SEO for Youtube: optimizing your videos

Throughout this month we have gone in depth in the strategy of Youtube for business. All that you can find in the previous posts of Oleoshop's blog is great, but we must never forget about SEO when we propose a strategic plan in a medium where the search engine is one of its strengths.

We are going to give you a few tips on optimization that are relatively easy to implement and that will give you an advantage when it comes to getting a little more visibility. 

The truth is that we have said several times that it is the second most used search engine in the world. That is why it is worth making an effort. 

Also, keep in mind that videos are a very interesting asset, but it takes resources (especially time and sometimes quite a lot of money). To make your video marketing strategy as profitable as possible, generating organic traffic is a great option 

If you are used to the concepts of SEO for Google, you will be quite familiar with many of the aspects that we are going to discuss. It makes sense since the search engine has owned Youtube for many years and they have adopted its logic.

Let's go step by step. 

There is no SEO without proper keyword research. People use words to articulate their search intents; if we find them and use them within our content, we will have come a long way.

It is important that you think in Youtube keywords and not in Google keywords.

The intents are different because the user is in a different phase of the Customer Journey. In general, words that are oriented towards discovery and comparison will work better than those that are directly transactional. No one is looking to "buy a mask" on Youtube, but they are searching for "types of face masks".

One of the best resources that can be used is the search engine's predictive text, which, when self-completed, offers us many alternatives. 

This can be done manually or, more advisable, using some tool such as keywordtool.io to extract the terms and Ubersuggest for the search volumes.

They are easy to use and help to speed up the task.

We will not get too involved in explaining the details, but here is more info if you want to know about tools for doing keyword research.

When we optimize a page to be important in a search engine, we work on some aspects that go from the content to the title, the headings, the tags, the images that are used...

In SEO for Youtube there are fewer elements, but they are also there. These are some of the most important ones and you should take special care of them.

Short but not too long, try to have at least 6 words and that among them are the most important keywords.

Note that using the keyword does not imply repeating it many times. This is an over-optimization that is very badly seen by Youtube and that annoys the user.

When the Google bot scrolls through a document, it can extract the topic it is about and the semantic context. A video is much more opaque to a bot because it simply does not understand whether what is happening within the content is unboxing or a tutorial in Hungarian on how to make the Betanzos omelet.

Description is our main weapon to achieve this, so we must take great care with it. As a reference, we would say that you should try to write at least 250 words in which the content of the video is explained in detail, repeating -3 or 4 times- the main keyword and some complementary or variation.

As in Google, or any other system based on an algorithm, there are certain ranking factors. This algorithm uses them to determine which content is more or less relevant. 

These are some of the factors you should know if you want your videos to be well-positioned in Youtube and generate visits.

Basically, the idea is to generate the highest possible user retention. In the search for relevance, for YouTube, there is a direct relationship between having the user spend a lot of time watching a video and the quality of the video (something similar to the logic of the bounce rate).

The other quintessential Youtube video creator's tag is "subscribe to my channel" when the video finishes. Again, this is something that is highly considered by the algorithm, which considers that subscribing after a viewing is due to the quality of the content.

Don't hesitate to ask, it seems silly but we know that a call to action always works.

This metric is also very simple: if you like something you share it and, of course, if you do not like something you do not share it. The same goes for likes and dislikes (a funny thing that does not happen in most social networks, dislike).

There is no more mystery about it.