Some tips to optimize your SEO on YouTube

If you read us regularly, you surely know that the agency’s SEA team fights tirelessly against corporate self-censorship when it comes to creating an advertising video for YouTube. And for good reason, today it is a format accessible to most budgets, which can hold some nice surprises in terms of performance.

But you may not know it, YouTube is also the 2 Nd search engine behind the unbeatable Google. Inevitably, our SEO team also had some advice for you on this organic acquisition channel, which has been on the rise lately.

By 2021, 80% of internet data traffic should be attributable to video (source: Cisco), According to the latest measurements from Mediatory, in France alone, 39 million Internet users use YouTube, of which 16 million use it every day. What’s more, in addition to bringing together most categories of consumers, the platform’s audience is considered to be particularly attentive to the content it consumes.

Suffice it to say that with an appropriate natural referencing strategy, your channel could quickly take off and bring you as many visitors as your site, or even more if your activity is particularly suited to it. So here are some SEO tips to please the YouTube algorithm and better position your videos there in the search results.

Summary

• Think SEO when working on your video keywords
• Use transcripts and subtitles to help SEO robots
• Intelligently embed your keywords in the fields associated with videos on YouTube
  • The name of your files
  • The title of your videos
  • La description
  • Les tags
• Do not neglect the gain of authority brought by the backlinks
• Optimize your CTR with good copywriting
• Care for your user experience signals to please the algorithm
• What to remember to optimize your SEO on YouTube
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Why is it important to optimize the SEO of your YouTube videos?
  • How can you optimize your video titles and descriptions?
  • What other tips can help improve the SEO of your YouTube videos?

Think SEO when working on your video keywords

SEO, for “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)“, is not limited to Google. Certainly, Google brews most of the organic traffic, but natural referencing techniques make it possible to seek out tens or even hundreds of thousands of users every month elsewhere on the web.

So, on YouTube as elsewhere, to generate traffic, you have to apply a certain number of classic good SEO practices, starting with semantic work on keywords. This work, which you may already be doing to position your blog articles or your corporate pages on Google, you have everything to gain by extending it to your YouTube channel. It is thanks to the keywords that the platform’s indexing robots will understand the subject of your videos and associate them with the right user requests.

It’s up to you to determine the most relevant keywords for your strategy, by deciding between their search volume and their level of competition. You can help yourself with the tools usually used for SEO on Google, but you can also be attentive to the specificities of the video platform, in particular by taking inspiration from:

• Automatic search suggestions from the YouTube search bar
• Titles and descriptions of the most popular videos in your theme

If you’re starting out with low visibility, bet on long-tail queries. They will be more easily accessible to you and will normally bring you more qualified traffic, located at the bottom of the conversion funnel.

Use transcripts and subtitles to help SEO robots

Once you have determined the keywords that will allow you to reference your videos with your ideal audience, you still have to integrate these keywords into the data that you send to Your tube’s indexing robots.

However, these robots do not yet understand the meaning of the videos… They therefore need associated texts to analyze the subject of these videos. The most exhaustive means of transmitting this content to them remains to produce transcriptions of your videos (possibly with the help of the automatic tool provided by YouTube) in SRT files and to activate the subtitles.

By doing so, you will give indexing robots textual material equivalent to the comments developed in your videos. They will therefore be able to understand these words with precision.

Intelligently embed your keywords in the fields associated with videos on YouTube

Not all videographers use subtitles, SEO on YouTube also takes into account the various text fields associated with videos. It is therefore appropriate to naturally integrate your important keywords to position yourself in the search results.

In this case, you must pay attention to the following fields:

• The name of your files

Few videos’ creators care, but the name of your files is the first gateway into understanding your videos for YouTube robots. Before uploading your files to the platform, remember to rename them in accordance with their content.

• The title of your videos

This is the field that users see first. It is therefore an important element for SEO on YouTube. You need to include at least your main keyword and, if possible, one or two secondary keywords. The difficulty, however, lies in the need not to let the integration of keywords in this title erase the attractive side, which must remain its priority. Think SEO, but not too much!

• La description

Unlike the title, the description gives you much more space to place your target keywords. This description can thus be approached from a classic perspective of writing SEO texts. In other words, be sure to develop a clear statement that is faithful to the content of the associated video, while diversifying the semantic spectrum to give material to indexing robots. And why not also take the opportunity to develop a kind of internal link to your channel by placing links to your other videos in your descriptions?

• Les tags

Officially, they are not taken into account for referencing by YouTube. In theory, it is therefore a fairly secondary field. That said, these tags still give crawlers an additional way to understand the content of your videos. It would therefore be a shame to deprive yourself of them… In any case, you have nothing to lose by using them, both to describe the subject of your videos and their type (testimonial, test, tutorial, etc.).

Do not neglect the gain of authority brought by the backlinks

It is unclear to what extent backlinks influence Your tube’s algorithm. Still, the authority level of a video weighs in its SEO.

The net linking work that you may already be carrying out for the important pages of your website would therefore benefit from being extended to the important videos of your channel. A reference site that would publish an outgoing link to one of your videos would on this occasion transmit part of its authority to this video and, more broadly, to your channel. This would undoubtedly be an asset for your SEO on the video platform, not to mention that it would also bring you traffic.

Moreover, YouTube videos are positioning themselves better and better in Google search results. By working on the net linking of your channel, you will put all the chances on your side to raise your content in the SERP of the leader of search engines.

Optimize your CTR with good copywriting

Being well referenced on YouTube is one thing, collecting views on your videos is another (which also has an influence on the first…).

What’s the point of making efforts to improve your SEO on the platform if it’s to see potential traffic pass you by and leave for the competition? Once well referenced with your audience, you must obtain a good click-through rate on your videos, otherwise your efforts will not be rewarded.

And, for once, the best way to generate clicks is to take care of your copywriting in the search results:

• Optimize the visuals and texts of your thumbnails to create attraction
• Place a profit promise in your headlines
• Play on the complementarity between the two

By mobilizing the levers of persuasive writing, you will certainly boost your CTR and do justice to all your SEO work. On this subject, have you read our article on the pillars of good copywriting?

Little tip: also bet on long videos. They tend to get more clicks and rank better, as evidenced by the average length of top 5 videos, which is 11 minutes.

Care for your user experience signals to please the algorithm

In the same way that the click-through rate on your videos influences their SEO, the different user experience signals while watching them also influence this SEO. At this point, we enter the heart of Your tube’s algorithm. This is both the most enigmatic aspect of SEO on YouTube and the one that can make all the difference…

Fortunately, the enigma is not total and the main variables of the algorithm related to UX are known. Here they are, in no order of importance:

• Number of views
• Number of shares and embeds on other sites
• number of likes
• Number of subscriptions
• Activity in comments
• Average watch time

To work on these variables, there is no miracle recipe. The quality of your content and its adequacy with the needs of your PPC for Home Services remain the main factors of success. That said, you can make things easier for yourself, for example by asking your “viewers” to like your videos and subscribe to your channel, as is tradition on YouTube, or by encouraging them to comment.

What to remember to optimize your SEO on YouTube

As you will have understood, SEO on YouTube is in fact not very different from SEO on Google and on all search engines. To improve the SEO of your videos, you need:

• Develop a smart keyword strategy, with a focus on the long tail
• Make life easier for crawlers by using text associated with videos
• Work on your channel’s net linking
• Use copywriting to increase your CTR
• Take care of your user experience and the signals that reflect it