Shares
Video shares also plays the same role in search results. When more people share a video online it not only generates more viewership, it also adds up to get a higher ranking.
Tip 6: Click-Through-Rate
CTR is the number of users who click on your view as a result of their searched keyword. The more the CTR the higher the ranking. The best of increasing your CTR is by creating extremely attracting thumbnails with good titles.
Tip 7: Video Title
When you publish a video content upload it with a title that has minimum 5 words. I would like to share a small tip here, when you use the keyword in the beginning of the video to give a boost by video SEO.
Tip 8: Video Description
Like Meta descriptions for blogs, video descriptions are very important. You should use the keywords in the video descriptions in order to rank. These are a few tips for video description:
- You should always use the keywords in the first 25 words.
- The description should always be atleast 250 words.
- You should always include the keywords 2-4 times in the description
These are some of the tips for the YouTube SEO. Let me know if this article was useful for you in the comments below.
