How to Optimise Your Video for YouTube

August 18, 2017

YouTube offers a huge opportunity for marketers.

After all, it is the second largest search engine in the world – behind Google, which owns it. Unfortunately, there’s also a lot of competition.

300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, which means that it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd. That is where these tips come in. Here are just seven ways to make your YouTube presence a success.

1. Use annotations (and hard code them)

Annotations are clickable links in your video which can be used to direct people to videos and playlists and even to subscribe to your channel or to visit an external website. Using them makes it easier to push people to take action, and you can even hard code animations, buttons and other visual elements into your video that the clickable links can be placed on top of.

2. Carry out keyword research

Because YouTube is a search engine, you can use many of the same SEO techniques that you are using elsewhere. As a result, it is a good idea to carry out keyword research with a specialist tool before you move on to the next step.

3. Fill out tags, titles and descriptions

When you upload your videos, you should fill out as much information as possible including a keyword rich title and description. Video content is notoriously difficult for search engines to understand, so adding this information will make it easier for them to surface your video on the results pages.

4. Optimise for watch time

YouTube uses “watch time” as a metric to identify the “stickiness” of your videos, which means it is often better to upload shorter videos but to keep people engaged until the end. Go out of your way to edit out as much as you can while leaving the core aspects of the video intact. Better search rankings will reward you.

5. Use closed captioning

YouTube allows you to upload closed captions that can be displayed as subtitles. Doing this will make your videos more accessible while simultaneously telling the search engine more about what the video contains.

6. Create playlists

Playlists are used to group multiple videos and can be easily displayed on both your channel page and on third-party websites. Better still, these playlists can be discovered in the search, giving you another opportunity for your content to be seen, and they also keep viewers on your content. Instead of watching a video and clicking away, they will automatically cycle through each of the videos on the playlist.

7. Embed and share videos

Embedding and sharing videos on third-party websites will help to increase their exposure and to bring in new viewers. If your viewers are coming in through both YouTube and other platforms, it increases the odds of creating a snowball effect which will push your viewing figures through the roof.

Business
marketing, video, video marketing, YOUTUBE

Georgi Todorov is a digital marketer and guest author at More By Us. He recently started his own blog about digital marketing DigitalNovas. His passion is to help beginners to start and grow a successful online business. Hit him up on Linkedin or Twitter @GeorgiTodorovBG anytime.

Georgi Todorovguest author