Effective Ways to Optimize Your YouTube Videos to Rank

YouTube Video Marketing Techniques

Last Update May 28, 2020 @ 6:08 pm

Video platforms have become powerful and effective online marketing tools. In particular, YouTube has become a social media giant, second to Google as the world’s largest search engine.

It garners 1 billion unique visitors and 3 billion searches every month. Imagine the untapped potential audience on this platform if you have not created a YouTube content marketing strategy for your brand yet!

Content marketing and search engine optimization may be a complex and continually evolving world. Still, as video continues to grow in popularity, the online video platform will remain to be an effective driver of traffic.

YouTube videos can be leveraged to boost your content marketing strategy and improve the conversion rate of your business.

And because Google owns YouTube, high-ranking video content on this platform automatically ranks well in the number one search engine in the world.

This article will show you how to create a compelling home channel, how to create engaging videos, how to boost your SEO ranking, and everything else you need to know to get started on your brand’s YouTube marketing strategy.

Steps to optimize your YouTube for better visibility

A successful YouTube content marketing plan does not happen by accident. It consists of a series of well-informed steps backed up by studies made throughout the years. Whether you want to strengthen your brand presence, improve conversion rate, or attract new customers, start by applying the following strategies:

1. Design an outstanding YouTube channel homepage.

First impressions are everything, especially in marketing. Your homepage is a user’s first brush with your brand identity, so make sure it is presented well. Ensure that all its elements represent what your brand and channel are all about. 

Consider the following elements:

• Profile picture. This will be your brand’s official icon, appearing every time you post a video or a comment. While it may be small, it can still be a powerful ad for your business. Go for a clean and easily identifiable image. If your brand has a face, use it in this instance. The human brain recognizes faces better than it does logos.
• Channel Art. This is your channel’s header or banner image, the biggest space on your homepage located right at the top of the screen. Because of its placement and size, it’s an effective billboard for your channel’s brand identity.
• Channel Trailer. This video plays automatically whenever someone lands on your channel homepage. It could be one to a two-minute video of fresh and engaging content telling viewers what your channel is all about.

2. Conduct YouTube keyword research. 

Since YouTube is a search engine, you need to up your keyword game. If you haven’t built an audience yet, the best way to gain followers is to optimize your content with the right keywords. Using the most popular keywords will improve your search engine rankings, give you more suggested views, and over time, a better subscriber conversion.

To generate a list of the best keywords, go to YouTube or Google’s search bar and type in a word or phrase related to the video content you wish to post.

The list of keywords that come up are those most heavily searched for by users and are, therefore, great to optimize your video with.

Another way to do keyword research is by finding the most popular video in your niche and simply using the same keywords that it is optimized with.

After all, the chances are high that a video with a lot of views is optimized with the right keywords. This is considered a best practice even by SEO services for small businesses.

3. Include keywords to your video’s title, description, and tags.

For the ultimate optimization, include the correct keywords in your video titles, descriptions, and tags. Search engines have little way of knowing the content of your videos and therefore have to rely on its metadata to index and rank it. 

What you need to know:

• Title: Add a keyword or phrase to your title. This will be one of the first things users will look at after searching, so make sure you include the correct keywords.
• Description: The first two lines of your video description will appear on YouTube and Google searches, so include your keywords in the first or second sentence.
• Tags: YouTube allows you up to 500 characters for tags, but even so, you don’t want to put too much as it will appear as keyword stuffing. Keep it down to 10 to 15 tags per video. Tags are single words suggested by YouTube, and keywords can be long-tail keywords and phrases that you can add within quotation marks to help users find your video better.

4. Optimize your channel by adding keywords.

Adding keywords to your YouTube channel helps the platform understand your content better and determine who your target audience is.

This increases your channel’s visibility by showing your channel as a result whenever users search for your keywords on Google or YouTube.

A study has also shown that optimizing your channel with the correct keywords can increase your Youtube rankings in a small yet significant way.

Lastly, YouTube uses these keywords to help them decide which videos to put in their suggested or recommended videos section—a great way to get more visibility for your channel.

