Optimising your YouTube Video

YouTube is often overlooked as a marketing tool by many companies but it can become a great source of traffic, views and engagement for any online business owner with just a modest investment. Whether you want to promote a production services, establish yourself as an expert in your niche or just raise awareness of your brand, YouTube is unparalleled in terms of video marketing. And because YouTube is a Google-owned company, it is perfectly tailored to get your videos ranking well in Google’s search engine results pages.

Below are some tips that will help you to improve the SEO of your videos and maximise the potential audience that you can reach.

More Than Just Video Sharing

YouTube is more than just a video platform; it is also a platform for engagement. You can make video series, annotate your uploads and talk to your users in comments threads, and run channels which show videos related to your chosen subject. What’s more YouTube is a search engine itself. Google uses a large number of elements to determine the ranking of videos in YouTube but YouTube itself also uses a whole host of factors to determine where to rank your video when searches are made within YouTube itself.If you want to have a chance of your videos being featured within Google or YouTube search, then you will need to make an effort to understand the ranking factors.

The algorithm considers trust, authority, channel strength, keywords, popularity, reactions and more when ranking videos. A video that gets lots of external links, comments, and views will rank better than one no one has watched. However, this is something of a chicken and egg situation. How can you get people to watch videos if the most important ranking factors are popularity? Well, there are some other ranking factors that you can control more easily, and focusing on those is a good starting point.

It might seem obvious but the most important aspect of video marketing is producing high-quality video content. That’s not to say you shouldn’t always have the SEO angle in the back of your mind though. A video that is in HD will always be promoted over a lower-quality video for instance. This is both a video quality and an SEO benefit.

Videos that include keywords in their annotations and descriptions are more likely to show up in the search results than ones that do not, and videos that have links to them, and links going out from them, are also likely to perform well. If you can include the above, and select an attractive thumbnail for your video so that it gets clicks when it is displayed, then your rankings are likely to improve.

Getting Started with your YouTube Channel

Another aspect that is often overlooked in YouTube marketing is your YouTube channel. Whilst this won’t affect the SEO of your individual YouTube videos, it is vitally important to know the dos and don’ts so when users do decide to click through to your channel they get the best possible experience.So for example you should

• Never mix your corporate and consumer content
• Never put your most popular content at the top of your channel, although it may seem tempting to do so
• Never put TV ads at the top
• Order your content using hashtags
• Use hashtags to help connect your channel and videos with other relevant channels

Past channel performance is an important ranking factor too. So once you have a couple of videos that are performing well, you can expect that future videos will have a head start. That’s not to say that every video is guaranteed a huge number of views, but once you have one popular piece of content, Google will support you and help your other videos to grow. As with most other parts of doing business, those first few videos are the hardest to promote and to build popularity with.

Conclusion

These YouTube SEO tips are just the basics. As with any other form of marketing, rigorous testing is important. Every audience has different tastes and preferences, and the more you know about your audience the more accurately you will be able to target your video content and your SEO. You can use your popular video content to promote your website or your social media feed, and build a loop of self-sustaining social media channels for people to engage with.

Author Bio: Jon Mowat used to make documentaries for the BBC.Nowadays he can be found running video production and marketing company, Hurricane Media, based in Bristol, England. You can follow Hurricane on Google+ or Facebook.