Introduction to YouTube SEO

Did you know that each day there are over a billion searches on Facebook and over 300 billion tweets on Twitter. YouTube is definitely far behind in achieving the coveted ‘billion’ mark. A staggering 4+ billion hours of videos are watched on YouTube everyday.

Amidst rising competition from other players such as Facebook, YouTube is still the go-to platform for video marketing. It is the largest video streaming platform in the world and the second largest search engine after Google, its parent company. It is getting more and more difficult to rank videos on YouTube and make them discoverable. That’s where ‘Search Engine Optimization’ plays a key role. To get your videos to rank well for the relevant search terms, you need to provide engaging content keeping in mind the video SEO best practices.

You can earn ROI from your YouTube channel with the help of advertisements. But these ads will be served only when video views are high and the watch time is higher. So how do you increase the video views? With so much content uploaded per minute on YouTube, the chances of your video getting ranked and discovered by users are very minuscule. YouTube not only ranks videos by volume of views but also by watch time. Video views and watch-time increase when the video is discoverable in other words optimized.

These are the 3 ways in which your videos can be discovered.

• YouTube Search – Video search is the largest contributor to video discovery. We need to consider various factors here such as compelling imagery and effective metadata such as thumbnail, title and description for your videos to rank well in search ranking.

• YouTube Subscribers – Subscribers to your channel are the most important asset of your videos, they guarantee views and watch time. Brands must monitor this metric regularly and ensure that the subscriber base is always a growing number.

• Social Media – YouTube views from Social Media channels have gained momentum over the last 5 years. Social media makes the video discovery easier as it is targeted over a group of people. Brands need to have a social media strategy for YouTube.

You must have a YouTube video SEO strategy. Creating engaging content with relevant keywords, adding title and description to make your videos discoverable, adding relevant call-to-actions are some of the practices you can follow to ensure that your video is discovered and viewed.

You can also listen to our expert webinar on YouTube SEO.