Here at Citizen 2.0, SEO is one of the topics we’ve covered the most. But there’s something we’ve never talked about, and it’s about time we did: SEO for YouTube.
You will have read more than once that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, only after its big brother Google.
As you will see, as with SEO on blogs and other types of websites, the basic guidelines, which would be “On-Page SEO for YouTube,” are not very complicated to do.
However, I assure you that you have a huge opportunity here: most YouTubers don’t do any SEO at all. Therefore, just by doing the basic SEO that I will explain in this post, you will be able to make an abysmal difference with them.
In this post I will talk about the keys to how you can improve the positioning of your videos. I assure you that, if you take it seriously, you can give them a huge boost.
The truth is that no one knows for sure what exactly Google’s algorithms and YouTube’s search engine consist of because they hardly give any information about them.
What is known, or rather, believed to be known, is the result of reverse-engineering experiments that try to figure out how the algorithm works and a good deal of speculation. Therefore, add to what I say, or what others say, a certain level of “fuzzy logic.”
In any case, you have to be clear that, just like in Google SEO, everything is a sum of factors that you work on on your channel and on each video. Therefore, SEO is also a big part of an “ant” job.
Let’s look at all this in detail.
Doing SEO on YouTube starts with “decorating your home,” that is, creating an attractive channel that makes you want to visit. And this is concrete in several aspects.
Before starting a YouTube channel, you have to be very clear about what type of content you are going to generate. And, above all, if there is an audience (a demand) for that content, how large that audience is and how competitive that thematic niche is.
At this point, one of the best things you can do is a global niche analysis with a keyword analysis tool.
There are free tools like Google Keyword Planner, but they’re very limited in the information they provide.
Here I recommend using freemium tools (with a free version with limitations and paid versions). In my case, the one I use and my favorite is SEMrush and, in particular, its Keyword Magic Tool.
Other very good alternatives are Keysearch or Ahrefs, but if you take a look at the video above, you’ll probably agree that since SEMrush has released their Keyword Magic Tool, they’re a step or two ahead of the pack.
I’ll also tell you about a creative and 100% free alternative, a very popular trick to do a niche analysis at the “macro” level and capture ideas for the content of your channel: use Amazon’s bestseller list.
Amazon also has other additional indicators, such as user comments, which give you good clues about the topics that your channel could also be dedicated to.
With this information, you should have a clear idea of the topic you want to dedicate yourself to.
Once your channel is up and running, we can improve this targeting over time thanks to the statistics we have within our own YouTube account.
If you have a small audience, experiment, make your content in several different ways, and find out what works best for you, because later, once the theme of the channel is consolidated, it will be difficult for you to change because it will not fit well with the expectations of your followers.
You can always improve and implement new things, but radically changing is not a good strategy since, somehow, you would have to start from scratch.
If you want people to be comfortable in your home, you should decorate it in a pleasant way.
The same is true on YouTube. Things will be easier if your channel is an attractive place that makes you want to enter.
This, strictly speaking, is not part of SEO, but it does do it in an indirect way because a good image encourages people to stay on your channel, which favors more views, and this is an SEO factor of great weight, in addition.
A good image for your channel starts with choosing a good name.
It’s simple: please don’t use names like “warrior97” and the like. You can use your own name, come up with a “brand” name for your channel, add a suffix like “TV,” etc.
If you work on it a little and get inspired by examples from other channels, it won’t cost you as much.
Complete your channel name choice with the description field in your channel’s “Learn more” tab. Here you can and should write a description of your channel.
This is not only another part you should use to compose a good image of your channel but also an opportunity to use search keywords that you want your channel to fall under.
On the other hand, you must create an attractive header, put in an appropriate profile picture, and connect all your social networks so that the first impression of your visitors is positive, and for these elements, they transmit a first impression of a “serious” site, a well-worked site.
For a person who visits you, it is inevitable to think that if the site is well worked, the content will probably be too.
Getting this “love at first sight” greatly favors subscriptions.
In addition, there are tools, even free ones like Canva, that allow you to create stunning designs without knowing anything about design.
