YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and the second most visited website behind Google. So if your company has taken the time and money to create quality videos, optimizing them should be a key component in your digital marketing strategy.
But where do you start?
The following is a guideline on how to optimize your YouTube videos to help get your videos found by your customers:
Create an Optimized Title & Description
Correctly optimizing video titles, descriptions and tags are an important way for YouTube and Google’s search algorithm to determine the subject of your video and help it rank in search engines.
Optimized Video Title The video title should be descriptive and concise and include the major keyword phrase for which you want the video to rank.
Optimized Video Description The description should contain information about what the video is about as well as keyword phrases that visitors might search on.
Always include a relevant URL linking back to your website so viewers can find the corresponding information. It is best to put the link at the top so it doesn’t get hidden behind the “show more” section. Be sure to include the “https://www.” part as YouTube will automatically create a hyperlink for you.
Aim to have 250 words or more, using the key phrases you’ve researched on for the title of the video while still remaining natural sounding (no keyword stuffing).
To help you write titles and descriptions, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
What questions are you trying to answer for your visitor?
What would people search for in order to find this video?
Tag it
Always add tags to your videos (10-20 is ideal). Each tag should be a word or phrase (use mostly phrases) that are relevant to the content of the video. If you had to describe your video in one or two words, what would those words be? These are your tags.
Playlists
Group similar videos into playlists- this can help drive more traffic between similar videos. A user is more likely to view another video of the same topic.
Write keyword focused, accurate description for the playlist. The description can be a maximum of 5,000 words.
Video Best Practices
Video Length – An ideal length for a video is between 16 seconds and 2 minutes. This has been proven to get the most engagement. Google wants to serve up the most relevant content therefore, they do take into consideration how long people view a video for. If a video is 6 minutes and viewers are only watching it for a minute, Google is less likely to serve that video up as it won’t be looked at as relevant.
Mobile-friendly – Make sure videos are mobile optimized – make sure there are not tiny words on the screen that will be scaled down to unreadable text. Most people these days are viewing from some sort of mobile device so you want to give them the best experience possible.
Don’t have time to optimize your video? Contact me for a quote.