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How to Optimize Your YouTube Videos for SEO

Make your videos more visible and optimized for Google


People often overlook the importance of SEO when making videos on YouTube. It's not hard to see why. There are many more aspects to making a video than there are to making a simple blog post or an article. That being said, if you use SEO in your video strategy, you can improve the visibility and reach of all of your videos. This will not only increase your video view time, but it will also catch the attention of your target audience. It is something that will aid you in YouTube retargeting as well. For this reason, we would like to tell you how to optimize your YouTube videos for SEO.

A 3D rendering of the YouTube logo.
You must optimize your YouTube videos for SEO if you want to benefit from your efforts.

Focus on Your Keywords

Back in the day, all you needed to do was make a quality video, and you would be able to gain traction. However, even though being prolific is essential these days, you need to do more to stand out. When it comes to SEO, it may seem like a losing battle for someone just starting out. There is too much competition from other creators, products, and services. But that is precisely why you must find a way to stand out from the competition. It starts with choosing your keywords as best as you can. Search for the best possible keywords for your video but avoid too popular ones because if they are tied to a competitor who is more prominent than you, they won't have as much of an effect.

A person searching for a video using a keyword, showing why it's crucial to optimize your YouTube videos for SEO.
Keywords are the most critical elements of optimization because they are how you connect with your audience.

Include Keywords in the Title of Your Video

To make any form of SEO work for your YouTube video, you need to understand what your audience is searching for. If you don't know for sure, maybe it will help you to know that among the most popular search intent on Google are informative, commercial, navigational, and transactional searches. Once you have figured out what your audience is searching for, you need to make a video about that. The next step will be to add the search keyword to your title. This way, when your target audience is looking for something specific, they will come across your video.

Second, according to Movers Development experts, one of the most important things you need to do is to understand who your target audience is and how to get to them. For example, include the product name in the video title and description if you want to highlight a product review. This may seem like an obvious thing to do. However, many amateurs and even professional creators often forget to do this, which usually results in less than stellar reach and views.

Improve the Description of Your YouTube Video

If you make sure to write a well-optimized and clear video description on your video, you will most likely have a better SEO ranking for your video than if you failed to do so. YouTube will review the video whenever you modify or update any YouTube video aspect, including video descriptions, subtitles, closed captions, and video thumbnails. With that said, this can easily backfire if you don't know what you're doing. That is why it's so important to do it correctly. We suggest you include your most important keywords in the first couple of phrases of your description. Other than that, it would be best to keep your description to a maximum of 200 words in length. In general, you should make your description helpful. If it does not assist your viewer, it would be best to get rid of it.

Don't Forget to Use Hashtags for All of Your Video Content

These days hashtags are synonymous with social media, and many people don't usually think about YouTube as a social media, so they avoid using hashtags. Hashtags are there to help people locate the material that answers their requests across a variety of platforms. With that said, you can use hashtags in the descriptions and titles of your YouTube videos. This will help your audience find your video when searching for a specific hashtag. Tags, in particular, assist in boosting search by making relevant trends more evident. Including a hashtag in the video description will appear above the title and get hyperlinked. It's also vital to remember where you put video hashtags in this section. If you include a hashtag in the video title, hashtags from the description will not be shown next to the video title.

A cardboard hashtag sign.
Hashtags are important because they make it easier for your audience to find you.

Make Your Thumbnail Unique

Thumbnails are, in a way, much more important than your video title or the description. The first thing people will see when they find your video in their feed is the thumbnail. For this reason, you should make sure that your thumbnail is catchy. Additionally, if you can't naturally incorporate your keyword into the title, you can place it into the thumbnail. As long as you make something that catches people's attention and stands out from the crowd, you won't have any issues.

It would be best to do the same with your channel's logo. If you have an overarching theme for your business or content that you create, your logo can be something that links everything together. For this reason, it is crucial to think about creating a logo. If you have never thought about this, you will be surprised how much of an increase in reach your videos will have once you do something as simple as implementing a logo.

Conclusion

We have covered how to optimize your YouTube videos for SEO, so all you should do is try some of these methods out. As you can see, making your videos reach a larger audience is not that hard. However, it will take a lot of experimentation and patience. Therefore, don't give up if you don't notice huge changes immediately. Give it time, and you will soon be happy with the results.

 

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