The rapid growth of video consumption and advertising is a frightening opportunity:

YouTube has over a billion users, resulting in 800 million viewers per month and making it the second largest search engine in the World behind Google.

Further, video is just such a fantastic opportunity to tell a story…showing rather than telling… in a way that you simply cannot do with text.

Seems like an opportunity not to be missed… right?

Yes, but with over 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, how do you stand out from the noise and get your videos ranking higher?

How the YouTube Algorithm Works

Similar to Google, YouTube has a proprietary algorithm to determine the most relevant videos to display for each viewer’s search query.

Unlike Google, however, links do not form part of that algorithm.

Instead, the algorithm is heavily weighted towards the video content and user engagement as a metric of quality and trust.

These User-based signals are measured by:

  • Topical Relevance
  • Number of Views
  • Number of Complete Views
  • Video Length
  • Thumbs Up/Down
  • Subscriptions
  • Comments (Read: ‘Engagement’)

Whilst the overall quality of the finished video content – and it’s intent match to the audience – is the largest lever in improving user satisfaction and engagement, many of these metrics can be further optimised to give your video the best chances of success. Many refer to this as ‘Video SEO’.

Let’s get started…


How to Optimise for YouTube

Step 1: Determine your audience and how you will measure success

Just in the same way that you optimise content for Google, identifying the keywords that YouTube viewers are using to find the answer to their question is a basic, yet fundamental and often overlooked, step to ensuring a video gets in front of the right audience.

Strategy

Sounds basic right, but lets start at the begining.

  • What are you wanting to achieve?
  • Who are you trying to reach?
  • How long does the video need to be to be helpful? (Longer videos actually tend to perform better)
  • How do you wish for them to engage with this video?
  • How are you are going to distribute the video?
  • By what metrics you can accurately measure success? Are you looking for engagement, views, subscribers? Yes we always want all three, however you can tailor your video, and wider video strategy, towards an overall objective.

YouTube Keyword Research

Videos are expensive to make. They take a lot of time, effort and money to create and so keyword research is a vital and high ROI activity to ensure you’re making videos that are in demand and can be helpful.

When researching keywords for YouTube we’re really just trying to understand what our audience is actually interested in, and when based on seasonal trends.

There are some great tools that can help to gain those insights.

YouTube Keyword Research Tools

Google Trends: https://www.google.com/trends/

Google Trends chart of apple pie query demand

Trends is a great macro view to see what is generally becoming more, or less, popular in your space.

You can also confine your search to just YouTube behaviour which can be really helpful in understanding seasonal demand and providing guidance as to when you need to be publishing or when to schedule your paid promotion spend for videos.

YouTube Autocomplete

Simply start typing a word into the YouTube search field and you’ll be presented with suggested queries. This is gold – the actual terms people are searching for!

You can quickly build out an idea of the general topics your audience is looking for. For a more complete list, try appending a letter to your search, E.g. ‘{keyword} a’, {keyword} b’.

Pro-tip: Using the Keywords Everywhere plugin, we also get search volume displayed directly within the autocomplete box! Wowsers.

YouTube Autocomplete Search Box

Quite why you’d want to bake your face… I don’t really know (or want to!)

 

Comments

Comments on related videos are a great way to tap into your audience. What did they like about the video? What didn’t they like? What follow up questions do they have?

Whilst you may have to wade through a lot of dirt to find the gold, comments can provide great insight into what to produce next.

Common Search Modifiers

Video is the perfect medium to explain answers to questions that benefit from a visual aspect.

As such it’s not surprising that queries containing ‘how to’, ‘reviews’ or ‘tutorial’ are the most common queries searched for on YouTube each day.

 


Platform

Earlier, I referred to YouTube as the second largest search engine however, unlike Google and Bing, it’s more or a secondary search engine as it’s only surfacing content served from YouTube rather than across the web.

In that sense, I urge you to adjust your perception of YouTube away from simply being a site you host videos and think of it more so as a channel experience for your audience.

Before we get started on optimising each of your videos, we really need to make the most of the channel settings to ensure your brand is appropriately presented and the channel effective contributes to your overall marketing strategy:

Channel Links

Add relevant links to your website and other properties (E.g. twitter, instagram etc) through the ‘About’ section.

This provides both users and YouTube an idea of who you are and where else they can find you. (Ppsst, it’s a followed link too which is good for SEO!;-)).

Channel Art

Add brand-appropriate images to your channel header, consistent with the rest of your online presence.

YouTube doesn’t look at it, but your users certainly do and anything you can do to improve trust is only going to be beneficial.

YouTube Analytics & Google Analytics Integration

Not often spoken about – you can actually link your site’s Google Analytics to your YouTube channel which enables you to gain valuable insights from a wealth of channel data.

Whilst the YouTube Analytics interface itself is fantastic for gaining top level data points such as video engagement, connecting YouTube to Google Analytics provides you with additional insights such as:

  • Which channels are driving traffic to your videos
  • Video engagement through time on site (I.e. watch time) and bounce rate
  • Repeat visits to your channel (I.e. Audience Engagement)
  • The average time between these visits
  • Where your audience is located through geographic reports

Channel Trailer

Adding a trailer video is a great way to quickly introduce people to your channel, informing them of what they can expect and why they should subscribe to keep up to date.


Step 2: Make it easy for Viewers, Google & YouTube to understand

Despite making self-driving cars, Google is still unable to fully decipher and understand all spoken content within a video.

As such, various meta data is required to ensure YouTube is able to categorise, measure and rank the relevance of a video according to a user’s search query, just like classic SEO.

