YouTube SEO Advice: 5 Ways To Get Your YouTube Videos Ranking

YouTube SEO Advice: 5 Ways To Get Your YouTube Videos Ranking One of the best ways to get better rankings in search it to get your YouTube videos ranking — this is some of the best SEO advice any expert could give, check it out.

Do you even think about ranking your YouTube Videos when publishing?

When it comes to trying to go viral on Youtube, SEO can be something of a forgotten asset. While we put a lot into refining the SEO on our websites we think of content first with Youtube. This isn’t a bad strategy, but intelligent SEO is a hidden driving force behind the continued popularity of a Youtube video.

With Google owning Youtube, search data between the two is shared. The major benefit of this to budding viral stars is that Youtube videos are immediately indexed by Google. So with all this opportunity in mind, just how do you get your Youtube video ranking highly?

1. Caption and Transcribe your Videos

YouTube captions are something of a mixed bag. You can be forgiven for forgetting to include them while you’re caught up in the excitement of uploading a video, but they do play a valuable role in your ranking. As a search engine can’t watch your video, it needs to find a way to read it. What is said in your video coming through as captions will contribute to the ranking.

Adding captions has become a less vital concern for the content creators themselves since YouTube introduced auto-captions on all videos. Using this service can save you time, but on average it gets the captions wrong roughly 70% of the time, meaning 1 in every 3 words is incorrect. If you’ve produced a well-made video it should be full of keywords you’re looking to rank for, and you don’t want to miss out on a third of them. It’s worth investing some time or money into making sure your transcriptions are correct and the keywords obvious.

When looking at transcription options, remember that Youtube has a strong non-English viewership. Consider the audience you’re aiming to reach and rank for, if they speak another language it’s worth captioning specifically for them.

2. Focus on User Engagement

YouTube is all about increasing viewer engagement, and it likes to reward those that do it well with high rankings. Engagement on YouTube means more views and more clicks through to other videos. Like dwell time for SEO on a website, watch time is a huge factor in how your video will rank. The longer a viewer spends watching your video it will rank, which is why hooking your video in early on a longer video is more worthwhile than producing lots of short easily consumable videos they will click out of.

3. Keyword Optimize your Videos

Treat the text on your video and channel pages the same way you would treat a webpage on your website. If you’re working towards ranking properly you’ll be doing some keyword research and basing your videos on that. As YouTuber Sean Cannel explains on the Stellar Life podcast, many budding content creators will shoot a video first and try to optimize later. This is the video equivalent of keyword stuffing.

The title and description of your video should be sensibly optimized with the keywords you’re looking to rank for. These additions should be natural, and used in the way YouTube users like to think. Attempt to use keywords that have less competition so you can separate yourself from your competition.

4. Encourage Comments

As mentioned earlier, search engines need text to read on your YouTube video page just like any other webpage. Comments are another method of getting text onto the page. It’s a great way to introduce two elements YouTube love, engagement and keywords. YouTube gives popular content a boost, and views, likes and comments are the three pillars of popular content.

Gaining comments has become a part of the YouTube strategy for content creators now. The best way of getting comments is to do so within the video. Either at the start, for immediate engagement, or at the end, as a summary and reaction to the content. Give your viewers a question to answer in the comments or a suggestion to give. To get more keywords on the page ask for a reply that includes what you want to rank for.

5. Add popular keywords as tags

Tags are an opportunity to include keywords. They’re an often underappreciated way of ranking and feel like too easy an option to yield any proper results. You should always make sure your first tag is the exact keyword you want to rank. This is the equivalent of having a keyword in your title. From there use a mix of broad and focused keywords for your tags, without going overboard and using too many tags. This is a common mistake for YouTubers and can give search engines a hard time defining what your video is actually about.

Achieving a high ranking YouTube video is down to persistence and intelligent coverage of keywords. Quality content that knows it’s audience will always win out on the platform, and as you build your base and discover your niche follow simple best practice and draw in a bigger and better audience.

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by Chris London of Pixel Productions Inc. The Everything Design Company