What Is Youtube SEO? How Is YouTube SEO Done?

We produce strategies and work to increase the organic traffic of brands’ websites on search engines such as Google, Yandex, or Bing. We call the processes on the website that feed the digital visibility of brands the most “SEO”.

At this point, while using the search engine concept for search engines such as Google, one of the points that many of us miss the most is that the only search engine is actually not Google, Yandex, Bing, or Opera! 

As a result of the queries made by today’s users according to their search intentions, they may not always be able to access the content they aim to find through known search engines. That’s why they can resort to YouTube or one of the other alternative search engines. 

With the simplest definition of SEO, we know that it is to increase the websites of brands in an organic way in digital. So what is Youtube SEO? Why did brands start to need Youtube SEO? How can I follow the rankings I get with Youtube SEO? We have answered questions like this for you in the sub-paragraphs. We wish you a pleasant reading…

What Is Youtube SEO?

Youtube SEO is the process of optimizing your YouTube channel and videos to be reflected in more users’ algorithms in order to increase your brand’s rankings.

These optimizations generally include the video title, description, and more. Similar to other search engines, YouTube has a complex algorithm that determines how and where your videos show up in its rankings. 

So what does YouTube focus on the most?

It’s interested in how ‘engaging‘ your video is on YouTube compared to other competing channels and similar videos. It is interested in the number of viewers your video has and how well it ranks in its category, along with the attractiveness of your video to viewers.

With YouTube SEO optimizations, you can increase important metrics such as brand awareness, number of followers, website visits, and revenue. The number of people realizing the potential of YouTube is increasing every day, and so are the producers. You should consider optimizing your channel to turn this situation against you and increase your brand’s conversion in growth marketing processes. 

Why Is Youtube SEO Important?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, has always been, is, and will continue to be important for brands. Besides the fact that paid advertisements on different channels are limited to a certain budget and time, SEO has always targeted long-term organic traffic. In addition to keeping interactions from all channels on the website for the long term, it also helps you to have a loyal user base.

In Youtube SEO, again with the logic of general SEO, optimizations are required to serve purposes such as increasing the number of viewers on your channel and being the most watched and searched video in certain categories. 

In this way, you can use the increased visibility of your videos to gain authority for your website, and you can be reflected in SERP results as a video source in many searches based on search intent. This will have an impact on both your website and YouTube channel in terms of increased authority, user-viewer growth, and organic revenue growth.

How Is Youtube SEO Done?

Google and Bing use similar optimization techniques in their SEO studies, as does Youtube. Of course, the most important components here are definitely the video title and video description.

You should create videos that answer the questions people are looking for or that can attract their attention in the long run. But you don’t need a huge budget for this; you can take the phone out of your pocket and create videos that can go viral on different social media channels.

Of course, we don’t need to explain the impact of a corporate and professional stance on target audiences over and over again 🙂 Therefore, if your business is suitable for more professional shootings, we always recommend that you consider the professional and corporate video production option. 

Technical Youtube SEO Tips to Increase Your Rankings

As we said above, you can combine your SEO and video strategies to increase your business’ YouTube visibility. In this way, your users can evolve into a loyal audience with the improvement of the watch times of your videos. Thanks to YouTube, you can make progress in growth marketing.

The first thing you need to do here to increase your target audience and improve your SERP rankings is do the right keyword research. We are starting our YouTube SEO tips that will help your channel attract more traffic.

Keyword Research for Youtube Videos

The YouTube SEO process starts with keyword research. 

The keywords seen and used on Youtube compared to other search engines (Google, Yandex, Bing, etc.) are slightly different. Generally, keywords starting with ‘how to‘ are used, and queries are mostly made through five ws and one h. 

In this case, in order to get ranked in the video results related to your business, you can first search on Google with the title you choose suitable for your video, and then check whether the video result comes up. One of the most functional ways to do this is to examine YouTube Search Suggestions.

Keyword research is not something that can be progressed through a few suggestions, and as we have mentioned a lot in the upper sections, it involves the beginning of the whole process. That’s why you need to do the right keyword research. Here are some tools you can use for this:

• Google Keyword Planner
• Ahrefs
• Semrush
• Keyword Tool.io
• MOZ
• Youtube Search Suggestions

Optimize Your Video Title

Creating engaging video titles is challenging. That’s why you first need to assess your audience’s search intent and relevance to your business. 

Footnote: 

Users’ searches on the web are divided into four categories according to their search intent:

• Information Acquisition
• Commercial
• Navigation
• Operational

Secondly, understand the purpose of your YouTube video and why you want to create one. One of the best actions you can take here is to determine what kind of service you provide to the user. How?

Well, if you are selling a product and aiming for your product to reach more users, you can definitely include the product name in the title with videos like ‘product review‘.

So don’t forget to include your keywords in your videos in a natural way and create clickable titles that grab attention. 

In addition, you can voice your target keyword in the video content! YouTube will hear it and continue to process it.

