Guest post produced by the team SEMRush .
Even with the expansion of Facebook Videos, YouTube is still the king of video marketing segment. When users want to find a video, the first place they’ll search is YouTube.
Why is this so important to optimize your channel and your videos to ensure they can be easily found among billions of videos and channels currently available.
A flashy banner to decorate the top of your YouTube page is crucial because your channel should be visually appealing. Make sure that your images and the channel name are in the middle of the banner and not on the sides so that they are still visible on a mobile screen.
At the bottom of your banner, you can put links to your social networks and your page.
Ask your webmaster to check your domain with Google Search Console. Now, you can now add a link that will appear on your YouTube video and take you to your site. Your domain is in the “associated website” in the “Advanced” settings.
Be careful when using commercial music in their videos. YouTube offers royalty-free music that you can use.
In the settings of your channel, click “Advanced Settings”.
In the “Channel” menu, select “Upload defaults”. These patterns are settings of your uploads, ie here you can select default settings for tags, privacy videos, comments, languages, etc.
Now that your channel is already optimized, we will learn to optimize videos.
Get a high number of video views may seem difficult, but not impossible, provided you have a plan that works.
Think about it, you will not create a new blog post without planning optimization before. With the videos is exactly the same.
Let’s look at video optimization details
To get started, install the extension vidIQ Vision . Once you finish, you will see a small “IQ” icon at the top right of your screen. Now, update the YouTube page and notice that each video appears with a vidIQ panel underneath. The panel provides various information practices, the average number of views, number of views per hour, number of subscribers each video brought etc.
Always use keywords and phrases relevant as video tags. If you chose a tag in the “Upload defaults” section, they will automatically appear, however, you can always add more tags to manually upload the video.
Incidentally, the vidIQ lets you see what tags other video creators are using.
By uploading your video, we recommend choosing the private way to ensure that your video will remain unavailable to the public until you finish all the adjustments and corrections. To do this, select the “Private” in the “Info and Settings” menu option.
Opt for a readable and optimized title for users. To create a good title, you do not need to fill it with keywords because Google is smart and may find that you are trying to fool you. Use natural language and choice phrases that seem natural. Your goal is to achieve a good balance between the keywords and the readability of your content.
After choosing your title, copy and paste the full sentence in the first line of the description of your video.
Try writing a description of approximately 400 words providing as much information as possible.
Think about the user’s point of view: it would not be great if you could skip to the main point of a video of 60 minutes? Believe it is possible.
Let’s assume that your video has three minute presentation, and you start explaining what is SEO for videos after one minute and shows a practical example to 02:32.
In your description, you can write: “1:00: Definition of SEO for videos. 2:32: Practical Example “.
When you publish this video, YouTube will transform their timestamps into clickable links that allow users to move to a specific time of the video.
This way, you can help Google and its users better understand your video.
On the right of the page, under “Video Manager”, you can see symbols of Twitter and Google+ (if you’ve linked your Twitter and Google+ accounts to your channel).
Check both boxes and copy its description in the field above the boxes. Your description will be shared with users of Twitter and Google+ via Push Notification.
All your YouTube videos must be activated subtitles. To do this, go to the “Subtitles and CC” section on the “Video Manager” and click the “Add new subtitles or CC” button.
The tool Rev.com can help you create captions for your audio and video files for USD 1.00 per minute. Once you receive files with subtitles, upload it.
At the moment, this feature is only available for desktop users, but is very useful and allows you to add up to 5 cards per video. The cards can show a specific URL, a custom image, calls-to-action etc.
With the help of cards, you can send your users to your site using their videos. Cards can appear and disappear at any time of the video.
Now that your videos are optimized already, it’s time to evaluate the performance of their content and find out which bring more public and which ones failed to draw the attention of users.
To analyze this data, check out the “Analytics” page information.
To start, review the engagement – amount of likes, dislikes, comments and views. These metrics can help you better understand the preferences of their audience.
Another important metric is the number of subscribers. Find out how this figure is changing over time, which brought more subscribers videos and understand what types of videos and themes which have success in your channel.
YouTube channel optimization and management can seem complicated, but fortunately there are several tools that can help you with this task. Some of them are:
And you use some specific hacks to optimize your YouTube videos? Share your experience in the comments!