15 Reasons Why Your Business Absolutely Needs SEO

These 15 reasons should offer some clarity, regardless of the industry or business size, as to why businesses need SEO to take their brand to the next level. 1. Organic Search is Most Often the Primary Source of Website Traffic Organic search is a massive part of most businesses’ website performance and a critical component of the buyer funnel and ultimately getting users to complete a conversion or engagement.

 
As marketers know, Google owns a significantly larger portion of the search market than competitors like Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, and many, many others.

 
1 Quality SEO and Website 

 
That’s not to say that all search engines don’t contribute to a brand’s visibility – they do. It’s just that Google owns a considerable portion of the overall search market. Nevertheless, it’s a clear-cut leader, and thus its guidelines are important to follow. But the remaining part of the market owned by other engines is valuable to brands, too. 

This is especially true for brands in niche verticals where voice, visual and vertical search engines play an essential role. Google, being the most visited website in the world (and specifically in the United States), also happens to be the most popular email provider globally with more than 1 billion users. YouTube is the second biggest search engine and over 2 billion people access it at least once a month. 

 We know that a clear majority of the world with access to the internet is visiting Google at least once a day to get information. Being highly visible as a trusted resource by Google and other search engines will always work in a brand’s favor. Quality SEO and a high-quality website take brands there.

 
2. SEO Builds Trust & Credibility
The goal of any experienced SEO is to establish a strong foundation for a beautiful website with a clean, effective user experience that is easily discoverable in search, thanks to the trust and credibility of the brand and its digital properties. Try out the Future of Dynamic Backlink Management Do you need a faster backlink checker? Semrush now has a high-speed backlink database plus a full suite of dynamic backlink management solutions. 

 Many elements go into establishing authority regarding search engines like Google. In addition to the factors mentioned above, authority is accrued over time as a result of aspects like: Natural links. Positive user behavior. Machine-learning signals. Optimized on-page elements and content. But establishing that authority will do more for a brand than most, if not all, other digital optimizations. 

 The problem is, it’s impossible to build trust and credibility overnight – just like in real life. Authority is earned and built over time. Following Google’s E-A-T guidelines is critical to ensure successful results. Establishing a brand as an authority takes patience, effort, and commitment and relies on offering a valuable, quality product or service that allows customers to trust a brand.

 
3. SEO is the Best Way to Understand the Voice of the Consumer
From understanding macro market shifts to understanding consumer intent in granular detail, SEO tells us what customers want and need. SEO data and formats – spoken or word – gives us clear signals of intent and user behavior. It does this in many ways: Search query data. SERP analysis. Analytics data and AI insights.

4. Good SEO Also Means a Better User Experience
User experience has become every marketer’s number one priority. Everyone wants better organic rankings and maximum visibility. However, few realize that optimal user experience is a big part of getting there. Google has learned how to interpret a good or unfavorable user experience, and a positive user experience has become a pivotal element to a website’s success. Google’s Page Experience Update is something that marketers in all industries will need to adhere to and is part of their longstanding focus on the customer experience.

 
Customers know what they want. If they can’t find it, there’s going to be a problem. And performance will suffer. A clear example of building a solid user experience is how Google has become more and more of an answer engine offering the sought-after data directly on the SERPs (search engine results pages). The intention is to offer users the information they are looking for in fewer clicks, quickly and easily. 

Quality SEO incorporates a positive user experience, leveraging it to work in a brand’s favor. 

5. Local SEO Means Increased Engagement, Traffic & Conversions With the rise and growing domination of mobile traffic, local search has become a fundamental part of small- and medium-sized businesses’ success. 

Local SEO aims at optimizing your digital properties for a specific vicinity, so people can find you quickly and easily, putting them one step closer to a transaction. Local optimizations focus on specific neighborhoods, towns, cities, regions, and even states to establish a viable medium for a brand’s messaging on a local level. 

