YouTube SEO: Ranking High is Easy

You can smash your competitors on YouTube — it’s easy!

To start off, you’ll need to adopt the correct mindset: What you’re creating on YouTube is a webpage!

For better or worse, YouTube can’t peer inside your video to see what you’ve filmed, so they rely entirely on what you put on the video’s webpage to describe it. This is where most video contributors fall short — they don’t take the time to describe their video thoroughly or know how to target organic search traffic.

Their loss is our gain!

So this is how you can leap ahead in the YouTube SERPs without a huge subscriber base or any external promotion: apply basic on-site SEO to the title, description and tag sections of your video uploads. I know — it sounds stupidly easy — but yet a quick look on Youtube should demonstrate how rare it is for people to actually do this!

Choosing A Title

YouTube lets you pick the title for your video, which also happens to be the HTML title tag of the webpage that it’s hosted on. This is as important for ranking videos on YouTube as it is for ranking webpages in Google’s regular search index.

Place your exact-match keywords near the beginning of the title, and keep the wording concise. When you look at a YouTube SERP, you’ll notice that the video titles are clipped to around 10-words. Make sure your keywords fit into this space and edit it afterwards if necessary.

Writing a Description

Most people write little or nothing at all for their video’s description. Remember, in Google’s eyes this is the bulk content of the webpage! It’s crazy to give a lacklustre effort in the one place that YouTube allows you to write to your heart’s content.

Drop your exact-match keyword phrase into the first sentence of your description. This is the only part of the description that’s shown on the video page without clicking “show more”. Go on to write as much as you’d like, but keep the most relevant and important keywords near the top of your content.

Your description should be informative and keyword loaded. Also, very few people will actually read what you have written, so don’t be a perfectionist on grammar and structure.

After your video has been online for some time, you may start getting various questions from your viewers in the comments section. Look at questions that get asked repeatedly, then address them in detail in the description section. This is an easy way to increase the word count on your video page and also a great source for fresh content.

Tag Generation

YouTube encourages you to write or generate as many tags as you’d like. Make sure to drop your primary keywords first, and then anything that’s even remotely related afterwards. Ideally, you should have dozens of tags.

Generally, go from highly specific keywords to more generic ones.

Why YouTube Is Easy

Using SEO in the title, description and tags of your videos will do wonders for them in the search index. This is because most video uploaders — including professional producers — know next to nothing about rank algorithms or SEO. Furthermore, most established producers rely on their subscriber base for views, and thus don’t even bother targeting organic search traffic!

On the other side of things, those that do know SEO and who come from an online marketing background are still likely to be focused on creating text-based media. But among those that do take a stab at creating video content, I’ve noticed that they often do a lousy job at promoting them; perhaps they’re only focused on their subscriber base?

Whatever the case, there is ample opportunity to get free search traffic to your videos, so long as you view your YouTube contributions as webpages. In other words, they’re pages that just happen to have videos embedded in them — a type of media that YouTube is incapable of judging directly. So it all comes down to what you write on the page to describe them.

Do yourself a favor and invest a bit of time SEO’ing each and every upload that you make to YouTube. Do a bit of keyword research before hand, and your job will even be easier!

There are many more tips for bringing search traffic to your videos — this is just the absolute basics! I’ll be sure to write more about this in the future, so stay tuned!