YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and the first largest video search engine. So just like you use SEO for text-based pages, you need to use YouTube SEO.
Furthermore, YouTube is owned by Google, which means that YouTube videos appear in Google search results more often than videos from any other source. And for certain queries, video results are even given priority over regular organic results. These queries include:
- Instructions and Guides (How to…)
- review and unboxing video (iPhone 13)
- entertainment videos (funny animals, stand-up comedians)
- sports and training (power yoga, full body home workouts)
Most of these queries are best served with visual content, and your regular articles just won’t cut it. If you want to rank for these types of search queries, you need to make video a part of your content strategy and follow SEO best practices to optimize your videos for search.
Are you interested in: Keyword SEO services?
What are YouTube ranking factors?
Since YouTube works as a search engine, you must know what factors will help your videos rank in YouTube SERP:
View
A view is counted if the user has watched at least 30 seconds of the video. A repeat view is counted as a new view, however, multiple views per day from the same user may be considered spam and not added to the total view count. These measures prevent spam bots from manipulating video viewing statistics.
Fun fact: YouTube’s business is views. It buys views from video creators and sells them to advertisers. That’s why views are everything. That’s also why YouTube is so careful about counting views – they don’t want to pay for fakes.
Subscriber
Subscribers are real accounts of real people who follow your YouTube channel. Closed accounts and spam subscribers (accounts you can artificially acquire through third-party services) are not counted by YouTube’s algorithm.
Audience retention rate
Audience retention shows how many people watch your video until the end and when they stop watching. This is considered by YouTube to be more important than clicks and views, so your goal is to create videos that people want to keep watching.
Interact with users
Your videos need comments, replies to comments, and new subscribers after they are published. The more activity your videos have, the higher their chances of being ranked by YouTube search engines.
Video quality
High-resolution videos are appreciated by both YouTube’s AI and your audience. With this in mind, you might consider switching to HD: multiple studies have shown that quality videos tend to rank higher.
Channel Authority
YouTube offers powerful monetization capabilities, but it requires a lot of thoughtful analysis and content creation. Once your channel reaches impressive numbers, usually around 100,000 subscribers, you can go for a verification badge and make your channel official.
Relevance
The best way to get your video to rank high on YouTube is to match it to a relevant query. Take the time to analyze what your audience is searching for and what’s trending right now.
So how do you successfully optimize your videos for YouTube’s search algorithm? Let’s get straight to the point.
Tip . If you’re a visual learner, be sure to check out our new YouTube video on how to rank your videos in search.
Step 1. Do keyword research
Start with video keyword research – get an idea of what your target audience is interested in and how they reference this information while searching for it.
Using YouTube Search Suggestions
You have two options to find video keyword ideas with the help of YouTube’s autocomplete feature:
Manually enter keywords from the YouTube search bar. Start typing your keyword to see YouTube suggestions in a drop-down list. Why are these queries good? Because they’re what people actually type when they search for videos.
Why isn’t this a win-win strategy? It takes a lot of time to check each of your keywords manually.
Use a tool to check all your video keywords at once. If you use Rank Tracker’s keyword software, go to Keyword Research > Autocomplete Tools , select YouTube Autocomplete , and enter your keyword phrases just like you would on YouTube.
The software will show you a list of the most popular autocomplete options.
The bottom line is that you can check as many keywords as you need at once, saving yourself a lot of time. The software automatically saves the results in a table, so you don’t have to write them down like you do with YouTube Search Suggestions.
Rank Tracker also collects the latest Google search statistics, allowing you to compare keywords in terms of monthly search volume, competition level and difficulty and decide on their potential.
Find video keywords in Google
Because YouTube is so limited in keyword research, you should search for related keywords in Google. Keywords found on YouTube and Google are not 100% interchangeable, but there is some overlap in popular queries.
Rank Tracker offers ten keyword research options so you can find all different types of keywords that are popular on Google.
Once you’ve created your keyword list, you can add them to your Rank Tracking dashboard to see which keywords tend to trigger video results in the Google SERP. Keywords marked with a video icon are the ones you should prioritize for your YouTube content:
Note: If Google doesn’t suggest a video for a given keyword, consider creating an article. Videos are great and useful, but it’s better to have a good, popular article than a video that will be ignored by search engines and therefore ignored by your target audience.
Check video results in Google Trends
Google Trends is useful to use when you have come up with a list of keyword ideas and need to compare them to pick the most popular ones. To launch the YouTube search feature, open Google Trends > enter a query > click search > select Web Search > select YouTube Search .