 SEO pros do this by optimizing the brand’s website and its content, including local citations and backlinks, as well as regional listings relevant to the location and business sector a brand belongs to. To promote engagement locally, SEO pros should optimize a brand’s Knowledge Graph panel, its Google My Business listing, and its social media profiles as a start. There should also be a strong emphasis on user reviews on Google, as well as other reviews sites like Yelp, Home Advisor, and Angie’s List (among others), depending on the industry. 

 6. SEO Impacts the Buying Cycle Research is becoming a critical element of SEO, and the importance of real-time research is growing. Using SEO tactics to relay your messaging for good deals, ground-breaking products and services, and the importance and dependability of what you offer customers will be a game-changer. It will also undoubtedly positively impact the buying cycle when done right. Brands must be visible in the places people need them for a worthy connection to be made. 

Local SEO enhances that visibility and lets potential customers find the answers and the businesses providing those answers. 

 7. SEO is Constantly Improving and Best Practices are Always Being Updated It’s great to have SEO tactics implemented on a brand’s website and across its digital properties. Still, if it’s a short-term engagement (budget constraints, etc.) and the site isn’t re-evaluated consistently over time, it will reach a threshold where it can no longer improve because of other hindrances. The way the search world evolves (basically at the discretion of Google) requires constant monitoring for changes to stay ahead of the competition and, hopefully, on Page 1. Being proactive and monitoring for significant algorithm changes is always going to benefit the brands doing so. We know Google makes thousands of algorithm changes a year. Fall too far behind, and it will be tough to come back. SEO pros help to ensure that is avoided. 

 8. Understanding SEO Helps You Understand the Environment of the Web With the always-changing environment that is the World Wide Web, it can be a challenge to stay on top of the changes as they take place. But staying on top of SEO includes being in the loop for the major changes taking place for search. Knowing the environment of the web, including tactics being used by other local, comparable businesses and competitors, will always be beneficial for those brands. 

 9. SEO is Relatively Cheap and Very Cost-Effective Sure, it costs money. But all the best things do, right? SEO is relatively inexpensive in the grand scheme of things, and the payoff will most likely be considerable in terms of a brand’s benefit to the bottom line. This isn’t a marketing cost; this is an actual business investment. Exemplary SEO implementation will hold water for years to come. And, like most things in life, it will only be better with the more attention (and investment) it gets. 

 10. SEO is PR SEO helps build long-term equity for your brand. A good ranking and a favorable placement help elevate your brand’s profile. People search for news and related items, and having a good SEO and PR strategy means your brand will be seen. Having a good user experience on your website means your messages will be heard, and your products or service sell. SEO is no longer a siloed channel, so integrating with content and PR helps with brand reach and awareness alongside other results. 

 11. It’s a Long-Term Strategy SEO can (and hopefully does) have a noticeable impact within the first year of action being taken, and many of those actions will have an effect that lasts more than several years. As the market evolves, yes, it’s best to follow the trends and changes closely. But even a site that hasn’t had a boatload of intense SEO recommendations implemented will improve from basic SEO best practices being employed on an honest website with a decent user experience. And the more SEO time, effort, and budget committed to it, the better and longer a website stands to be a worthy contender in its market. 

 12. It’s Quantifiable SEO is quantifiable. While SEO doesn’t offer the same easy-to-calculate ROI as paid search, you can measure almost anything with proper tracking and analytics. The big problem is trying to connect the dots on the back end since there is no definitive way to understand the correlation between all actions. Still, it is worth understanding how specific actions are supposed to affect performance and growth, and hopefully, they do. 

 Any good SEO will aim at those improvements, so connecting the dots should not be a challenge. Brands also want to know and understand where they were, where they are, and where they’re going in terms of digital performance, especially for SEO when they have a person/company being paid to execute on its behalf. There’s no better way to show the success of SEO, either. But, of course, we all know the data never lies. 

 13. SEO Brings New Opportunities to Light High-quality SEO will always find a means of discovering and leveraging new opportunities for brands not just to be discovered but to shine. Offering quality SEO to brands means submersing an SEO team in everything that is that brand. It’s the only way to truly market a brand with the passion and understanding that its stakeholders have for it: becoming a stakeholder. 

