The world of online video is occupied by one giant website, YouTube. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world (right behind Daddy Google) with an insane 100 hours of video content uploaded every minute. Without the right VSEO practices, there’s no way your videos will get noticed in the sea of videos that is YouTube.
With those aspects in mind you might be thinking to yourself that it will be very impossible to get a high number of video views. With the right VSEO plan in place, you can give your content the chance it needs to get noticed in the new year. Here are some tips to help you out.
Content is King for VSEO
Think of some of your favorite videos on YouTube, what drew you to them and kept you watching? It wasn’t the tags or the description or even the title, it was the video itself. Great content is what gains you natural video views and helps drive traffic to your channel. To do this you have to make sure your content engages the audience, is entertaining or informative and is easily shareable.
The surprising part is that not all of your video traffic will come from YouTube. As your content increases in popularity, the more likely it will be shared across the web. From this, YouTube has an analytics tool that can show you where exactly traffic is coming from and in what numbers. This can help you see where your audience is and give you extra information moving forward. Content is the best way to help generate VSEO for your videos.
Using Tags and Titles
The way to make your videos get discovered easier is to use tags and titles. As with any search engine, your video content isn’t searchable, search engine crawlers just don’t work that way. It’s the text surrounding your video that allows your video to be searchable. Don’t overload your videos with useless tags though just because they might be trendy keywords. Your tags should always relate to your video and not just be a cheap ploy to try and get visitors. By using tags and titles intelligently, you can rank for your target keywords and boost your video in search results.
Understand YouTube’s Watch Time Metric
The way that videos used to be rated was by the amount of views that they got. Due to this fact, a popular practice to buy “fake views” became commonplace. YouTube changed how they prioritize videos for their front page now by using a value called watch time instead.
What this refers to is the amount of time viewers stay watching a video. It’s how YouTube monitors the bounce rate of your videos. This is where the importance of relevant keywords comes in. If your video has many tags not related to your video and a user stumbles on to your video due to an unrelated tag, they aren’t likely to stick around to watch it. YouTube will see this and penalize your video. This will have a negative effect not only on your video but also on your overall VSEO.
Employ the Call to Action
Every successful YouTube video contains a call-to-action, either within the description or using YouTube annotations. There are two sides to the annotations coin: on one side annotations can be used to increase audience participation and boost your viewership, on the other side, annotations can end up just being distracting to users.
Annotations are very useful to help keep your viewers on your page and help to keep them within your channel. Another way to keep users engaged is through the use of another new YouTube feature called the Channel Trailer.
What this allows is for a video to play when a non-subscriber lands on your YouTube channel page. This is a great call-to-action for your VSEO as it can be used to share what your brand is about, why they should continue watching your videos, and give them something to do to keep watching.
By employing these simple to use VSEO tricks, you can get your videos ranked higher in the new year and improve your brand’s online image.
SearchPro Systems
2024