Over 25% of people click the first result when searching online, so optimising your content to appear in position 1 has never been more important. This doesn’t stop at written content and on-page SEO though, it also involves optimising your video content too.
People are changing the way that they search online, using platforms like YouTube to search and find different forms of content online. But how do you ensure that you’re ticking the YouTube SEO boxes to rank higher in the search results? In this article, we’ll take you through some key elements that you need to know about video marketing, including some YouTube SEO secrets to help you appear in that top position.
What Is Video SEO?
Video SEO is the process of optimising your video content to improve its visibility and rankings. By following video SEO best practices, you can increase the chances of your videos being shown to more viewers, ultimately increasing brand awareness and lead generation.
In fact, according to a recent report from Wyzowl, video marketing helped 90% of businesses increase their brand awareness. With a huge 89% of online shoppers wanting to see more videos from brands, optimising your video marketing strategy is an easy way to reach and engage with your audience.
Understanding YouTube’s SEO Algorithm
Now that we’ve touched on what video SEO is, let’s delve into YouTube’s SEO algorithm. YouTube’s algorithm plays a crucial role in determining the rankings of videos in search results and recommendations, considering various factors to determine the relevance and quality of videos. These factors include:
The users search history.
Video performance and user behaviour in relation to the video.
Text elements like title, description, tags and video metadata.
As YouTube is a video search engine, it uses these factors to signal to YouTube’s algorithm how relevant, popular or engaging your video is based on the user’s query. YouTube will then create a personalised homepage feed for the users to show only the most relevant content for them. By optimising for YouTube’s algorithm and aligning with what viewers want to see, you can improve viewer experience, gain more visibility and increase your chances of ranking higher in search results.
How YouTube Ranks Suggested Video Recommendations
To give your video a better chance at ranking in the users recommendations tab, here are some of YouTubes top ranking factors:
Video Co-Viewing: YouTube analyses which videos are frequently watched together or closely after by the same audience segments. A good example of this would be podcasts with regular episodes. People will typically want to keep up to date with watching these videos in chronological order.
Topic/Category Matching: YouTubes algorithm analyses the topic of the video being watched and recommends videos within the same category. For example, if a viewer is watching a video in the gaming category, they’re likely going to be recommended more gaming videos.
Personal Watch History: Looks at a viewer’s viewing patterns. For example, if you watch a video about puppy training, YouTube is likely to show more videos around that topic as you’re likely to be interested in those videos.
Channel Subscriptions: YouTube ranks videos from creators that the viewer frequently watches or who they are subscribed to.
With these ranking factors in mind, you can gain a better understanding of how YouTube ranks videos in their recommendations tab..
How Can YouTube Benefit My eCommerce Business?
Although using YouTube is a fantastic way to create brand awareness and generate leads by ensuring that your business is appearing for relevant searches on the platform, it can also be extremely beneficial from an eCommerce and sales perspective too.
For example, if you upload video content showing how to use a product that you sell, viewers are likely to be interested in purchasing the product. Instead of having to manually search for your product through traditional search engines like Google, there are a number of ways that you can showcase your products on YouTube:
Including the link to the product in the video description.
The product shelf below or next to a video or live stream.
Live streams with a pinned product.
The shopping button in long form videos or shorts.
As you can see from the image below, YouTube is the third most popular social media platform when it comes to people making a purchase through social channels. In fact, 34% of people use YouTube to make an eCommerce purchase, so you could be missing out on revenue and visibility if you don’t make the most out of YouTube for your eCommerce business.
How To Rank YouTube Videos
Video SEO is extremely competitive, so whether it’s eCommerce or lead generation, ranking your YouTube videos for SEO is extremely important for business success.
In fact, Hubspot’s State of Marketing Report highlighted that video content is some of the top content being produced. This further highlights the importance of ensuring that you’re making use of video product demonstrations, how to video guides and more to get your business and products seen by more people.
But where do you start with ranking your video content? From keyword research to adding timestamps, let’s take a look at some tips and best practices to rank your YouTube videos.
Discover Video Topics With Traffic Potential
Whether you’re writing a blog or brainstorming video content ideas, identifying what your audience wants to see is key, and this starts with keyword research. At Proof3, we can help you with your keyword research to identify potential topics that your audience might be interested in.