 The better a brand is understood, the more opportunities will arise to help it thrive. The same can be said about SEO. New opportunities with SEO today can come in many ways – from giving content, digital and social opportunities to helping with sales, product, and customer service strategies. 

 14. If You’re Not on Page One, You’re Not Winning the Click – Especially With Zero-Click Results SEO is becoming a zero-sum game as zero-click SERP show the answer directly at the top of a Google search result. The search intent of the user is satisfied without having to click any actual search result links. It’s no secret in the world of SEO that if you’re not on Page 1, you’re likely not killing the organic search game. 

 A recent study shows that the first three organic search ranking positions result in over 50% of all click-throughs, while up to 30% of all results on Page 1 and 2 don’t get clicked at all. What’s this mean? Three things: Zero-click results win. If you’re not on Page 1, you need to be. There are still too many instances when a user types a search query and can’t find exactly what it’s looking for. 

15. SEO is Always Going to Be Here Consumers will always want products and services online, and brands will always look for the most cost-effective way to do that. While the role of SEO may change and strategies change, new avenues are constantly opening up through different entry points such as voice, apps, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

According to Comserve.Inc, next-generation search engines powered by deep neural networks and machine learning are set to explode in market value, from $14.9 billion in 2019 to $55.7 billion in 2025.

New, organic search opportunities will always arise. Conclusion The role of SEO has expanded significantly over the last few years. In particular, SEO helps consumers when in need, and implementing robust, quality SEO on a brand’s website and digital properties will benefit brands and their marketing efforts. 

 SEO has its challenges, but the opportunities it brings help future-proof success for any type of business and are critical to a brand’s web presence now and in the future.

SEO mean different things to different organizations.

For some, it means finding the most searched keywords, finding keywords related to those keywords, and creating content for those keywords. You then monitor how you’re ranking for those keywords and optimize over time.



At the same time, you keep creating content to help “snowball” the growth of your SEO program. Depending on the size or type of your site, you may spend a lot of time optimizing product pages to new keywords or even creating landing pages to attract new customers.

This strategy works well for many websites; however, this strategy isn’t sustainable when you’re an enterprise organization. No matter how large your headcount might be, it can still be challenging to keep up with new keywords and optimize individual product pages versus page templates.

Rank tracking, specifically, can be difficult as there are so many keywords and URLs to keep track of.

While smaller organizations have no trouble keeping up with the rank of their most valuable keywords, enterprises are often challenged with staying at the top of Google for hundreds of thousands of keywords.

Let’s address some of the common problems enterprise organizations face when it comes to rank tracking and how to solve them.
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Challenges With Rank Tracking For Enterprises

The bigger your website, the more complicated rank tracking is for four key reasons:

1. Rank Tracking Is Difficult To Scale

Many enterprise websites are enormous. For example, think about an e-commerce site with 8 million indexed URLs or a news/media site that publishes 100 new articles every day. When you consider that a single URL can rank for multiple keywords (sometimes hundreds!), this can quickly get out of hand.

So how can you routinely monitor that many keywords, especially when rank can change day-to-day for a wide variety of reasons? Even worse, how can you optimize individual pages for keywords with that many pages on your site?

2. Rank Tracking Is Difficult To Maintain

Rank tracking typically comes from keyword research, a process in which you determine what phrases your audience is using to search for the information or products you offer. Unfortunately, this process can be long and cumbersome, especially for enterprises that want visibility for millions of different keywords.

Because of this, keyword research is usually treated as a “set it and forget it” project, or at best, something that’s done quarterly or annually.

If you only perform keyword research once, or very infrequently, you’ll miss out on tracking new keywords that your site is gaining impressions and clicks for. Especially in an increasingly digital world, there is a lot of risk in not seeing recent trends more frequently.

3. Rank Tracking Doesn’t Provide All The Valuable Details

Enterprise organizations often want more granularity than most rank tracking solutions can provide them.

