YouTube SEO: Strategies to Rank Your Videos on Top 

After Google, YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. With over 500 hours of videos being uploaded every minute, it is easy for your videos to get lost in the sea of YouTube videos. Your best bet? Start using video SEO best practices to create a solid YouTube SEO strategy. 

What is a YouTube SEO strategy? 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is designing web content to target unpaid traffic and to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs). Since it is often the gatekeeper to your content, optimising your content is necessary to attract traffic and increase viewers. In simpler words, it is the process of improving your channel to increase its visibility.  

However, YouTube SEO doesn’t use backlinks and other factors to evaluate rank as Google does. It involves everything from your channel, playlists, metadata, and descriptions to your videos. Therefore, you can focus on searches within YouTube and outside the platform.  

The basics of YouTube SEO  

SEO basics for YouTube videos, including keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and tags, as well as video accessibility since search engine bots cannot watch videos. Adding tons of keywords in transcripts, closed captions, and subtitles impact user experience, engagement, watch time, viewership, and SEO. We bring you some strategies to rank your YouTube videos. 

1. Diversify keywords  

Search engine results pages are getting more competitive every month, so you need to diversify your keywords and pick less competitive ones that bring you more views.   

2. Add keywords in Video Title and Video File  

Your video will have a much better chance of ranking and gaining more search volume if the file name you are uploading and the video title both have the target keywords.  

3. Optimise your video description  

Optimise your video description by adding descriptions, subtitles, closed captions, and thumbnails with important keywords. Adding subtitles will bring you an audience who doesn’t understand your language, whereas closed-caption files are transcripts or text of what is said in the video for those who can’t listen. These texts can be picked up by broad search engines, just as a blog would. 

4. Select a video category  

Adding your videos to the categories on YouTube that suit your videos will let users find videos from chosen categories. Contextualise your video with categories while uploading to have a better chance of getting found by a user. 

5. Customise your Thumbnail image  

Thumbnails are the first thing that grabs people’s attention, and they can lead to a higher watch time. Therefore, create a thumbnail image that stands out from the crowd to get your video noticed. 

YouTube and Google are the top search engines that use the same fundamentals in ranking algorithms. YouTube videos and Google results are now combined to simplify how people search. You can try this by searching your video title on Google. This means ranking YouTube videos is super easy.  

Looking for a digital marketing agency in London to help you increase your company’s visibility? Whether you are starting fresh or revamping your strategy, FBS Digital has you covered. Call FBS Digital at 0204 526 5195 or e-mail at hello@finchleybusiness.co.uk today!