An important part of maintaining a YouTube channel is optimizing your videos. YouTube video SEO is key if you want your audience to be able to find, view, like, and comment on them.
Read on for some of our top YouTube video SEO tips!
1. Optimize Your Video Titles
YouTube video titles should contain at least five words, with the primary keyword near the start of the title. Titles should make a user want to click on the video and be helpful to search engine spiders so they can easily understand what the video is about.
2. Create Stellar Video Descriptions
The video description helps your videos appear in suggested videos. Add a description to each video that is at least 100 characters – though 250 words or more is best!
The full description should:
- Contain your primary keyword several times without being spammy, including once near the beginning.
- Link back to your website in case people want more information or want to purchase the product(s) in the video.
Note that YouTube only shows the first 100-ish characters above the “show more” button, so make sure your description makes sense and uses complete sentences.
If the page you link to is ever deprecated, be sure to put in a 301-redirect so you don’t miss out on potential referral traffic from YouTube.
3. Add Closed Captions & Transcripts
Closed captions and video transcripts are helpful for users with assistive devices as well as those in noisy environments.
Additionally, over half of Gen Z and Millennial adults prefer watching shows and movies with subtitles, so making sure your videos are accessible to everyone is more important now than ever before.
Don’t rely on YouTube’s auto-generated closed captions or transcripts. These are often written in incomplete sentences, and the tool rarely understands brand names.
If you don’t have time to watch and transcribe each video on your channel, using an AI tool like ChatGPT may be able to get YouTube’s auto-generated transcript closer to where it needs to be.
AI tools can be helpful during this process, but the output still requires a human to read and edit. This way, you can ensure the transcript matches what is said in the video and that proper nouns are spelled correctly.
4. Add Your Videos to Your Website
Adding YouTube videos to relevant pages on your site can help search engine spiders understand the connection between your videos and your website. For example, you can include a product video on a transactional PDP or an informational blog post about the product.
When adding videos to your website, be sure to incorporate VideoObject Schema markup. This helps to better identify parts of the video for search engine spiders and gives the video the opportunity to appear in SERP rich results or SGE (Search Generative Experience) placements.
5. Respond to Questions & Comments
In the same way that we recommend responding to any Google reviews or blog post comments that you receive, we also encourage you to respond to all comments on your YouTube videos.
You can thank people for their kind words, validate their feelings and preferences, or tell them you appreciate their feedback and will pass it along to the team. (If you say this, though, be sure you actually pass it along to your team and work to make changes, if needed, to increase your trustworthiness!)
If someone has a complaint, provide contact information and ask them to reach out to your support team to get the issue resolved outside of YouTube.
Ready, Set, Optimize Your YouTube Video SEO!
While there are numerous ways you can improve your YouTube video SEO, these are our top five recommendations to get started optimizing the videos on your channel. Ready, set, optimize!
Do you know the latest news in SEO? To make sure you’re up to date, look no further than our monthly SEO recap series. You’ll discover the latest news, trends, and predictions in the world of organic search, straight from our dedicated experts. Read the latest in the blog series here.
Sources
- Morning Consult Pro, Why Subtitle Use Is Deceptively High Among Young Viewers, and Why Streamers Need to React.
- Schema.org, VideoObject.