Many rank tracking solutions will tell you what position you’re ranking in for your selected keywords but can’t give you any additional details like how many clicks you’re getting for those rankings. This is because most rank tracking solutions scrape Google search result pages to calculate rank position rather than use real searcher or actual website data.

4. Rank Tracking Is Missing a Lot of Context

Similar to the problem of lacking details is the issue of missing context. Enterprise organizations need to know not only what positions they’re ranking in but why they’re ranking there. Are they performing well, or is there a technical issue that’s preventing them from ranking better?

Without that context, you’ll have little to go off of when it comes to taking action.

So how can you solve the challenges of rank tracking for large enterprise websites? You go beyond rank tracking alone and incorporate more technical SEO elements into your strategy.

How PWA and AMP are Different and What Should You Choose?

Recent stats have confirmed that there are 4.68 billion mobile users actively surfing and exploring the web. And in 2016, mobile traffic surpassed desktop traffic by claiming 51.3% internet users as mobile device users. As much as this term was being floated since the past decade, it is truly now that the Mobile-First’ era has begun.

Consequently, it won’t be surprising to see organizations working to provide better services and experience to mobile users first. However, Google jumped to the mobile bandwagon a couple of years ago when PWA and AMP were introduced.

Both PWA and AMP were designed to enhance a user’s web experience while using a mobile device compatible platform. But users often get confused between PWA and AMP. Let’s save you some time and help you understand the difference between PWA and AMP.

What is PWA?

PWA stands for Progressive Web App. It is designed to give users the look and feel, and the experience of a mobile application by accessing its web pages on a browser. Simply put, PWA is an optimized web page to provide an app like functionality. PWA works when a platform or its services are accessed on mobile web, but without installing its mobile app.

As mentioned, PWA is focused on providing app-like features. This includes:

Faster transition between pages
A complete app-like interface
Ability to send push notifications (requiring users’ permission)
Offline content accessibility, and more.
We already have mobile application, then why did we need progressive web apps?

Mobile devices allow users to download native apps‒applications you download from App Store or Google Play‒but PWA is better. Why and how? Andrew Gazdecki answered the question in a Forbes article, “PWAs are more efficient than native apps. They work on-demand and are always accessible, without taking up a smartphone’s valuable memory or data.

By choosing to use a PWA over a native version of the same application, users consume less data. However, this doesn’t mean users need to sacrifice the convenience of a native app. They are still able to save the PWA to their home screen — it’s installable without the hassle of a real download.”

What is AMP?

AMP or Accelerated Mobile Page was introduced by Google in 2015 to create faster loading web pages for mobile devices. Google open-sourced the ‘AMP Project’ to help developers build these web pages.
In order to create mobile-friendly websites, the unnecessary (inline) JavaScript is removed. Furthermore, the CSS is limited to 50KB for inline use and Google caches the website content to provide a CDN like functionality. The AMP web component, among other features, also provides (limited) JavaScript insertion as a part of AMP library using which you can add animation to your mobile web pages without risking latency.

In the current scenario, AMP is no longer limited to websites. There are AMP ads, AMP emails, and even AMP stories. The AMP version of all these is built to render quickly on mobile devices.
“These days, if it isn’t instant – it’s not fast enough. Even the most memorable creative won’t serve its purpose if the ad is slow and is disrupting UX.” explains the AMP site.

As expected from ads, AMP ads maximize ROI by getting better CTR. They are proven to deliver the same. Triplelift, a native ad tech firm, has seen a 13% increase in its revenue attributed to 6X faster ad loading using AMP ads.

 

PWA vs AMP: What Should You Choose?