Quality & Compatibility

Ensure your video is filmed in High Definition (HD) and suitable to view on a variety of devices – specifically check mobile use for your shorter videos.

Video Filename

Include the target keyword, naturally, in the filename.

Try to include a word prior to the target keyword to avoid appearing as keyword stuffed. , E.g. how-to-save-for-a-first-home-loan.mp4 rather than ‘first-home-loan-mortgage-owners-grant-savings-deposit.mp4

Title

Try to include the target keyword at the start of the title if possible.

If this isn’t possible, just try to naturally include it in the title. Keep the title below 60 characters to ensure it’s not cut off.

Description

The description is a vastly underused asset by the majority and can be vital in effectively communicating the topic and value of a video to YouTube. The description should be more of a mini-blog with a minimum of 200 words and up to 5,000. If the video is also embedded in a page containing further information, including a link to this page within the description

If the video is also to be embedded in a webpage containing further information, including a link back to this page within the description. This ensures you have a good tie in between page > video > page.

Importantly, this link must be https:// or the link will not be clickable.

Video Thumbnail

Adding a custom thumbnail to your video can hugely increase the click through rate from search results. You can either select a suitable frame to display or upload your own thumbnail which you can enhance with perhaps a video title and branding.

Tags

Include the target keyword as the first tag and at least 2-3 more related phrases.

Cheeky tip: if there is a market leading channel related to the topic, add the channel name as a tag and the video may appear as a ‘suggested video’ at the end of that channel’s related videos.

This is a brilliantly free no-brainer to raise brand awareness and overall visibility of your videos.

Transcript

Like descriptions, transcripts make it (much!) easier for YouTube to truly understand the content of the video.

Don’t believe me? Open up the transcript of almost any video (likely to have not been manually updated) and you’ll see just how wrong YouTube is in understanding the spoken content. Whilst Google are fantastic at understanding voice search, this is mostly via a single voice that it learns from over time to improve. The sound quality of videos isn’t as good and voices vary so, naturally, it has a hard time to figuring it out.

This is perhaps the most underused optimisation technique I see and a brilliant no-brainer if you’re going after a competitive keyword.

Pro-tip: I recommend Speechpad to help with your video transcriptions. From just $1 per minute of video, it’s not going to break the bank to get your transcriptions in order.

Playlists

If the video is part of a larger series, bundle related videos into a YouTube Playlist. This will ensure related videos are presented as well as giving viewers the ability to subscribe to playlists – assisting views and engagement to newer videos as they are added.

End Screens & Cards

YouTube retired annotations in May 2017 due to both the downturn in engagement of annotations (caused by increased mobile viewing) and the increased effectiveness of End Screens and Cards.

End Screens are essentially thumbnail overlays that are displayed in the last 5-20 seconds of your video. They are commonly used to promote other videos, prompt subscription to the channel or promote another cause.

It is possible to add an external link to End Screens (E.g. your site) however YouTube restrict this to members of the YouTube Partner Program. The channel must also be enabled for monetisation and have over 10,000 public video views.


Step 3: Encourage viewers and engagement by spreading the word

Hold your horses on patting yourself on the back just yet.

Just like promoting your site content for traffic and links, once you hit publish there’s still a little more work to do to nudge your videos in the right direction.

Think about your audience and how you can increase the exposure of your video to reach people who would find it useful. This not only adds value to your audience – the engagement of views, comments, thumbs up etc all assist the video to rank for your target phrases.

Engagement is the fuel your video needs to propel forward.

Wow, that was cheesy. Anyway, here’s the next steps:

Embed

Embed the video on your relevant pages/blog post using the supplied YouTube share code.

If helpful to your viewers, you can even select a specific video start time so they don’t need to sit through irrelevant content/your waffle to get to the good stuff ;-)

Pro-tip: Where is your video being embedded? If it’s getting a lot of engagement with an audience on a certain site, look to see if there’s an opportunity to create a direct relationship. They obviously like what you’re saying :)

Newsletter

Consider adding a link to the video in a relevant EDM. Ensure you add the relevant campaign tracking tags so you can better understand how effective your Email has been in driving views. Leading Email platforms such as Mailchimp and Drip make this super easy for you.

Q&A Sites

These are true gold and heavily under-utilised.

Search for related questions on Q&A sites such as Quora, Yahoo Answers or forums, answer people’s questions on the subject and post your video alongside. It’s a great way to raise awareness of your expertise on the subject; improving brand authority, sending referral traffic, engagement and links.

Social Media

Share the video directly on relevant social media channels; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc with an update and promote within relevant groups who would find it helpful.

Paid Media

Paid promotion is a great opportunity to extend your reach to your audience and tap into a market. The organic  traction will also take time so paid promotion is a great way to a) Get some initial ROI and b) help get things started on those engagement metrics that will help organic.

AdWords for Video is a good option for helping drive more views and subscribers your way. You can easily manage the budget, timeframe and targeting to a specific audience and pause the campaign anytime.

The Creator Academy is a fantastic resource to learn more about this,

Last but not least, Engage!

Review the (relevant!) comments and answer any questions viewers have/promote the conversation. I say relevant because the comments section of YouTube is generally regarded as the toxic wasteland of the Internet, so be prepared!

If somebody has taken the time to comment on your video, whether its to say thank you, provide feedback or their own ideas/thoughts on the subject then replying is a great way to build relationships and your topical expertise on the subject.

Thanks for reading and, as always, please reach out if you have any questions.

– Andrew