Optimize Your Video Description

The Youtube Video description field gives YouTube detailed information about what the video is about. The algorithm uses this field to match the video to the most pertinent query and comprehend the video.

The importance of the video description is not just relevant to one algorithm. It is also a field that will allow you to appear as a video result in user queries made on all digital channels. 

The most important tip here is to add your targeted keyword near the beginning of the description text. And Why?

Youtube provides a description field on the search results pages that will allow the user to see a little information about the relevant video. For this reason, content creators should add keywords at the beginning of the video description, both for the target audience to click on the video and for the Youtube algorithm to make sense of the description and gain ranking.

Optimize Your Youtube Hashtags

The use of hashtags on social media makes it easier for many users to find the content they are looking for on various platforms. Therefore, you should use the right hashtags in order to appear in your target audience’s searches using hashtags and to inform YouTube itself, which YouTube itself recommends. 

You can read about proper hashtag usage by visiting our article “How to Use Hashtags on Social Media”.

If your video tags match a video that someone is watching, your chances of ranking and being seen will increase. Therefore, you should choose hashtags correctly.

Encourage People to Subscribe and Leave Comments

Subscribing to a channel on YouTube is a big deal. Having people subscribe to your channel means that your users will be instantly aware of you wherever you add content or stream YouTube live. But as everyone knows, it is not that easy to convince any user to subscribe to your channel quickly.

However, you can produce serialized videos in areas where your target users are constantly researching and need new information about your business and the field it is related to. Since this situation will be continuous, it will both increase the views of the channel and establish a regular audience and content network on YouTube. 

In addition, the most commonly used method of gaining subscribers is for content producers to ask their viewers to subscribe. 

Another issue is to definitely encourage people to comment. You can talk about interesting or topical topics, ask your viewers for their opinions, pick their favorite pieces, or ask them to tell different stories.

When your video gets comments and the number of comments increases, it sends signals to YouTube that it is a popular video and that people are interested in it. This is important because YouTube, like Google, prioritizes popular content.

Therefore, one of the best pieces of advice we can give is to turn to evergreen content. You can take a look at our article “How to Write Evergreen Content”.

Add Subtitles to Your Videos

On YouTube, in-video subtitles are mostly used for viewers who do not understand the video language and are hard of hearing. However, subtitles also provide an SEO advantage that is not widely known. 

Specifically, search engines like Google, Bing, etc. crawl subtitles! This means that in addition to having a well-optimized title, description, and hashtag, you also have a text on YouTube that other search engines can crawl, just like a blog.

Even if most content creators use automatic subtitles and YouTube supports them, it’s not always perfect. That’s why you can add and edit your own captions to increase your channel’s SEO success.

Categorize Your Videos

One of the best ways to group your videos with similar content is to create separate categories under advanced settings. This way, your video can be placed in different playlists and reach more viewers. 

Of course, this process is not as simple as we said above. In order to categorize your video, you need to study the categories and strategically know which category works for what. But don’t worry; YouTube has a variety of categories to choose from.

Optimize Your Channel

In order for your YouTube channel to rank on YouTube and reach more subscribers, you should optimize your channel page.

In SEO studies, we pay a lot of attention to the professionalism and corporate stance of websites. Just like this, it is very important that your channel have a professional appearance. 

For this, you can improve your channel description as well as add keywords. The most important thing you should pay attention to here is not using keywords to describe the most important aspect! 

Take care to choose keywords that are highly relevant and compatible with your business and videos.

Add Engaging Small Images

The thumbnail of your video is the first visual field a user sees in search results. That’s why you need to design an eye-catching cover image for each video. Many people pay as much attention to the video image as they do to the titles on the results screen.

Even if the video image is not a ranking factor for YouTube, it will have a positive impact on your SEO efforts.

Share Your Videos on Social Media Channels

Sharing is definitely the best way for the content you produce to reach more people through various channels. 

In order to increase the visibility of your YouTube video, you should continue sharing on social channels regularly to ensure continuity. Here are some social platforms where you can share your videos:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Linkedin 

Embed Your Youtube Videos on Your Website

Another thing you can do to ensure that the videos you are trying to rank on the YouTube channel have more users and more views is to embed the video on the website.

Footnote:

Embedding refers to the placement of images or videos that we do not want to weigh on our own website server on website pages through a different external source.

Track Your Video Rankings

Corporate businesses or individual content producers need to monitor the performance of their videos over time and strategize accordingly. Knowing how the rankings of your videos change will allow you to see if your Youtube SEO optimizations are effective. 

There are different platforms that you can use to measure your video rankings, as well as manually track them. These are:

• Youtube Analytics
• Youtube Studio
• TubeBuddy
• Unbox Social
• Channel Meter
• Socialbakers

At the end of it all, remember that rankings can change depending on many different factors. The important thing here is that you continue to produce valuable content for your audience and optimize your existing videos. 

As Digipeak, along with the support we provide on SEO, paid search, social media, and web design with our expert team, we offer 360-degree marketing services, from branding processes to data control of your brand with our video production and camera services.