YouTube SEO: How to Rank Your Videos #1 Part-2
YouTube SEO: How to Rank Your Videos #1
Second, you need to start with a strong hook.The first 10-15 seconds are critical for your video's success. Hook your readers, and you'll have audienceretention graphs that look like this. Forego the hook and lose the majority of yourviewers before you even get a chance to deliver value. Every niche is different and unfortunately,there isn't one formula that (search term) works for everyone. Being in the how-to and informational spacefor a B2B audience, I like to start off with stats or proof so that's worth your time to keep watching. Like in this video on (social signals) YouTube SEO, I startedoff by showing you how we rank in the top 3 for a lot of competitive keywords. I also showed you that our search trafficgrew by almost 400%. And most importantly, I tell you that I'mgoing to show you the exact steps we used so you can try and replicate our results.
Drop-offs in the first 15 seconds is inevitable. But you can minimize the damage by connectingwith your audience's reason for watching and showing that you have a solution to that problem. Third, you need to edit your videos (social media)strategically.For every single video we create, our focus isn't to impress you with cool tricks. We care about engagement. So rather than getting into a full-out editingtutorial, I'll leave you with a few power tips. First, use jump cuts. A jump cut is a transition between two shotsfrom the same position. It creates the effect of the scene "jumping,"hence, the name, "jump (video seo) cut." These add dynamics to a video and help polishmistakes. Second, draw your audience's attention towhat you want them to see. Pay attention for a second. If you've never used our Site Explorer toolbefore, and I say something like: "Click on the Linked domains report." Did you see it? Probably not. But I could easily draw your eyes to the ( linkeddomains report by doing this, this, this, or even this.
The effects don't need to be fancy, but theyshould help your(youtube videos) audience follow along to avoid drop-offs due to confusion. The last tip is to entertain with storiesor narratives. YouTube is an entertainment platform. But entertaining isn't easy. So while our primary focus is to teach SEOand marketing, we do our best to make it somewhat entertaining without trying too hard. If you've watched up to here, then you'veprobably seen some examples, so I won't go deeper into that.(social signals) We have a full video on the workflow we useto edit our videos for YouTube, so I highly recommend watching that, which I'll link up. On-page optimizations for YouTube boils downto 4 things: We have the Title, Description, Tags, and Thumbnail. Each of these help provide context to yourvideo and/or will influence your bottomline: click-through-rates. After all, no clicks = no views. Here are a few best practices to craft searchableand clickable videos, according to YouTube.
Ranking highly:
A study from Briggsby also shows that morethan 90% of top ranking videos included at least part of a target keyword in their title. While it seems important to include at leastpartial matches of your target keyword in your title, you don't want to sacrifice the"click-worthiness" of it. Tip 2 is to keep your titles under 60 characters. YouTube recommends keeping your titles concisewith the most important information up front. From an SEO perspective, that will often meanusing your target keyword near the beginning of your title. And you'll see that we added the phrase rightat the beginning. Keeping your titles short will also prevent losingclicks from truncation in search, suggested, and browse features. Tip 3 is to write catchy titles that evokecuriosity or highlight a benefit. If you were to create a tutorial on tyinga tie, a keyword rich title might be, "how to tie a tie." But that's uninteresting at best. There are numerous angles you (links to your video) could take like:How to tie a tie with the "007 technique;" How to tie a tie in 11 seconds flat;My 3-year old teaches you how to tie a tie. The point is that boring titles are less likelyto stand out in a competitive landscape. Tip 4 is to create a thumbnail that complementsyour title. In my opinion, this is the hardest part (video description) toexecute consistently. Here's the thumbnail for our SEO mistakesvideo.
Search engine optimization:
The thumbnail text describes the video since91% is the majority. And if you look closely, there's a pictureof Google's (video content) page numbers with the third part circled stating, "You are here." You can also draw inspiration from thingsaround you and use your image to speak undeniable truths like our video, "How long does ittake to rank on Google." And if you're stuck, try and get ideas fromGoogle images or stock photos. For example, I searched for the word "system" in AdobeStock, and was inspired by this image. So I used the idea to create our thumbnailfor our link building system video but cooler. The next video optimization tip is to writesearchable descriptions. YouTube says using the "right" keywords (youtube channel)canboost views and watch time because they help your videos show up in search results. But what are "the right" keywords? For starters, we include our target keywordin both the title and description. But we also include related keywords by analyzingthe descriptions of the top ranking videos. Just type in the keyword you want to rankfor, then look through the description for keywords that have relevance to your topic. For example, this video uses language like"free traffic" and talks about traffic in the context of a blog. Another phrase used is "increase website traffic." These might be keywords that I want to includewithin my description or other closely related keywords where my video matches the content. Next up are Tags.
Longer videos:
And tags are another way to give context to yourvideo, which can help you rank in YouTube search and suggested. YouTube simplifies this by recommending toadd keywords and phrases that are most descriptive of your video. You can also use tools like VidIQ or TubeBuddyto see the tags for competing videos in the sidebar. Look for common tags within competing videos,and add them to your video when it makes sense to do so. And as an extra measure, I'll normally copyall of the tags from the top ranking videos, and paste them into Ahrefs' Keywords Explorerto see the search volumes on these tags. Step 4 are In-Video Optimizations. Creating the video is 80% of the battle. There are additional optimizations you cando to increase retention rate and create a better user experience for your viewers.
The first thing is to add subtitles or closedcaptions. Many creators, including myself, believe thatYouTube reads closed captions to better understand the context of videos. And chances are, your viewers come from allover the world with a different native tongue. So it's worth using a transcription serviceor if your videos are scripted, just go to the CC tab of your video, select your language,and create your closed captions file. To give you an idea, around 17% of our viewersuse our English subtitles when watching our videos. The second thing to do is to add cards toyour video. These are an interactive feature that encouragesviewers to take one of these 5 actions.
YouTube SEO: How to Rank Your Videos #1
Just select the timecode where you want thecard to trigger, select the type of card you want to use, choose an appropriate option,and you're all set. Now, when a viewer hits that timecode, the titleof the video will slide in as a suggestion. Finally, use end screens. End screens are similar to cards.
The purpose is to keep viewers on the YouTubeplatform. For our channel, we have a Subscribe buttonas well as a suggested video the viewer should watch next. This can help you get more subscribers, keepviewers consuming your content, and increase one of the metrics YouTube uses in their rankingalgorithm, session time. I'll expand on this in a bit. For now, let's move on to step 5, which isto publish and promote your video. The first 24-48 hours from publishing canmake or break your video. So you need to promote your video as hardas you can right away. Here are some rapid-fire tips to do that. First, promote to your existing audience.
We publish at around 8:00 AM Easterntime on Wednesdays. We then use an inapp alert to notify our customersabout a new piece of content we created. At noon, we tweet out our video link, whichsends us more viewers directly to our video. And of course, we send an email newsletterto our blog about 24 hours after the video was live. Now, if you don't have an existing audience,a few things you can do are to post on relevant niche forums like Quora. Just search for the topic of your video, providea helpful answer and include your video in the mix.