If you are reading this post you definitely understand the importance of video marketing and video SEO. YouTube has taken over as the second most popular search engine over Yahoo and Bing. Even more surprising is YouTube will soon surpass Google.
The videos are more popular than ever and are being introduced into every popular social media platform online. For starters, YouTube videos have a massive preference in Google search results. YouTube now favors live videos way more than traditional uploaded videos.
Facebook loves Facebook Live and gives these posts very high circulation compared to other posts Instagram’s short videos are changing this platform into a huge engagement and money-making machine.
I can keep going but I think you get the point. Video is hot and will continue to be the method of engaging with leads.
YouTube Video SEO – How To Rank Your Videos
You can simply upload videos to YouTube and have success but the chances of this happening a becoming less and less. Much like traditional search engines can be influenced by SEO, YouTube is very similar. The methods I’m about to show you are completely white-hat and really help ensure your video is indexed by YouTube properly.
YouTube favors certain elements within your video post that help it understand what your video is about in order to provide more accurate search results.
Copying videos, stuffing keywords, and purchasing likes and views will get your videos removed and your account banned. Do things right and YouTube will reward you with thousands of views for years to come.
Enough B.S., let’s get into this.
Performing Keyword Research
If you want your video to rank high I suggest you perform some basic keyword research prior to even creating your video.
Before we begin with the keyword research you need to open a free account at vidiq.com. Then add the vidIQ vision for YouTube extension to your Chrome browser. Then open a YouTube video and you should see the vidIQ login fields on the right-hand side of Chrome. Login so information will automatically appear during our future search results.
You don’t need any paid tools, the Google Keyword Planner will work just fine for this exercise. Go ahead and search for this tool. You may need to set up an Adwords account and begin to set up a campaign. Don’t worry, we are not going to run any ads and this does not cost anything.
Once you have finished with the keyword tool I would recommend searching your keyword in YouTube. As you are typing the keyword watch what instant results appear.
Take a screenshot of this so you can later search for these proposed search terms.
Open the first couple of videos that appear after every search. The vidIQ information should automatically appear on the right-hand side. Look at the tags and text in the description field. These are attributes you may want to copy into your own video.
Now that you have a bunch of tags you can use for your video, we have an entire checklist of items to complete before our video is fully optimized.
Make sure to change the name of your video file to your keyword prior to uploading it to YouTube. Once the video has been uploaded, edit your video. Scroll down and to the right, you should see an SEO checklist provided by the vidIQ plugin. We need to ensure each item has a green checkmark.
Here’s the List:
- Add End Screen/Annotation
- Add a card
- Enable monetization
- Add closed captions
- Add to a playlist
- Share on Twitter
- Liked on Facebook
- Respond to a comment
- After posting the video – add the video link in the description
If you take these steps before publishing any video you should see better results. Not all videos will take off…some will get plenty of views while others will perform poorly.
About the Author
YASHPREET SINGH
Yash is the owner of WILCYDESIGN and he is a blogger too.