A very powerful element to connect with your audience and give professionalism to your channel is to create a highlight video (like the one you can see in the example above) where you briefly introduce the channel and explain what content can be found on it.
He finishes off the game with some first playlists. They add organization to the contents. They would be like the categories of a blog.
There is some debate about whether the number of subscribers is in itself a ranking factor for videos on a YouTube channel.
But what is undoubted is that it does so indirectly for several reasons:
A higher number of subscribers will generate a higher number of views (which is a ranking factor) when you post a new video.
The greater the number of reproductions, the more comments, the more shares on social networks, etc. All this helps.
If we talk about doing SEO for content, we have to differentiate between the basic work of making Google, or YouTube in our case, understand what search intentions our video responds to and the positioning factors that favor that search(es).
Let’s start by looking at how to position videos on YouTube, which basically consists of making YouTube see in which searches our video should appear.
What makes a video rank for one or another search(es)?
Well, this works a lot like how a “normal” web page is positioned: the keywords of this search(es) must appear in strategic places. On YouTube, these strategic places are mainly the title and then the description and tags.
In this way we are guiding YouTube by telling it “what our content is about.” In terms of SEO, we could say that this is YouTube on-page SEO.
That is, if your target searches are those that contain the keywords “guide dog training,” you will have to use these keywords and variations of them that make sense in the title, description, and tags.
In the description, I recommend you take the opportunity to create a text of at least a few hundred words that makes sense and uses variations of the keywords.
In my personal experience on my channel, here you can scratch a lot to position your video for many more specialized variants of your main search.
Plus, it’s easy to make. Normally, a summary of the content that the video will be about, along with a minute at the end (later we will see what this is and how it is done), will be perfect.
Keep in mind, also, that videos also rank in Google, and here the description of the video will have more weight; therefore, when writing the description, you have to take this factor into account, along with the title of the video.
Tags are a very special positioning element within YouTube and have an important weight for SEO. For this reason, I want to dedicate a specific section to them.
On the one hand, they are one of the positioning criteria for searches. That is, the tags should reflect, just like the title and description, the keywords you’re targeting.
But they also give much more play.
I advise you to “gossip” the tags of the competitors’ videos that are ranking for your search.
You can’t see the labels directly (years ago they were displayed), but there are tricks to visualize them, like this free Chrome extension.
You can also view them “bareback” (without using extensions) with Ctrl-U, which will open a tab with the source code of the page (it works in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer and probably in more).
In this tab, look for this text string (including quotation marks): “keywords”:
This is where you will see, separated by commas, the tags of the video. You can locate the text of “keywords” easily with Ctrl-F, which is the on-page search function of these browsers.
And now comes the kicker: YouTube chooses the list of suggested videos on the right largely because of the similarity in the tags to the video playing.
Therefore, apart from giving you ideas, using tags of very well-positioned videos (especially the ones that are more unique) can put you in the “slipstream” of these videos. In other words, when you view these videos, you greatly increase the probability that yours will appear as a suggested video, so you will get a good handful of extra views.
With the above, we have pointed to the searches that interest us. Now, what we are interested in is getting ranked, that is, appearing as high as possible for those searches.
Let’s talk, therefore, now about the SEO positioning factors on YouTube that will determine just that.
There is no 100% defined hierarchy, but there is quite a consensus on what the main positioning factors are and the fact that, of all of them, watch time, or audience retention as YouTube calls it, is probably the most important.
As Brian Dean of Backlinko, one of the world’s most reputable SEOs, says here:
“Unlike Google, which can use inbound links and other signals to evaluate the quality of content, YouTube doesn’t have that luxury. So they rely on audience retention.”
In other words, we could say that audience retention is for YouTube something similar to what links are for Google.
So the quality of your content should always be your No. 1 goal. If you fail to retain your audience, the rest of the efforts will be in vain.
Another very important sign is the click-through rate on your video.
If, in a list of results, a video clearly receives more clicks than others, this is a very important signal for YouTube that that video is a very good result for that search (that it responds well to the search intent) and, therefore, has a lot of weight in how the video is positioned.
