Welcome back to our Youtube University series. In this blog post, we look at how you can optimise your video content to help you rank highly in one of the World’s biggest search engine – YouTube.

YouTube is now the second largest search engine in the world by a clear margin. And as such, can have a significant effect on brand reach; with direct and measurable SEO benefits. As a result Optimising Individual Youtube videos alongside an optimised channel is vital in a successful SEO strategy.

Google Experience Metric and YouTube Analytics

First and foremost, to drive ranking any produced video must have relevant and engaging content. Google’s experience metric helps determine where a video comes in its and YouTube’s rankings. This consists of analytic data such as average view duration, comments, new channel subscriptions post watching, shares and likes/dislikes. If your video is scoring low on a few of these factors it won’t be ranking very highly.

YouTube Keywords

Keyword research for YouTube videos differs slightly from standard Google keyword research. This is due to the fact that Google only shows video results for particular keywords within your niche market. See below for an example.

This person has searched for cute kittens and google has returned a video result. This tends to happen more frequently for search terms with “how to” in, as well as reviews, tutorials, anything fitness or sport related and funny videos. Once finding a keyword, aim to go after those with at least 300 searches per month in Google keyword planner.

Specific Video Optimisation

Video title

• this should not be over 70 characters long, and contain a relevant keyword
• it also needs to be descriptive so it can be easily searched for

Category

• YouTube offers various categories you can put any video into
• make sure that the video category is relevant to the content

Video description

• this should not exceed 160 characters in order to show up fully in search results
• include keywords naturally wherever possible
• try to fit your company website in

Video elements

• when uploading your video, include relevant keywords in the file name
• this makes it more readable to Google’s crawlers

Captions

• YouTube converts videos into JavaScript and consequently, Google’s crawlers can’t read it
• include captions so Google can understand what is going on in the video

Annotations

• these enable interactive video commentary
• usually included at the end of a video
• most effective when including a call to action, and placed around the edges of a page
• can link to other videos to boost their views

Video tags

• an easy way to introduce a few more keywords

Following these top tips will really help boost your visibility on YouTube. Optimising videos can also have the knock-on effect of optimising your channel as well. This will help increase brand visibility, and links from youtube channels to a brand website can show real direct search engine optimisation benefits.

If you need any help optimising your YouTube content why not speak to one of Tamar’s content experts?