Parameter	PWA	AMP
Definition	A web page that provides the look and feel of a mobile application.	Designed to deliver fast and mobile-friendly web pages on mobile devices.
How it's done	Coded mostly using Javascript. However, designed like a web app and includes functions like push notifications.	Website is scripped down of non-required CSS and Javascript to offer fast loading web pages while maintaining user experience.
Recommended for	Progressive web apps are highly adopted by e-commerce and social media businesses.	Accelerated mobile pages are recommended for all publishers targeting mobile audience.
Benefits	App like features.Fast, reliable, and engaging. Eliminates the requirement to design apps for different OS (Android/iOS) using different language. Offline site accessibility. Users don't need to download the app and its updates	Faster loading web pages. Good for mobile SEO. Better chances to increase in traffic Improved ad views. Being Featured on the Google search top stories carousel leads to a higher Click-Through Rate (CTR).
Result	A web page looking and offering mobile app-like functions and experience.	A faster loading web page with better user experience

Can AMP and PWA Be Used Together?

Yes, AMP and PWA can be used together to offer elegant user experiences. This is how it will look like:
User searches for a service and an AMP-enabled result appears on his/her screen. This means a lightweight and pre-cached website is waiting for the user to get clicked on. Once the user clicks on the website, the publishers can engage the user with an app-like web page that asks to send push notifications. This web page enables the user with features like:

• Offline browsing of content and service
• Smooth transition even during a slow internet connection
• An app-like experience
• What’s stopping us from adopting this idea?

The prime challenge is development. While AMP works on the rule of using only HTML and CSS, and avoiding JavaScript altogether (for the most part), PWA pages are designed mainly using JavaScript enabled service workers.

However, this can be countered by creating separate AMP pages used for SERPs, post which the traffic is transferred to the PWA page. What this means is that AMP page can be used to rank well on search engines, and once user clicks to open the AMP page, browser initiates the PWA page for user engagement and retention.

We can help you as a Digital Marketing Services Provider Company in Delhi NCR India

Final Word

PWA and AMP are different technologies for mobile phones. AMP is used to load web pages faster and PWA is used to provide the look and feel of native apps.

As analysed by Adobe, 40% of their revenue came from mobile devices from 1st November to 31st December 2018. With 10.5% mobile traffic resulting in conversions as opposed to desktop traffic where the conversion rate was 7.4%, it is clear that businesses, both big and small, should take their mobile audiences seriously, and start investing in AMP, PWA and/or both, depending on their needs.

By the end of January 2019, 12% ads served by Google were AMP ads. It is also said to be adopted by most publishers, especially the ones concerned about ad delivery and loading speed.

Both are powerful tools to improve site performance and user experience. You can choose either of two technologies or simply implement both to experience the best of both. The choice is yours.

Main Article - https://www.adpushup.com/blog/pwa-vs-amp-progressive-web-app-accelerated-mobile-page/

What's new in Google Analytics 4

Google self-describes the purpose of the new Google Analytics as a next generation approach to “privacy-first” tracking, x-channel measurement, and AI based predictive data all at once. By applying Google’s advanced machine learning models, the new Analytics can fill out data for website traffic and user behavior without relying on having “hits” come from every page.

Google Analytics 4 is built on the same platform for the “App + Web” system that they released in 2019. The App + Web version of Analytics was mainly focused on cross-channel data, meaning that it gave marketers a way to track users across apps, software, and a website.

All this means that its main goal is to shift the way data is shown to focus on users – mainly the user journey from first visit to final conversion.

Plus GA4 is all about “events.” These events are the main way that data is presented in the new Google Analytics.

Finally, the machine-learning processing in this new Analytics means that it can fill in gaps where businesses aren’t able to understand their complete customer base because of users that opt out of cookie usage and data collection. Internet users and even browser companies are becoming increasingly stingy about allowing Analytics to track sessions or return users by using cookies – for example, Mozilla Firefox has moved to block Analytics, and a lot of websites are starting to use visitor consent to define their Analytics tracking.

The need for something like Google Analytics 4 largely comes from new privacy protection laws (like the GDPR and CCPA) and the diminished stability of traditional analytics. A lot of businesses using the traditional Universal Google Analytics could often run into issues with inaccurate or missing data due to cookie consent options required by these laws.

Highlights of the new Google Analytics 4

It’s built with machine learning as the main form of data measurement, using “modeling” that can extrapolate from existing data and make assumptions about site traffic/user behavior. The new AI powered “Insights” feature is meant to automatically highlight helpful information for marketers.

