Have you ever released a video and then crickets, it got zero views. It leaves you wondering why is
nobody watching my video? Well, it's probably because you didn't do your YouTube SEO right,
and as a result, YouTube doesn't even know what your video's about. Well, in today's video,
I am movie breaking down YouTube, SEO basics, everything that you need to do to set your video
up for success. So if you want to know what you need to do for your YouTube SEO thing,
keep on watching. A lot of people when they're starting out on YouTube, think that
they can just make videos, put it on YouTube, and suddenly millions of people will find it. Well,
unfortunately that is not the case. You may not know this, but YouTube is actually the second
largest search engine in the world and it is owned by Google, the largest search engine in the world.
Essentially YouTube is a search engine and the reason they continue to be the number one and
number two search engines in the world is because they have proven time and time again that they
provide the best answers for the questions that people are searching for and that actually is what
search engine optimization is all about. Search engine optimization or SEO for short is the work
that you put into your video to make sure that it can be found by the search engines and so that
the search engines can actually know what your video is about and then recommend it to people,
and this might be obvious, but one thing that Google and YouTube are are they are businesses.
They make money and their main business, one of the biggest ones is search. They have gotten so
dominant at search and they want to make sure time and time again that they are your number
one place to go when you are searching for things online because guess what?
When you search for things, they also have ads and that's how Google makes money as they
have the ads sprinkled in on the search results page. But then also for YouTube,
they have ads on the videos. So by creating content that people are searching for that
they have questions for and it provides answers and they're able to find the absolute best video
that gives the best answer, then you are going to stick around. You're going to watch the ad,
you're going to watch the video, you're probably going to see another ad and Google makes money.
So you actually might have amazing content that provides great answers to people's questions,
but because you're not doing the SEO, Google's not ranking you and no one's finding it. Now let's be
real here. YouTube is not a human. It can't really watch your video and know what your video's about.
So SEO is the work that you need to do to give Google a better understanding about what your
video's about so that way they can present it to people who are searching for those key
words. And speaking of keywords. Let's jump right into that because keywords are one of
the most important things before YouTube. SEO, because they are the foundation of
all the work that you need to do. So keywords are words or phrases that you give to Google,
letting them know what your video topic is about. These can be shorter phrases such as
fashion tips or longer phrases such as how to organize a garage or how to grew my own dog.
So before you even make your video, you should do keyword research. You need to figure out what the
competition is like out there for the different topics that you want to make your video about.
So for example, if you want to do a vlog and you want to rank for vlog in doing your keyword
research, you'll find out that that probably isn't something that you should target as a brand
new YouTuber. While it does have incredibly high search volume, tons of people are searching for
blogs. The problem is it's very, very saturated and very competitive. So that means when you put
your video, even if you optimize it the best you can, you're probably not going to stand a
chance because there are other established videos and content creators that YouTube
already trusts for that topic. So instead you might want to focus on a longer tail keyword,
something that not as many people are searching, but it has much lower competition. For example,
how to make a vlog, how to make a blog in 30 minutes, how to edit a blog using I movie.
Now you're going to find that these longer tail keywords are going to have lower search volume
and hopefully less competition, which will give your video a better chance of standing out. So
in doing my keyword research, basically what I started out doing is I just start typing into the
YouTube search bar. I type what I think I want my keyword to be. And then what I do to validate that
and get the data is I use two really great tools. One is called TubeBuddy and another VIDIQ. They
each have different pros and cons. But one thing that they will do is they will give you a score or
a ranking of that keyword based on how competitive it is and the search volume. Now one thing
that's really important to note is you can have multiple keywords that you are trying to target.
Not every video is just going to be strictly on one topic and there's going to be other
keywords that are going to relate to the video that you are producing. So you can
create a ton of different keywords that you will then use when you're optimizing your
video and your fields. But you want to make sure that you have a focus keyword,
what is the number one keyword that you're targeting and you want to make sure that
that focus keyword is everywhere and gets prominent placement when you are doing the
SEO for your video. So that's just to give you a high level overview on why keywords
are important and why keyword research is important even before you start filming
your video. If you want me to do a full video on my keyword research process and how I do that,
let me know in the comments below because I would love to do that for you if you guys want.
All right, now that we have our keywords established, the next thing that we want
to do is we want to start optimizing the fields that Google looks at in determining whether it
should rank a video or not. And the first one is your title. One of the biggest mistakes that I
see new content creators make is that their title literally has none of their keywords in it and it
has nothing to do with their video. They're doing something that's very click baity or it has a hook
or they're trying to be funny. And while this may work for very established, prominent brands and
YouTube, others who they have an audience that's just going to click on their video no matter what,
for smaller content creators just getting started, that is not to serve you. And it's especially not
going to help because Google doesn't trust you already and they're going to see this video.