5. Use playlists to develop an organized channel.

Playlists are more than just an organizational method to put and categorize your videos on YouTube. Used correctly, they can become a powerful tool in your content strategy that will lead to users going through hours of watching your content.

Optimize your playlist’s title and tags with the correct keywords and under one theme so that your channel becomes more like a TV network showing a set of cohesive and related content rather than an assortment of videos unrelated to each other.

Once you incorporate playlists in your overall content strategy, you start thinking in terms of the bigger picture of your channel as a whole, rather than just in individual video posts. This will lead to improved user experience and will work in favor of your channel in terms of algorithms as well. 

As an example, the Shralpin Skateboarding creates themed playlists with well-created videos that keep people watching for hours on end.

6. Create a high-retention video.

A high-retention video simply means a video that people will want to watch until the end. The percentage of your video that users watch is your audience retention rate. The more consistently high your audience or viewer retention, the higher your video’s visibility will be on YouTube’s search and suggested video features.

To create high retention or engaging videos, follow these three steps:

1. Start your video with a summary of what your video will be about. At least 20% of people who watch your video will leave after the first 10 seconds, usually because the person in the video did not do an excellent job of letting the audience know that they were in the right place.
2. Jump into your content. Longer introductions result in lower audience retention. Waste no time in getting into the useful content your viewer wants to see.
3. Make use of open loops. These are teasers or previews of things that will come up in the video. It keeps the viewers watching until the big reveal. This is a neat trick to keep viewer retention up.

7. Use the closed caption (CC) feature in your videos on YouTube.

Adding subtitles or using the closed caption feature in YouTube opens up your video to a larger audience. It allows your video to be translated to other languages and helps viewers who may be hard of hearing to understand the narration of your video better. A study shows that captions can significantly boost a video’s views, and because subtitles can contain keywords, it can improve its search rankings as well.

If your video is made in clear and well-voiced English, YouTube can automatically make the captions for you. Although being machine-produced, you will probably need to edit it out a bit. Otherwise, you can type out a transcript so that the platform can execute a more flawless job of captioning your video.

8. Promote your videos.

Now that you know all about high-retention videos and how to optimize them properly, you need to get a targeted audience to view them.

Use the following strategies to promote your videos:

1. Promote your video on Q&A sites like Quora. Forums and Q&A sites such as Quora are some of the most popular websites where people go to get information on a certain topic specifically. Posting your video link there will most likely result in both high quantity and high-quality (meaning high-retention) views for your video.
2. Include a link to your video in your email signature. You use your email in a major chunk of your online personal and business communications, and having an easy, clickable link at the end of your signature can drive many of your correspondents (whether just plain curious or genuinely interested) to the video.
3. Embed your video in relevant blog posts. Whenever you write a blog for your website or as a guest on someone else’s, think of a relevant situation wherein you can embed a YouTube video. A well-placed and related video in the blog you are writing about will largely guarantee that most of its readers will want to seek more information via the video you embedded. See how this video by Brandon Leibowitz is expertly embedded into his blog post, making it a seamless and necessary feature of the article.

9. Monitor and analyze performance.

Once your videos are optimized, loaded, and promoted, the next step is to monitor and analyze their performance. The YouTube Analytics feature is a great tool to find out more about your audience. It can pinpoint you to the traffic sources, who your subscribers are, and your viewers’ demographics. Knowing this data helps you direct your energy and resources and plan out your strategies better.

In particular, watch out for your subscriber conversion data or which videos are compelling enough to make a casual viewer hit “Subscribe.” Use this data to make more of those videos to help increase your conversion rate. Pay attention to other performance indicators such as your ranking, number of views, number of likes, and dislikes as well as your comments section. All of these provide valuable insight in the areas of content optimization, creation, and promotion.

Final words

To get your YouTube marketing plan on the right foot, take the time to fully optimize specific areas of your YouTube channel, load it with strategized playlists of cohesive, high-retention videos and promote them on relevant online channels. A carefully crafted marketing plan provides maximum benefits to your business. It reinforces your brand identity and serves as a unifying link to your brand’s online marketing strategy.

Remember, maximizing your YouTube presence now can pull in a new audience base for your brand, improve your conversion rate, and create more opportunities for your brand to attract lifelong customers.