Today, you are going to learn 5 powerful YouTube SEO strategies which work great. Try them to rank your YouTube videos. If you want to increase YouTube traffic or increase YouTube subscribers, you should read this YouTube SEO tutorial carefully.

Useful Tip: if you want to make cool movies by yourself, you can try MiniTool MovieMaker.

When it comes to SEO, almost many users will think of Google, the most powerful search engine.

As a matter of fact, now, YouTube is the #2 search engine, right after Google, and YouTube SEO can gain you far more search traffic than Yahoo and Bing does. Therefore, if you are not doing YouTube SEO, you’re missing out.

Today, in this post, I am going to show you exactly how to rank 1 on YouTube to make money on YouTube.  

What Does YouTube SEO Mean?

Before we get into today’s YouTube SEO tutorial, we need to know what SEO is.

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. It is a measurable and repeatable practice of driving targeted website traffic to your website from search engines. If you want to attract traffic and grow a following, you need to optimize your website because search is often the gate-keeper to your content.

More information and details can be found in SEO.

Let’s right dive in.

Secret 1. YouTube Keyword Research

The first and the most important step of YouTube SEO process is video keyword research.

Question is: How to find perfect keywords?

Here is the deal:

These are simple methods to find the right keywords for your YouTube videos.

YouTube Suggestions

Have you ever used the YouTube’s Search Suggest feature (it is also called YouTube Autocomplete)?

The simplest way to find keywords is YouTube Suggest. It is one of my favorite strategies. The trick is to open YouTube and then enter your main keyword. Next, YouTube will display many search suggestions related to what you typed in.

For instance, you enter data recovery. Then, you will get a bunch of keywords and they are great as they have very high Click Through Rate (CTR). There’s no need to wonder these words which are suggested by YouTube are popular or not.

search keyword using YouTube suggestions

Keyword Suggest Tool

You also can use KeywordTool.io to scale the YouTube autocomplete process.

The steps of finding great keywords are:

  • Enter your keyword.
  • Select YouTube.
  • Filter the keyword list according to your choice and your need.

Keyword tool helps find great keywords

Google Search Results

To rank your video on YouTube, you can search for your keyword in Google. You will get 2-5x more views if you are successful.

Google only includes videos in the search results for certain keywords. All you need to do is to optimize your keywords that already have video results in Google, and then you will also get targeted traffic to your video directly from Google’s first page.

Conversely, you only get traffic from people searching on YouTube if you optimize video around a keyword that doesn’t have any video results in Google.

Google tends to use video results for these types of keywords:

  • How-to keywords
  • Reviews
  • Tutorials
  • Anything fitness or sports related
  • Funny videos

Now, you might be wondering:

“How do you find these magical keywords?”

You search the keywords you found via YouTube Suggestions on Google, and see if any of them have YouTube video results, like this:

search your keywords in Google

Next, check if the word has any search volume via Google Keyword Planner. Select the keyword which gets at least 100-1k searches per month in Google as a target keyword. For instance, fix IO device error is a great keyword to create a video around.

use google keyword planner to select keyword

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Speaking of creating your video, you can keep reading to find more details.

Secret 2. Create an Awesome Video

If you can create a video that your viewers are happy with it, your video will have a good rank. MiniTool MovieMaker is recommended here to help you create wonderful videos because of its powerful functions.

If you want to increase YouTube subscribers and rank YouTube video, you need to consider the following parameters before creating video content:

  • CTR
  • Engagement
  • Watch Time

CTR

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. The higher CTR, the better.

If people are clicking on your result when searching for your keyword on YouTube, YouTube will give this video a boost. Conversely, YouTube will drop your rankings if people are skipping over your result.

CTR is a very straightforward parameter. CTR needs experiments to grow. To improve CTR, you need to create compelling thumbnails and titles. (More details can be found in Secret 3.)

Engagement

You will get maximum possible engagement if you can keep a user curious about every next minute of your video. Engagement of a topic or even web content is very closely linked to the following information:

  • How you present it.
  • How valuable information you’ve embedded in your video.

Watch Time

To increase YouTube subscribers and rank YouTube video, you need to increase watch time – the total accumulated amount of time people have spent watching your video on YouTube.

Nail the First 15 Seconds

YouTube recommends that users need to pay close attention to the first 15 seconds of every video. Most YouTube viewers judge a video based on the first 15 seconds of content. If a user drops here, your ranking will start falling because of less watch time. It is recommended to focus on your every video’s first 15 seconds.

