The YouTube SEO tips I’m about to give you will have helped you rank for hundreds of different keywords. Here, I’m not gonna give you generic advice like use video tags you already know. Here, You’re gonna see little-known SEO tips that are working right now.
Let’s do this. And trust me, I tested everything different combinations of keywords, video lengths, introductions, tags, and more. It took months of almost nonstop testing for me to figure things out but in the end, I developed a formula for ranking videos that actually worked. In this formula quickly grew my rankings, views, subscribers, and traffic.
Now it’s time to show you the most powerful strategies that I used. So, Let’s get started without any further delay:
#1 Front-load Your Keyword: As Everyone knows, You should use your target keyword in your video “title” but what you might not know is that YouTube puts more weight on words that appear at the beginning of your title.
For example, let’s say you want to rank your video for cold brew coffee and you put a title like this: My 7 Best Tips for Making Cold Brew Coffee.
Now, that title completely cool but you can easily make that title even more SEO-friendly by front-loading your keyword. A tittle with a front-loaded keyword would look something like this “Cold Brew Coffee: My 7 Best Tips“. In fact, this little tip works so well, that I tend to front-load keywords in almost all of my titles.
#2 Boost Video Engagement Signals: After long research on “What makes a video rank higher than others” I found that videos with lots of engagement signals outranked videos that didn’t get a lot of engagement. So, what are engagement signals exactly?
Connection signals like shares, likes, comments, and subscribers. So, Every time a user engages with your video, it tells YouTube of Search Bot that people are loving this video and comments correlated with rankings more than any other engagement signals.
So, the question is, how can you get more people to comment on your videos?
Putting a specific call to action at the end of your video works best for you. Most Youtubers use a generic call to action like, “Leave a comment,” or “Let me know in the comment section” But I’ve found that hyper-specific call to actions works much better so instead of a generic, “Leave a comment,” give your audience a particular thing to comment on.
For example, at the end of the video, you can ask your viewers about their experience in relation to this video.
#3 Use The Tab Formula for Video Tags: According to our ranking factor study, tags aren’t as important as they used to be. That said, tags still make a difference. So, it’s worthwhile to spend some time in them. Unfortunately, most of the people on YouTube use tags completely wrong. Remember tags are designed to help YouTube to understand the content of your video. Which means you don’t need a lot of tags to get the job done. In fact, if you use lots of tags, you’re just gonna confuse YouTube and Google and they’ve no idea what your video is actually about.
For example, If you are using 15-20 tags in a video. Imagine for a second that you’re YouTube. What do these tags tell you? Well, they tell you the video is about 15-20 different topics and if YouTube doesn’t understand what your video is about, they’re not gonna rank it for anything.
That’s why you should a small number of highly specific tags. I call my approach the TAB formula.
The TAB stands for target, alternative, and broad. Here’s exactly how it works:
- Firstly, you have to make sure that your Initial tag is your target keyword. Just like with your title, YouTube puts more weight on tags that appear early on especially your first tag. So, if your keyword is best SEO Tool, you’d make your first tag best SEO Tools, simple.
- Next, create three to four tags that are alternative versions of your primary keyword. For example, you’d use variations of best SEO Tools like; best SEO Tools to rank high, and 5 best SEO Tools. You can easily find these variations by appearing a target keyword into the YouTube search field. These suggestions make perfect alternatives versions of your main keyword to use as tags.
- Now, include one or two broad terms or some sort of category as your last set of tags. These tags should describe your videos overall topic. The main aim of these tags is just to give YouTube more context about your video. For example, broad keywords for Best SEO Tools would be like Search Engine and Internet Marketing.
#4 CTR magnet thumbnails: You probably already have know that CTR (click-through rate) is an important YouTube ranking factor. If your video gets more amount of clicks than average in the search results, YouTube will boost your ranking.
So, how can you get more clicks?
Use CTR magnet thumbnails.
CTR magnet thumbnails are strategically designed to get more clicks from YouTube searchers. Here’s the step-by-step process.
- Non-YouTube colours in your thumbnail: Well, the main colours on YouTube’s website are white, red and black. So, if you use those same colours in your thumbnail, you’re gonna blend in. Instead, I recommend using colours that contrast with YouTube’s colour scheme like green, blue, purple, grey, and orange. For example, I use green, blue l, and grey in most my thumbnails. These colours help my results stand out from the others which brings me more clicks.
- Bold and Easily Visible Text in your Thumbnail: Thumbnails with readable text get more clicks than thumbnails without any text. As don’t have a lot of space to write I recommend using 30 characters of text max.
#5 Write Many Blog Posts for Your Video Descriptions: What most do in their video description is; This video is awesome and description did, this was a huge mistake. Long descriptions help videos rank better on YouTube. Because the well-defined description helps the bot to understand about your video more efficiently. So, you should write your descriptions between 100 and 200 words.
The long description helps video to way to the top of YouTube for competitive keywords like SEO. When it comes to what to write; You can about the video mainly to give a rough idea to your audience that what this video is about.
#6 Boost Video Length: When it comes to video SEO, what works better? Long video or short videos?
The longer videos trended to outrank short videos. The average video duration on the first page of YouTube is 14 minutes, 50 seconds long. A few years ago, YouTube said,” We focus on those videos that increase the amount of time that the viewer will spend watching videos on YouTube.” In other words, YouTube loves videos that keep people watching for long periods of time.
#7 Use Brackets and Parentheses on Your Video Title: YouTube themselves, state that, “ Well written titles can be the difference between someone watching and sharing your video or ignoring like its never there.” The best way to increase your CTR is to add brackets or parentheses to your video title which can boost the click-through rate by up to 38%.
#8 Rank in Suggested Videos: YouTube SEO is more than just ranking in the search results. You can also get just as many views if your video to appearing as a suggested video. Suggested video is a video shows up next to another video in the sidebar. So, if you manage to get your video to show up next to a really popular video, you can easily steal some of their views and the best way to show up as a suggested video; using same tags of that video uses. When YouTube sees that some of your tags are exactly same to the tags from a popular video, they’ll understand that your video is about the same topic which means you video has more chances to show up as a suggested video.
How to do this:
- First, you need to know, what is the tag are tag they are using on their video you can explore this information in the source code of the page. Simply just right click on the page and click view page source. Then look for keyword section in source page. These keyword that appears here are the tags for that video.
- Next, copy a few of the tags from the popular video. Make sure to copy the tags exactly phrase. If your video is something related and has good quality with the popular video you will get ranked a suggested video.