And there's no keywords in it and they have no idea what this video is about. And then
your description is just smiley face. The description isn't helpful either. And so
Google's going to say, ah heck no. Google is going to have no idea what your video is about and it's
not going to put it in front of its users. So if Google does that and they put a random
video for some search terms, they're going to lose trust with their users. And then less people are
going to start using Google or YouTube when they are looking for an answer because they're like,
well, YouTube just gives me crap Dow. They don't actually give me the answers that I'm
looking for. All right? So the very first thing that you need to do when you had your
keyword and your focus keywords is then you want to put that focus keyword in your title.
So let's say I'm doing a video and I want my focus keyword to be how to groom a poodle. So in my
title, that phrase, how to grow a poodle should be there, but you don't want to stop there. You
have 100 characters to fill, so you might as well put some of your secondary or tertiary keywords in
there as well. So how to do it on a budget, blah, blah, blah, whatever your video is about, you
want to put them in there. Now note, while you do have a hundred characters in the search results,
Google is only going to show the first 70 so you want to make sure that your focus keyword is at
the very beginning of your title. Don't put it at the end because there's a chance that depending on
how long your title is, it could be cut off and it won't show up in the search results.
All right, next up is your description. Ah, this is so good because this is where
you have a whole entire space, a dedicated space to just talk about your video and what
it's about. I see so many people who don't even bother to fill this out or they'll put
just a little blurb and that is a huge missed opportunity because it's basically blank space
that Google has given you to say, Hey, what is your video about? Tell me in a long form,
a few paragraphs even let me know and people still choose not to fill it out and then wonder
why they're not getting ranked. So this is where you will write out a big description about all
the things that you cover in your video. I typically do two to three paragraphs where
I'm talking about my video. I'm including different keywords, key phrases in there.
Some key phrases may be more or less the same but written differently. And that's because two
different people might type the same question out differently. So you want to make sure that you
include that in here in those two different ways. Now it's really important when you're doing this,
you want to include the exact keyword or keyword phrase match in your description
and also in your title and try the best that you can. Not to break it up because again,
that is what people are searching for, that exact phrase in that exact order.
So you want to make sure that you copy and paste that into your description.
So another thing that's really important when you are doing your description is links. You
want to have links to other videos or maybe have a section that says watch more videos
on this topic because YouTube wants to keep people on the platform as much as possible.
They want people to just sit on YouTube all day long because the more they do that, the more ads
they watch and the more money YouTube makes. So you want to make that easy for you to have and
make it easy for people who are watching your videos. So make sure to include links to other
videos in your YouTube description because that will help increase the total watch time for
your channel. And it will let you to know that, Hey, people are watching a ton of this person's
videos. Maybe I should take another look and rank these videos more. And that is how you will end up
getting picked up and recommended in the YouTube algorithm, but that is for another day. All right,
next up our tags and these are really, really important. Some people say you don't need them,
but again it's another opportunity that Google is giving you to say, Hey, what's your video about?
At this point you can literally copy and paste all of the keywords that you are targeting or
wants to target for this video into that section. Again, it's really important to
include the exact match. A big mistake that I see a new content creators doing is that they
will just go for the broad keywords log, grooming poodle, so remember the smaller, the key phrase,
usually the more competitive it is and harder to rank for. So you're showing Google in the tags,
Hey, I want to rank for poodle and I want to rank for grooming. So Google being a computer isn't
going to know any better and it's going to put you on those search result page. But again, since they
are more competitive, you're going to be all the way down. You're going to be on page six
seven ten one hundred who knows? And so no one's going to find you and it's not going to help.
So it's really important that when you are doing this that you have long tail
key phrases that people are searching for. So again, remember to do those exact match
and long tail key phrases because that is going to be your friend when you are doing
your YouTube SEO and give your video a better chance of ranking. The next YouTube SEO basics
that you need to do is your transcript. The transcript is word for word what you said
in the video. It's basically the script for your YouTube video and you would be
surprised the number of people who don't even bother with this step. They think,
Oh, you can have an automated transcript. I don't need that because they already did it for me.
Let's stop right there. Because the automated transcript that YouTube puts out is usually really
crappy. It's really bad. The AI that they use is good but not great. And so you'll find a lot of
errors in the transcript. But this transcript is gold because it's literally all of the words that
you said in the video YouTube count. Watch your video and understand what you're talking about,
but your transcript is you handing Google your script and saying, here, this is what the
video is about. Now go rank me. I actually use a service called rev.com for this. They are amazing,
their prices are so good and the quality is just perfect. You can have a transcript done
by a person which is going to be so polished and perfect. It's going to have spelling,
capitalization, punctuation, all of the good things that you need. Or you can do more of an
automated one but which is basically will get you 80 or 90% there and you can just
scan it and fix a few little things here and I've used both and I'm very, very impressed,
but I would definitely recommend using a transcription service or a VA or even if you
have to take the transcript that YouTube puts out yourself and edit it, but whatever you do,
please do this and don't skip over it because it is a huge indicator to YouTube about the
topic of your video and by doing this in correlation with all of the other things,
it's going to give your video a higher chance of getting ranked.