Create Long Videos

To increase watch time, and rank YouTube video, please create long videos.

Let me give you an example…

Both video A and video B have good quality and the same keyword. Video A is 5 minutes. Video B is 10 minutes. However, we find that video B has 2x the watch time of Video A.

Backlinko’s research found that longer videos (>15 minutes) outperformed shorter videos in YouTube search.

the relationship between video length and watch time

After creating a video, it’s time to optimize video for YouTube SEO.

Secret 3. YouTube Video Optimization

Title, description, tags, and thumbnails are the foundation of your video’s YouTube SEO.

Video Title

Video title is one of the first impressions of your video. YouTube title appears in a very prominent place in the YouTube Search Results Page (YSRP). Thus it greatly affects your CTR. Viewers will check it and then decide either to click and watch your video or not.

  • Make sure the title is at least 5 words long.
  • Include keywords in the title.
  • Make sure title contains a clear and concise interpretation of your target keyword. Viewers can guess what’s inside the video by reading the title.
  • Avoid keyword stuffing.

video title, video tags and video description

Video Description

YouTube and Google understand the context of your video via video description. The better they understand, the higher your video will rank.

Try using YouTube SEO-optimized description:

  • Include your keyword in the first 25 words.
  • Make the description at least 250 words.
  • Include your keyword 2-4 times.

Besides, video description is your chance to expand on the information in the video with links, and calls to action. For instance, you can include links to your website and other social networks in the description.

Video Tags

Video tags not only help you rank for your target keyword but also help YouTube and Google learn what your video is about. Create up to 10-12 tags. Tag your videos with relevant words and keyword. 

Video Thumbnail

In terms of attracting the click from the YouTube searcher, a video’s thumbnail image is actually more important than the title. A thumbnail should be attention-grabbing, tease potential viewers, and reflect a video’s subject.

To increase CTR and rank YouTube video, you had better create a thumbnail of your own, and add title or fun graphics. Make sure it is intriguing and well-lit.

video thumbnails helps rank YouTube video

Thumbnail should meet the following best practices and requirements:

  • Suggested image size: 1280 x 720
  • Minimum width: 640 pixels
  • Maximum file size: 2MB
  • Recommended ratio: 16:9
  • Supported formats: .JPG, .GIF, .BMP, .PNG

Secret 4. YouTube Analytics

It is impossible to improve YouTube SEO without knowing your audience. In fact, to rank YouTube video, you need to pay attention to YouTube analytics since it offers audience retention, watch time, demographics, traffic sources, CTR, the number of unique viewers, and other useful metrics.

video thumbnails helps rank YouTube video

You will get a clear idea of what deserves focusing on and what is a waste of your time as long as you thoroughly analyze these stats. Maybe, you can try creating some content that caters specifically to them.

For instance, audience retention is an important analytic on YouTube that lets you know how long your viewers are watching your video. If people leave your video at an early stage of its staring, you need to improve your video content.

audience retention

YouTube loves videos that keep people watching. If your video has high audience retention and watch time, it will show up more frequently in Search and Suggested locations on YouTube. In a word, you need to boost your audience retention to rank YouTube video.

Secret 5. Promote YouTube Video

As we know, YouTube SEO is incomplete without video promotion. However, how to promote YouTube video? You can try the following tips.

Tip 1. Share Video on Social Media

There is no doubt that social media networks is the most powerful content marketing tool. Prompting your YouTube videos on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, and other various platforms can increase YouTube traffic as well as YouTube viewers.

Though social media, your videos are watched by more people. If a fan comments or shares your video, his friends and followers will view this activity, increasing audience engagement towards your channel.

Tip 2. Embed Your Videos in Post

Whenever you write a post, you can embed a YouTube video into this post.

For example, when I mentioned I/O Device Error, I embed a video to explain how to solve this issue.

fix I/O device error

This INSTANTLY got my video a few hundred high-quality views.

Tip 3. Create Video Playlist

If you have uploaded a few videos, you can create a playlist to get more views. Playlists automatically play every video in the playlist, leading to thousands of extra views every month.

How to create a playlist:

  • First, look over your videos.
  • Identify 4-5 videos that have a common theme or topic.
  • Create a playlist to includes these videos.
  • Include that playlist on your channel page.

create video playlist

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Bottom Line

OK! I hope this YouTube SEO tutorial helped show you how to rank YouTube video.

If you have any other good suggestions or tips about YouTube SEO, please share them with us by leaving comments in the following comment zone. Thanks in advance.

And in the end, if you consider this guide helpful, you can share it with more friends.

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