Check out the keyword popularity filter by Top Related Queries (with the most search traffic) and Growing Videos . Breakouts are new queries that have barely had any search traffic before .
Step 2. Add video metadata
Video metadata is all the text and visual information that describes the video to users and search engines. Honestly, YouTube’s algorithms can now recognize objects in videos and understand their content, which means metadata is not as important as it once was.
However, metadata prevents algorithms from misinterpreting your video content, thus ensuring that your video will be ranked correctly.
Metadata is also the first thing users see when they watch your video, so your job here is to arrange it in a way that is attractive, relevant, and clickable.
Note: The first 48 hours of your video’s life are crucial. Don’t publish your video thinking you’ll optimize your metadata later. It’s hard to recover once the algorithm has flagged your video as worthless.
Put keywords in the title
Your video title should reflect the topic of your video, so it should include the keyword phrases you want to rank for. According to research done by Backlinko, videos with exact match keywords in the title rank better.
If you want your video to rank well on Google and YouTube, make sure your title fits within the 60 character limit to avoid being cut off on the results pages. Don’t overwrite your video title, avoid clickbait, and skip the ALL CAPS title.
Note: Titles can be translated to show your videos to more users in their native language. See YouTube’s guide on how to set up title translation .
Put keywords in description
An optimized description helps viewers find your video through search. Sound human, don’t forget to add a call to action, and try to put relevant keywords closer to the beginning of your description.
Remember that the first two or three lines of your video description will show up in video search results, so start on a high note.
While YouTube allows for 5,000 characters in your description, that doesn’t mean it’s your job to take up all the space. Contrary to popular belief, content length doesn’t affect rankings.
Don’t artificially inflate your video description – if a sentence feels right, then leave it at that.
In the Show More button of your description, you can hide all your marketing information, such as links to your website, social media, and playlists of related videos you’ve created.
Add some relevant #hashtags to the description: Unlike keywords in the title, hashtags can be broad match keywords and generic links.
Note: descriptions can be translated as well as titles. See YouTube’s guide on how to set up description translation.
Create attractive thumbnails
The thumbnail is the first thing viewers see. It allows viewers to understand what your video is about and decide whether or not to watch it. While YouTube can generate a variety of thumbnails from your video, you should upload a custom thumbnail.
According to a Creator Academy report, 90% of the best performing videos on YouTube have custom thumbnails.
Technically, the best way is to upload an image:
- 1280×720 pixels
- 16:9 ratio
- <2 MB
- Format .jpg, .gif, .bmp or .png
This is a typical example of a thumbnail. The search query for this video is how to make a vegan cake .
The thumbnail above is a good choice, because:
- The picture includes a person, which makes it more engaging and “alive” than thumbnails that are just images.
- The text takes up about 30% of the image, which makes the image more informative but doesn’t overwhelm it.
- This image looks professionally done, adding credibility.
Note: Uploading custom thumbnails is only available for verified YouTube accounts. Check YouTube’s verification page and follow the instructions.
Optimize your tags
YouTube says tags are useful when your main keywords are often misspelled. YouTube doesn’t limit the number of tags, although try not to overdo it: 10-12 tags max is enough. Make sure your video tags are relevant – these aren’t hashtags.
YouTube SEOs believe that tags work similarly to keywords, so they try to borrow the best tags from other successful videos.
Except, the tags aren’t visible to regular users, so they have to resort to various SEO tricks, like using the VidIQ plugin to see competitors’ tags and other video details:
Provide closed captioning
Closed captions, or CC, make it much easier for Google to analyze your video content – artificial intelligence is more successful at recognizing text over audio.
Google can suggest AI-generated closed captions for your videos, but it’s better to create your own. This way, you’ll avoid any errors due to accents, pronunciation issues, or poor audio quality.
Use keywords in your closed captions to help your videos rank in search. Closed captions are written representations of your video, so make sure to include relevant keywords throughout your script.
If your video consists of different parts, use keywords to mark the transition from one part to the next. For example, if you’re making a video about assembling a bike, you might say things like let’s put the front wheel on your bike or let’s put the brake cables on your bike .
This will allow search engines to rank your video segments if they match search queries.
In the screenshot below, you can see how Google suggests watching the part of the video that is most relevant to the query.
Create closed captions for your videos manually by writing down what’s said in the video, or use a tool like 3Play Media, Amara, or Cielo24 to generate them automatically.
Translate closed captions so your videos can be found by more users from different parts of the world. You can use automatic machine translation to do this, or you can translate your CC yourself to avoid cultural misunderstandings.