All right, next up is file name. This is pretty obvious, but again,
Google has given us lots of opportunities to say, what's your video about, what's your video about,
what's your video about? And your file name is one of those opportunities. Most of the
time when you export a video, it's going to be a bunch of random garbly goop or random
numbers or maybe the file name of the initial video that you use. But again,
Google is going to look at that and think, uh, I don't know what that means and so I don't know
what this video is about. So the thing that I do is I just take the title of my video and I
just make that the file name for my video and it's really important that you do this before
you upload your video to YouTube because you can't change the file name after you upload it.
All right. The last part of the YouTube SEO basics when it comes to uploading your video
is your thumbnail. You want to make sure that your thumbnail is very eye-catching. Maybe it
has very bold graphics or pictures, but maybe has a few words that include your keywords or
the focus of your video because people are going to look at the thumbnail and they're
going to look at your title and maybe a little bit of description when they're in the search
and those things are going to be whether they are going to click or not. And having a really
captivating thumbnail is going to help your video get clicked in search. And if people then watch
your whole video, it's going to make your video rank even higher in search because it's proven,
Hey, this is something that people want to watch. I should rank it more.
I don't see a lot of people doing this, but another thing that I like to do is I
like to make the file name of my video, which has all of my keywords. I like to
make that the file name of my thumbnail image as well. So I'll usually just take
the title and make that the file name and then at the end I'll write thumbnail. Again,
it's another opportunity for me to tell Google what this thumbnail is about, what this video's
about. This might seem really redundant and like we are hitting Google over the head with it,
but that's how SEO works and that's what it takes. All right, so those are all the things
that you need to do when you are uploading your video before you publish. So that's my
next tip is that you need to do all of the SEO optimization before you hit publish.
It's so important that you have all your ducks in a row because as soon as that video goes live,
YouTube is going to send its crawlers to look at the video, look at the title, description tags,
all of those things to see what is this video about? Because Google is always trying to make its
search results better. So if a new video appears, it wants to make sure, Hey, is this a good video
or a bad video? And if you don't have any of those things there when you upload, Google's going to be
like garbage video. I don't know this about, I'm not going to rank this thing. And that's
why you get zero views. So don't think, Oh, I just need to get this video out. I can do those things
later. Please, please, please wait and do all of the optimizations before you hit publish please.
So one of the most important things for YouTube SEO is watch time. If people click
on your video and then they drop off or they close out or they go away after 30 seconds,
Google is going to use that as an indicator that, uh, maybe this isn't a good video or maybe this
isn't helping people for that search term and so you're not going to rank. So you want to make sure
that your video is engaging, that it's really high quality, that it really does answer the question
for those keywords. So while you can't really force people to sit there and watch your video,
it's kind of hard to control this, but the one thing that you can control is the quality
of your video and making sure that it does the best job to answer those questions. All
right. Another really important thing that goes along with watch time is engagement.
You want to have calls to action that people can do. That will be indicators or cues to
Google things like, like this video. If you found it helpful, subscribe, you want more amazing tips
or watch this video or right here by you having these calls to action in your video and people
then doing them. These are going to be indicators to Google that this is a good channel and they
should recommend your videos more seriously. Just like this video of another tip when you're
recording your video is to make sure that it is long. Shorter is not better when it comes to
YouTube. YouTube wants to keep people on their platform so it's going to tend to favor longer
videos. Now that doesn't mean you need to extend and make this overly long, boring video, but you
don't want to do a video that's 30 to 60 seconds long because YouTube isn't going to like that.
Google not only loves videos that get to the point and provide an answer,
but it also loves videos that elaborate on the answer. So you want to make sure that
you really have a jam packed video with so many tips and tricks or whatever your video is about so
that way people find it really helpful and they sit and they watch the whole thing. All right,
my next tip for YouTube SEO is playlists. This is so under utilized. Did you know that playlists
show up in YouTube results? You not only want to create videos on certain topics, but you
should also create playlists on certain topics. These can be playlists of your own videos or it
could be a mix of your videos and someone else's videos, and then when you create that playlist,
you need to optimize the title and the description so that way people know when they click on that
playlist what it's about and more importantly, you let YouTube know what that video is all about.
All right. My very last tip when it comes to YouTube, SEO is consistency, consistency,
consistency. If YouTube is going to continue to recommend your videos and your channels,
it wants to see that you're contributing to the platform, that you have a consistent
upload schedule that it can rely on. Google likes to see its users continually putting
out fresh content. That doesn't mean that it's not going to recommend old content,
but if you just do one video and you're done, it's not going to see you as a credible source
and it's going to take that into account when it's determining whether to rank your video or
not. So make sure that when you upload, whether it's once a week, twice a week, every Friday,
whatever, that you consistently do it and stick to it. All right guys, that is YouTube SEO basics.
If you found this helpful, give it a light. You see what I did there? Seriously? Give it a like.
You should. It's awesome and let me know in the comments below what SEO tip you found helpful
and that you are going to start doing in your own YouTube videos. If you really enjoyed this video,
subscribe. I would because each week on my channel, I have new videos on how to use
online marketing and social media to grow your business. And of course, we want more YouTube
tips. Check out these videos right here. That's all I have for now and I'll see you next time.