YouTube SEO Tips to Boost Your Video Performance
YouTube is now the second most popular search engine in the world. Find out how you can improve your YouTube organic search visibility and get more views on your videos with these actionable YouTube SEO tips.
YouTube is not only a social media platform, as of 2019 it is also the world's second most popular search engine. According to the latest trends, YouTube has more than 1.9 billion users each month. Users are spending billions of hours each month watching YouTube videos which means that there is a huge opportunity for publishers, brands, and small businesses to increase their reach through video content.
The principles of search engine optimisation not only apply for the content on your website, YouTube also has its own set of best practices around SEO which means that it's good to keep up to date with the most important ones so that you can improve the ranking and visibility of your videos. Here's a list of a few of the most important things that you can do to improve the SEO of your YouTube videos.Keyword Research
Just like on-site SEO, keyword research goes a long way to improving the search visibility of your video on YouTube. It's not enough to simply create the right content, if you don't get viewers to actually watch it then it's meaningless. Keyword research can help you understand how to link your video with the best words to describe it and how to create content that addresses the most popular search terms.
Keyword research makes it easier for us to discover your content and it also allows search engines to match your content with the search queries based on relevance. Keyword research for videos can help you to discover new content opportunities and create a video content marketing plan that fits in with your overarching YouTube strategy.
A simple way to find the most important and relevant keywords that are going to match your video intent is to use the YouTube search bar. The autocomplete feature on the YouTube search bar highlight the most popular keywords around your topic.Engagement Matters
It's not enough to simply get a lot of views from a diverse range of viewers on your content, engagement is one of the most important metrics that YouTube uses to measure the relevance and popularity of a video. User behaviour allows YouTube to understand whether or not your content is useful for interesting and therefore whether it is worth it ranking for relevant keywords. Some of the most important engagement metrics that Google uses to measure the strength of your videos include:Learn from Your Competition
A good team to help you understand how YouTube SEO works is to learn from the most successful and popular videos on YouTube. It's also worth searching for topics that are relevant to your channel to spot how your competitors are optimising for keywords, using titles to increase engagement, and how you can use thumbnails and descriptions to make it easier for users to click from one video to another.