It’s focused on giving marketers a “more complete understanding of the customer journey across devices.” And it seems that it’s more focused on measuring an end-to-end shopper journey, and not just individual metrics across devices/pages/segments.

It’s designed to be “future proof” and work in a world without cookies or identifying data.

Google Analytics 4 features “data streams” instead of the views and segments used by old Universal Analytics properties. There is no “view” level section of GA4. Whereas traditional Universal Analytics famously has three levels (Account, Property, and View), GA4 only has Account and Property levels.

Whereas “event tracking” in classic Analytics required modified Analytics code or gtag.js script, Google Analytics 4 claims to enable editing, tracking and fine-tuning of events within the UI. This means interactions like clicks, page-scroll, and more.

New capabilities of GA4

GA4 will allow marketers to edit, correct and fine-tune the way events are tracked in their analytics without having to editing on-site code. Data Import can now include a wide range of data from non-website sources (like apps for example) all within one property.

Cross-domain tracking that does not require code adjustments either, can be done within the UI.

A “Life Cycle Report” which seems to be one of the biggest changes in Analytics and focuses on user journey. Plus “templated reports for ecommerce funnels” give marketers a way to display and visualize data – a feature that before was only available in Analytics 360 accounts. Events: these are user interactions with a website or app – like page views, button clicks, user actions, etc. Unlike before, events do not require adding customized code into the on-site Analytics tracking code, some events are measured by default.

Parameters: additional bits of information that give context to each event. For example, parameters can be used to describe the value of a purchase, or to provide context into where, how, and why the event was logged. These can include page titles, article IDs, etc. – these are most analogous to many of the “dimensions” that were available before.

User property: attributes or demographic information about the user.

User ID: which is used for cross-platform user tracking.

Main Article - https://raddinteractive.com/what-is-the-new-google-analytics-4/

Google Web Vitals - Evaluating page experience for a better web

 Since, Google came in this world, it is working for a better user experience, it is started from SERP results and landing page of the website, landing page of the website again divided in various part like loading time, loading system, content, design and mobile view, so in this term Google announced in the last year means in year 2020 and its name was google web vitals, this tab also Google started showing in the web master tool and it is known as search console in these days.

So, lets start the value, worth and importance of google web vitals

Page experience ranking

Great page experiences enable people to get more done and engage more deeply; in contrast, a bad page experience could stand in the way of a person being able to find the valuable information on a page. By adding page experience to the hundreds of signals that Google considers when ranking search results, we aim to help people more easily access the information and web pages they're looking for, and support site owners in providing an experience users enjoy.

For some developers, understanding how their sites measure on the Core Web Vitals—and addressing noted issues—will require some work. To help out, we've updated popular developer tools such as Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights to surface Core Web Vitals information and recommendations, and Google Search Console provides a dedicated report to help site owners quickly identify opportunities for improvement. We're also working with external tool developers to bring Core Web Vitals into their offerings.

While all of the components of page experience are important, we will prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn't override having great, relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search.

Page experience and the mobile Top Stories feature

The mobile Top Stories feature is a premier fresh content experience in Search that currently emphasizes AMP results, which have been optimized to exhibit a good page experience. Over the past several years, Top Stories has inspired new thinking about the ways we could promote better page experiences across the web.

When we roll out the page experience ranking update, we will also update the eligibility criteria for the Top Stories experience. AMP will no longer be necessary for stories to be featured in Top Stories on mobile; it will be open to any page. Alongside this change, page experience will become a ranking factor in Top Stories, in addition to the many factors assessed. As before, pages must meet the Google News content policies to be eligible. Site owners who currently publish pages as AMP, or with an AMP version, will see no change in behavior – the AMP version will be what's linked from Top Stories.