However, it is also a very manipulated factor with very striking images or texts, for example, something known as “clickbait.”
Beware of falling into these temptations of manipulation; a little further down I explain why it does not make much sense and can become counterproductive if done wrong.
The number of views, of course, is another important factor in positioning. The more successful your video is, the more strength you have to continue climbing positions.
Of the factors that remain, I’d just like to highlight that the more people comment on a video, the more they subscribe to your channel, and the more they share your videos, the better. It’s common sense that these are good signals that YouTube can use to assess the quality of a video.
Keep in mind that you can substantially influence this just by asking people to comment, subscribe, and share your videos from your own device.
Here we are a little out of the strict focus of this post because if we talk about links, we are talking about searches from Google, not from YouTube.
But I just want to remind you that YouTube videos are also ranked on Google, especially in searches such as “[search] video.”
So, if you can get links for your video, it will also rank on Google, just like another website, and add views 🙂
If we talk about doing SEO for content, we have to differentiate between the basic work of making Google, or YouTube in our case, understand what search intentions our video responds to and the positioning factors that favor that search(es).
Let’s start by looking at how to position videos on YouTube, which basically consists of making YouTube see in which searches our video should appear.
What makes a video rank for one or another search(es)?
Well, this works a lot like how a “normal” web page is positioned: the keywords of this search(es) must appear in strategic places. On YouTube, these strategic places are mainly the title and then the description and tags.
In this way we are guiding YouTube by telling it “what our content is about.” In terms of SEO, we could say that this is YouTube on-page SEO.
That is, if your target searches are those that contain the keywords “guide dog training,” you will have to use these keywords and variations of them that make sense in the title, description, and tags.
In the description, I recommend you take the opportunity to create a text of at least a few hundred words that makes sense and uses variations of the keywords.
In my personal experience on my channel, here you can scratch a lot to position your video for many more specialized variants of your main search.
Plus, it’s easy to make. Normally, a summary of the content that the video will be about, along with a minute at the end (later we will see what this is and how it is done), will be perfect.
Keep in mind, also, that videos also rank in Google, and here the description of the video will have more weight; therefore, when writing the description, you have to take this factor into account, along with the title of the video.
Tags are a very special positioning element within YouTube and have an important weight for SEO. For this reason, I want to dedicate a specific section to them.
On the one hand, they are one of the positioning criteria for searches. That is, the tags should reflect, just like the title and description, the keywords you’re targeting.
But they also give much more play.
I advise you to “gossip” the tags of the competitors’ videos that are ranking for your search.
You can’t see the labels directly (years ago they were displayed), but there are tricks to visualize them, like this free Chrome extension.
You can also view them “bareback” (without using extensions) with Ctrl-U, which will open a tab with the source code of the page (it works in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer and probably in more).
In this tab, look for this text string (including quotation marks): “keywords”:
This is where you will see, separated by commas, the tags of the video. You can locate the text of “keywords” easily with Ctrl-F, which is the on-page search function of these browsers.
And now comes the kicker: YouTube chooses the list of suggested videos on the right largely because of the similarity in the tags to the video playing.
Therefore, apart from giving you ideas, using tags of very well-positioned videos (especially the ones that are more unique) can put you in the “slipstream” of these videos. In other words, when you view these videos, you greatly increase the probability that yours will appear as a suggested video, so you will get a good handful of extra views.
Of all the things I’m talking about in this post, this part, in which we’re going to talk about keywords, in my opinion, is the most important. It’s the key. Go. 🙂
If you want your videos to rank, they have to respond to something that people search for on YouTube, and they have to do it with the language that people use.
Let’s take this same post as an example: it talks about SEO for YouTube. Some obvious keywords would be “YouTube SEO.”
However, here’s something very important to keep in mind: “SEO” is a technical term that only those who already know what SEO is, a small fraction of the potential audience only, know.
Therefore, if we stay here, we will lose a lot of potential traffic.
Most people don’t know what SEO is and will search for things like “increase YouTube views” or “get YouTube views.” Try it on YouTube, and you’ll see that the results are very different.
