How Do You Optimise YouTube SEO For Top Google Rankings?

As YouTube is owned by Google, YouTube is the second-largest search engine on the internet. Billions of people are using YouTube regularly, making it one of the largest sources of traffic online. Due to this, individuals and companies are utilising YouTube as a channel to market their products and services.

Advertising through YouTube is a great way for businesses to expand their reach and increase brand awareness, especially for smaller businesses. Given the sheer number of daily users on this platform, YouTube may be an excellent method of promotion.

As the popularity of video marketing is constantly on the rise, YouTube is becoming more competitive as a platform. These tips below will help your business to stand out from the crowd and optimise YouTube SEO to achieve higher Google rankings.

 

Naming Files

Before uploading your videos to YouTube, give them a meaningful and relevant name.

Correct file naming not only helps to make the clip searchable, but it also makes it easier when sorting for relevancy. The file name and video title should be closely relevant to the content in your video. Having the target audience for your videos in mind when naming a file or creating a title for a video increases its chances to be found on YouTube and other search engines such as Bing and Google Search.

 

Keyword Usage

Search engines usually look at a number of factors when deciding which video to rank and one of these factors is keywords. Keywords give an indication about the type of content you are publishing and this helps to give search engines a steer when serving search results. Meta titles and descriptions that contain relevant keywords are more likely to be served to your target audience and rank higher on YouTube and on Google.

Knowing what keywords to use takes a little bit of research, but it can make a difference when you’re trying to get your video in front of the right people.

There are several tools that you can use to find desired keywords, here are just a few:

  • YouTube’s ‘auto-suggest’ (type directly into YouTube search to see suggestions)
  • Google Trends – Find trending topics and searches.

 

Optimise Video Titles

Example Google search results for ‘seo tips and tricks 2020’

The best way to optimise a video title is to include specific and relevant keywords as this increases the chance of your content being discovered by your target audience. Not only will this help your content be found on YouTube, but it will also have an impact on Google search rankings as YouTube videos can be served as search results.

A YouTube video title should consist of around 50-55 characters to engage and maintain the interest of a user.

While properly used keywords improve your YouTube SEO, an intriguing and memorable title also helps to attract your target audience. Combining the right keywords and a memorable title helps improve your SEO and traffic.

 

Use the Video Descriptions

Example YouTube video description text from one of Odyssey New Media’s uploaded videos

The description of a video enables you to summarise the basis of the video and also provide extra information if needed, such as citations, sources, links to resources, and more. It’s a valuable bit of information that makes your video look more polished and refined.

For SEO, in particular, a snippet of the description will be visible on search engines should your video show up as a result. This means that it’s important to utilise the video description in order to optimise your video.

You should also use the description to promote your business/company website and links, an example of this can be found on one of our old videos at Odyssey New Media.

Here, you can see that we have provided links to services on our website for YouTube viewers as well as additional information about our company if someone wanted to contact us.

Any business could apply this strategy and method by creating video content and using keywords in the title and description to increase their SEO for Google Rankings.

 

Categorising Videos

YouTube videos can be categorised for users in order to make their browsing experience easier and more convenient. Making it easy to find and access your content is an important step in YouTube SEO. One of the ways you can do this is by labelling your video with the appropriate tags as this will help YouTube to understand what your video is about.

Example of appropriate tags for an SEO related business would be:

  • Education
  • How-to and Style

 

Contact Our Experts for Digital Marketing Strategy

If you’re interested in developing your overall digital marketing strategy, then please get in touch with us. We have years of experience in developing digital marketing strategies for a wide range of sectors.

Call us on 0121 439 5450 or you can contact us here.

Share