If you’re looking for relevant keywords with good search volume and low competition, we can use various tools like Google Keyword Planner and SE Ranking to give you some topic ideas based on what’s ranking on Google. However, to get a better understanding of how topics will perform on YouTube, you can use various YouTube tools:
YouTube Inspirations: As part of YouTube Analytics, the inspirations tab allows you to see elements like what content is performing well from other creators, top searches based on your audience, related videos for what your audience is watching and more.
Keyword Analytics For YouTube: Allows you to see popular terms and search trends for YouTube in particular. With this tool, you can find insights such as keyword search volume, keywords by country, popular keyword trends, top videos related to the keywords and popular keywords by day, week or month.
YouTube Autocomplete: Shows you real-time suggestions based on the words that you’re typing. This gives you an idea of the type of content that people want to see around those terms.
By focusing on video topics with traffic potential, you can increase the chances of your videos resonating with your target audience and appearing in the search results.
Create An Optimised Video
To ensure that your video is as optimised as possible, it’s important to consider key elements to ensure that your video performs as expected. These elements include:
Create valuable content that users want to see.
Use clear audio, good lighting and smooth editing.
Use a concise title that will attract the user’s attention.
Structure your content to capture viewers’ attention from the beginning and maintain their interest throughout.
Encourage viewers to take an action (subscribe, watch more etc).
Promote the video on various marketing channels.
Note: Consider YouTube policy guidelines to ensure that your videos are compliant.
Fix Your Closed Captions
Transcripts and closed captions are extremely important to provide search engines with additional information about what your video is about, but it also helps with your videos accessibility too.
For example, if a viewer was hard of hearing or were in a loud environment, closed captions can enhance their user experience by allowing them to follow along with the video, without relying on audio. However, it’s important to ensure that captions are reflected accurately and are synchronised in the video.
To optimise your closed captions, Youtube’s ‘Transcribe and Auto-Sync’ takes your typed transcript and uses YouTube’s speech recognition engine to create your captions. Once it has generated your captions, you can easily edit and optimise the timings using a simple visual timeline for added accuracy.
Use An Enticing Thumbnail
Thumbnails are one of the first things that a user sees when scrolling through a list of videos, so it’s important to use a thumbnail that will grab their attention.
When creating a thumbnail, use high-quality images that are visually appealing, engaging and relevant to your video to improve your videos CTR. Consider using clear and concise text or graphic elements to highlight the key aspects of your video.
Remember: Test variations of thumbnail designs to see what resonates best with your audience. YouTube’s ‘Test and Compare’ feature is used by thousands of top video creators online and shouldn’t be overlooked.
Add Timestamps
Timestamps can significantly impact your video session watch time. Much like your website, timestamps act as a navigation, allowing viewers to skip to the most relevant content for their individual needs.
Although it seems counter-productive to give viewers the option to skip parts of your video, it actually keeps your watch time up as viewers are likely to click away from the video if they can’t find the content that is relevant to them.
Take one of our clients, Just Kampers, as an example. By including clear timestamps in their longer YouTube videos, viewers are able to skip to and replay specific parts of the video that are relevant to them. Backed by clear instructions and using easy to navigate timestamps, viewers have a much more positive and streamlined experience.
Having a longer session watch time is also beneficial for YouTube SEO, as it indicates to the algorithm that your video is engaging and valuable to viewers. This can result in higher rankings in search results and increased visibility for your videos.
Embed Relevant Videos On Top-Ranking Pages
Embedding relevant videos within your website can provide additional value to the user, enhance the user experience and attract more people to view the video. Using videos on these pages also helps reduce the pages bounce rate as users are able to find the content that they’re looking for.
Even if you don’t have a YouTube channel, you can still embed relevant videos from your suppliers. For example, one of our clients, Wood2U, had a lot of installation videos from their flooring manufacturers that weren’t being utilised. We suggested making use of these installation videos as there was a lot of search volume around terms like ‘Quick-Step laminate flooring installation’, ‘BerryAlloc flooring installation’ etc.
Working together, we suggested adding dedicated landing pages to include the most popular manufacturer flooring installation videos that their customers typically want to see. Not only did this help promote their key brand pages from an eCommerce perspective, but it also helped Wood2U support their customers after making a purchase.
Track Video Rankings in YouTube Search Results
Tracking the rankings of your videos in YouTube search results is an essential part of YouTube SEO. Rank trackers provide you with real-time data on the rankings of your videos for specific keywords or phrases.
By monitoring your video rankings, you can assess the effectiveness of your optimisation efforts and make data-driven decisions to improve your YouTube SEO and increase the visibility and reach of your videos.
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Henry Jones
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