With 2 billion monthly active users, adding YouTube videos to your marketing mix is a smart move. And optimizing YouTube videos for SEO is the pathway to be a winner.

This article is just a quick guide about optimizing YouTube videos to enhance visibility and increase traffic.

When creating your next YouTube video, keep these things in mind:

  Plan your content
  Keep your video length short (3 minutes)
  Don’t expect your video to go viral overnight
  Connect with your viewers

A Quick Guide To Optimizing YouTube Videos

YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google. So, optimizing your YouTube videos will help you grab some of that 2 billion viewers audience. This platform is a sea of opportunities. Therefore, don’t just publish one or two videos, instead make it a regular practice.

Now, how does one become a YouTube sensation?

Well, by optimizing your YouTube videos with best practice SEO. It’s accomplished by implementing an array of strategies to boost search visibility and increase video traffic. Of course, you’ll also want to consider monetizing your videos.

That said, here are a few tips to ranking your videos on YouTube and increasing daily views.

Select The Right Video Topic

Don’t produce videos that no one is searching for. It’s easy to find the popular topics that interest lots of people.

Go to the YouTube search bar. And input a search term like “eye makeup” (without the quotes). Or whichever category your channel falls under. Then, like Google search, YouTube’s search will provide you with the most searched video topics for that subject.

Performing Keyword Research

Just like when creating website content, you find the appropriate keywords to help people find it. So, the same holds true for YouTube.

Now that you have your topic from the previous step, go to keywordtools.io or you can use a different research tool.

Select the YouTube tab as shown below and explore the recommendations.

Note, keyword searches on Google might have low volume on YouTube. The search behavior for YouTube includes how to, tutorial or watch.

Writing a Compelling Video Title

When optimizing YouTube videos, one of the most important elements is the title. Crafting video titles to get views is a rather complicated process. However, it becomes easier using the below three rules of thumb:

  Solve a problem in one line
  Keep the title engaging and descriptive
  Be mindful of title character counts (less than 66)

Create an Effective Video Description

Your video description is crucial. Why? Because you can drive tons of traffic to your video by writing a gripping description. Also, make sure your focus keyword is close to the beginning of the description versus at the end of the writing. YouTube’s crawler will scan the description for the keyword and rank it promptly.

There are more options for optimizing YouTube videos such as tags, cards, custom thumbnails, and more. But since this is just a quick guide, I’ll cover more in a different article. For now, this should you started.

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Sara Komura

Sara Komura
VIDEO PRODUCTION DIRECTOR

Sara is the Director of Video Production at Envisager Studio. Her expertise includes animated videos, explainer videos, and other video types. She leads the team in creating professional videos that aligns with and supports clients’ marketing goals. In her spare time, she writes about video production, video marketing, and other media topics.