Summary

We believe user engagement will improve as experiences on the web get better -- and that by incorporating these new signals into Search, we'll help make the web better for everyone. We hope that sharing our roadmap for the page experience updates and launching supporting tools ahead of time will help the diverse ecosystem of web creators, developers, and businesses to improve and deliver more delightful user experiences. Contact to any Digital Marketing Company for more clarification about the pros and cons of this algo change

Know how to Rank Your Youtube Videos in Search

We all know that YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world (1st one is Google) and the first largest search engine for videos. So, just as you use SEO for text-based pages, you have to use SEO for YouTube videos.

Moreover, YouTube is owned by Google, which means that YouTube videos appear in Google search results more often than videos from any other source. And for certain queries, video results are even prioritized over regular organic results. These queries are:

• Instructions and tutorials (How to …)
• Reviews and unboxing videos (iPhone 12)
• Entertaining videos (funny animals, stand-up comedians)
• Sports and training (power yoga, full-body home workout)

Most of these queries are best satisfied with visual content and your regular articles are not gonna cut it. If you want to rank for these types of search queries, you have to make videos a part of your content strategy and follow best SEO practices to optimize your videos for search.

What are YouTube ranking factors?

Since YouTube operates as a search engine, you’ve got to be aware of what factors will help you rank videos in YouTube SERP:

Views
A view is counted if a user has watched at least 30 seconds of a video. A repeated view is counted as a new view, however, multiple views per day from the same user might be treated as spam and not added to the total view count. These measures prevent spam bots from cheating on video watching stats.

Curious fact:
YouTube's business is trading views. It buys views from video creators and sells them to advertisers. That's why views are everything. That's also why YouTube is so vigilant when counting views — it doesn't want to pay for fakes.

Subscribers
Subscribers are live accounts of real people who follow your YouTube channel. Closed accounts and spam subscribers (the ones you might have artificially gained through third-party services) will not be counted by YouTube algorithms.

Audience retention
Audience retention shows how many people watch your videos till the end, and at what point they stop watching. This is the factor that YouTube considers even more important than clicks and views, so your goal is to create videos that people want to keep watching.

Engagement
Your video needs to have comments, replies to comments, and new subscribers after a fresh video has been published. The more activity your videos have, the better the chances of being ranked by the YouTube search engine.

Video quality
High-resolution videos are appreciated by both YouTube AI and your audience. With this in mind, you can think of switching to HD format: multiple studies prove that quality videos do get higher ranking positions more often.

Channel authority
YouTube offers powerful monetization possibilities, but it requires a lot of analysis and thoughtful content creation all the way through. When your channel reaches impressive figures, usually around 100,000 subscribers, you can go for badge verification and make your channel an official source.

Relevance
The best way to make your video rank high on YouTube is to make it match a relevant query. Take your time to analyze what your audience searches for, and what is a trend these days.
So how to succeed in optimizing your videos for the YouTube search algorithm? Let’s jump right to the point.

Do keyword research

Kick off with video keyword research — get an idea of what your target audience is interested in, and how they refer to this information while searching it.

Start typing your keywords to see YouTube suggestions in the drop-down list. Why are these queries good? Because these are what people actually type when searching for a video. Why is this method not a win-win strategy? You do spend a lot of time checking each of your keywords manually.

Add video metadata

Video metadata is all the textual and visual information that describes the video to users and search engines. Frankly, YouTube algorithms can now recognize objects in videos and understand their content, which means metadata is no longer as important as it used to be. Still, metadata prevents algorithms from misinterpreting the content of your video, thus making sure that your video will be ranked correctly.

Metadata is also what users see first when they come across your video. So, your task here is to arrange it in a way that's appealing, relevant, and clickable.

Optimize your tags

YouTube states that tags will be helpful when your main keywords are commonly misspelled. YouTube is not restricting the number of tags, though try not to overuse them: up to 10-12 tags is enough. Make sure your video tags are relevant — these are not the hashtags.

YouTube SEOs believe that tags work similarly to keywords, so they try to borrow the best tags from other successful videos. Except, tags are not visible to regular users, so they have to resort to various SEO tricks, like using the VidIQ plugin to view competitors’ tags and other video insights.

Main Source - https://www.link-assistant.com/news/youtube-seo.html