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
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