Even if you have a lot of experience optimizing sites for search engines, you may not know how to optimize your video content. Below, you’ll find some of the best video SEO practices. Keep this advice in mind if you want people to see your YouTube content.
Use YouTube’s Search Suggestions
It’s likely that a lot of the keyword research tools you rely on weren’t designed with YouTube in mind. If you’re looking for a way to research keywords for the videos that you’re uploading, it’s a good idea to take advantage of YouTube’s search suggestions.
If you type a word into YouTube, YouTube will provide a number of suggestions to you. For example, if you search for “making coffee,” you’ll see suggestions like “making coffee without a coffee maker” or “making coffee with a French press.” Search suggestions can help you to decide how to title your videos, and it can also give you ideas for new content.
Take a look at this video which covers more ways to find great keywords to use for your videos.
Consider Your Audience
When you’re creating video content, you can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, you need to think about the audience you’re creating your content for. You may want to spend time researching your target audience so that you can develop a more effective strategy.
It’s a wise idea to look at other video content that is within your niche. Pay close attention to the content that your target audience is responding to. If you make content that is appealing to that audience, you’ll get better results overall.
Optimize Your Title
When you’re optimizing your site for search engines, one of the most important things to focus on is your title. You should research keywords for your video content and include your keyword in your title. You’ll want to make sure your video shows up when people are searching for content like yours.
You should also make sure you pick a title that will catch people’s attention. Your title should describe the content of the video accurately, but it should also make people want to find out more. Your title should be at least five words long, and ideally, your keywords should be the first words used in your title.
The following video has some great advice on naming your videos.
Upload A Custom Thumbnail
YouTube will automatically select a thumbnail for you when you upload a video. However, if you look at videos that have received a lot of views, you’ll notice that they all feature custom thumbnails.
Video content is a visual medium, which is why choosing the right thumbnail is essential. Your thumbnail image may also appear in image search results, which is why choosing an eye-catching images matter.
In many cases, you may want to add text to your custom thumbnail. Look at the thumbnails that other video creators are choosing so that you can find the best thumbnails for your content.
Choose Great Tags
When you upload a new video to YouTube, you’ll have the option of selecting tags for your video. When you do this, you’re essentially choosing keywords. Selecting the right tags will help make your video more visible in search results for the terms that you choose.
If you’ve done keywords research, you should keep those keywords in mind when you’re choosing the keywords for your video. Always make sure that the tags you’ve selected are relevant to your video. Try to pick out a minimum of five tags for your video.
Find The Right Ways To Promote Your Video Content
While you should try to ensure that people can find your videos when they’re searching for content on YouTube, you’ll want to make sure your content is visible in other places as well. You should share your video content on social media, and if you have a blog, you’ll want to promote your videos there as well.
If you have a newsletter, you should embed your videos in the messages you send out to your subscribers. If you share your videos in a lot of places, you’ll get more views, and the rankings for your videos will improve.
The last video here goes into some other methods for promoting your videos and YouTube channel.
These are some of the best video SEO practices, which is why you’ll want to implement these practices when you create new YouTube videos. Video content has a massive audience, and you’ll want to make sure you fully capitalize on that if you’re not already.
Video is especially important when it comes to your political campaign. Take these best practices and you should take your video SEO to the next level!