Also, search intent isn’t 100% the same in both cases.
We can assume that “YouTube SEO” fits better with an audience already initiated in SEO that wants to go deeper and “get visits” than with a more beginner one that mostly does not know what SEO is. The content should therefore also be something different.
This example has been trivial; it would have been easy to guess alternative search terms such as “increase visits” or “get visits,” but in many cases things will not be so obvious, and using a tool like SEMrush and the others that I have already mentioned above will discover searches and expressions that you would never have imagined.
So, stay with this: finding the most suitable keywords will often make the difference between success and failure. That’s why it’s so important to do good keyword analysis.
To see how to do keyword analysis on YouTube, I’m going to start with a very simple and 100% free method that consists of taking advantage of what Google already offers us: its autocomplete function, combined with the analysis of the number of views of the search results. The good news is that, despite how simple it is, it is quite effective.
Let’s look at it with a simple example: Open YouTube and type “how to train dogs.” You will see a series of suggestions that are real searches that start from this basic search.
But what’s really interesting is that, in addition, with a little trick you can explore much wider variants of this search very quickly.
The trick is to edit the middle words without deleting the first or the last.
If you want to explore, for example, the combinations of “like” and “dogs,” without deleting the previous search, edit train to change it to “_” or “*” and you will see the suggestions of the most important searches.
Now you can continue editing, and if you leave it in “like a dog,” you will see the most important searches whose second word begins with “a.”
We’re interested in dog training, but people may use other language. Try, for example, “how to train* dogs,” and you’ll see a lot of real searches with variants of “train.” Same with “like edu* dogs” and so on.
Write down the searches that interest you the most, in their most general variants (“how to train dogs”) and more specific (“how to train pit bull puppies”). The latter are known, by the way, as the long tail in SEO. A very important concept, as you will see later.
All these searches will have to be analyzed separately.
Let’s take “how to train puppy dogs” as an example. Let’s suppose it is a topic that you master, and you are motivated to make content about it.
It’s time to stop, do the search, and see what kind of videos come out and how many views they have.
First of all, notice that videos come out that exceed one million views.
It is clear that we are with a search with a very great potential. You can refine even more by trying variants of “educate,” “train,” etc. Also look at the words used in the titles of the videos in the search results to get ideas.
Now look first at the number of search results. This is an important indicator of the level of competition for this search, i.e., how difficult it will be for you to rank for this search above similar videos.
In this case there are 140,000 results, a fairly high level of competition.
You may be interested in going more along the long tail, more specific searches, therefore, with less competition, but, in general, also with less volume.
If we analyze the previous example of “how to train pit bull puppies,” you will see that for this search there are “only” 27,400 results, a medium-high level.
However, there is a pleasant surprise: in this case, the results still have a very high number of views, and even more interesting, the titles match the search less accurately than in the previous case.
It looks good. Therefore, I would say that it is clearly in your best interest to go for the most long-tail search in this case, especially if your channel is still young and you don’t have much chance of generating many views beyond the YouTube searches themselves.
That is, the title should be some variant of these keywords, for example, “How to train pit bull puppies and get good results.”
Plus, you don’t have to give up on the more general search. Although the decisive thing will be the title, both in the description and the tags, you can also use the more general search and other variants, such as “how to train small pit bull dogs,” for example.
Finally, a very important warning:
SEO is not an exact science. In this case, the number of results, for example, is not an exact metric of the competition. The exact degree of competition depends on more things: views and quality of other videos, words used in titles, descriptions, and tags, etc.
But only Google knows the “formula.” Therefore, you have to see these things as mere indications. SEO on YouTube and, in general, has a very high “feeling” and intuition component, the result of the experience of having done it many times before.
The main difference, apart from knowledge and experience, between an amateur SEO job and a professional SEO job is the tools used. With professional tools, you can work much faster and more accurately because of the additional information they provide.
As a general tool for keyword analysis, as mentioned above, I personally use SEMrush. In particular, I haven’t seen anything that even comes close to their Keyword Magic Tool to explore entire niches and specific searches.
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