Video search engine optimization or VSEO is the practice of optimizing your videos in order for them to show up higher on search engine results pages. You do have videos for marketing don’t you? YouTube alone gets over 800 million unique visitors a month. If you’re not creating videos and posting them to YouTube, you’re missing out on a very large piece of the marketing pie. YouTube is second only to Google in the amount of search volume it gets. Add in the fact that Google now places videos in their normal search results, and you have a multiple-faceted way to get in touch with your target audience.
So the real question is, once your post your videos how do you increase your presence via YouTube? Following are some tips and tricks to help you with your VSEO on YouTube.
1. Stay Focused on VSEO
When it comes to YouTube there are many steps to complete when posting a video, you have to upload your video, describe it, interact with your viewers, share your video, and of course, optimize it! YouTube is a social media channel that can drive up your VSEO ranking so make sure you take the time to reply to viewer comments and requests. It takes time to build a presence and be successful.
2. Start with the Video Title
Titles are the first thing a user will see when searching for your videos, so they are very important. You have to balance your title so it is interesting enough for users to click it to view the video and have the keywords you want in it to get ranked for. Titles have a limit of 50 characters so use them well and place that target keyword or phrase towards the beginning to make it a priority in a search.
3. Optimize your Description
Your description is a place where you can put everything you need for VSEO including keywords and URLs. The best way to start a description is to place your links first, whether those links go back to your website, a playlist you’ve created or your video channel is up to you. You can place lots of keywords in a description, but if you don’t make it look natural and it just looks like you’re keyword stuffing the area, you’ll get penalized.
Another part of the description to pay attention to are the tags at the bottom. You can add as many as you want as long as they don’t duplicate and they stay relevant to the video. This is the best place to put all those targets keywords for the video. As with titles, place top priority keywords first.
4. Use Annotations
When YouTube launched Creator Playbook, annotations took on an extremely important detail; the YouTube search algorithm favors videos that drive traffic to other videos through annotations. Annotations are very useful as they can be used to:
- Link to other related videos
- Link to any video
- Link to a playlist
- Link to your channel
- Help your VSEO ranking!
Also use those annotations to encourage audience participation in the form of leaving comments, issue a call to action for your audience, and ask them to post videos of their own linking back to yours.
5. Create Playlists
The way YouTube’s search algorithm works is that when it searches for a video, its crawlers differentiate between videos and playlists. What this means for you is if you put your video in a playlist, there’s a chance of that video showing up multiple times in a search as videos and playlists are indexed separately. Creating playlists are very simple and are a boost to your VSEO so there’s no reason not to use them.
6. Sharing is Caring
Your video getting shared is a ranking factor so make it easy for your viewers to do so. Encourage them to embed the video on their own blogs/sites and always allow commenting and rating.
7. Above All, Be Unique
Be a little different and break outside the mold. Create content for YouTube specifically like product teasers or behind the scenes looks at your business. You can also create multiple channels on YouTube to highlight different portions of your business or industry.
With these tips and tricks you should be able to master VSEO for YouTube in no time and get your video ranked high on search results.
SearchPro Systems
2023