If you've ever wanted to know how well
optimized your video is or somebody
else's on YouTube stay tuned because
we're going on a deep dive on a brand
new vidIQ tool.
Hello everyone welcome at to vidIQ my name is Rob if
this is your first time here we are
YouTube tool and channel that aims to
help you get more views in less time to
help grow your channel. One of the ways
we do that is through this wonderful vidIQ
Chrome extension that you see on
screen now. This is the video watch page
on YouTube and if you haven't used
vidIQ before you may be wondering what
on earth all of these numbers are and
statistics on the right hand side of a
screen. This is our industry-leading
video score card and it unearths all sorts
of data about every single video on
YouTube such as views per hour. It also
looks at social engagement of videos and
will even grade your search engine
optimization to find out whether videos
are as discoverable as they should be.
And the video tags here show you
where tags rank for this particular
video. What we're looking at today is a
brand new tool that we're bringing to
you and it comes in the form of this
section here which is the video
optimization checklist. Now I'm a video
creator just like you and one of the
most stressful times of any video
especially here at vidIQ where we
upload three to four videos a week is
the actual uploading process. You've
spent hours creating a video and then in
a rush to get the video onto YouTube you
forget to do a custom thumbnail or you
don't write enough tags, it's not
optimized properly, or you forget to add
the video to a playlist. There's all of
these things to think about when it
comes to YouTube to help them serve your
content to the right audience and have
maximum exposure. So what we have here is
the video optimization checklist which
for your own videos includes 15
different points for you to refer to. Now
each of these checkpoints are indicated
by a green tick or a red cross. For
example if you haven't added the video
to a playlist
you will get a red cross. If you haven't
shared the video to Facebook you will
get a Red Cross. However for titles, tags
and descriptions it's slightly different.
We rate your metadata so to speak. For
example with a title if it's less than
20 characters or more than 60 characters
we will give you a red cross because for
a title you need some keywords in there
so that would be at least a phrase of
some kind over 20 characters, but once
you go over sixty characters that will
cut off your title in some previews. So
the viewer may not be able to read the
entire title before clicking on the
video. As we've said tags are always used
to help categorize your contents giving
YouTube a little bit more information
about where the video should go and who
it should be served to so you should
include at least 200 characters worth of
tags which may be long tail or short
tail keywords. Make sure you include tags
to get the green tick. The
maximum is of course 500 characters.
As for descriptions the first
three or four lines are vitally
important to YouTube in terms of, again,
looking at those keywords of your
content and being able to index them
correctly in searches. Again
when you show those thumbnail previews
and description previews those first few
lines are read so we suggest having at
least 300 characters. The rest of the
check points are very much make sure you
do all of these things when you upload a
video, for example video cards. You want
to push your audience to more of your
content to increase session watch time.
The same with end screens, your content
doesn't have to end with the conclusion
of your video, make sure you're pushing
your audience to more of your content.
Closed captions
these help YouTube with indexing your
content, it will search for keywords and
it could help with translations as well.
Reply to comments, obviously very
important for improving engagement. When
somebody sends something to you,
asks a question, they put some time and
effort into that you should put time and
effort into engaging with your audience.
Sharing on Facebook and sharing on
Twitter. Obviously you wanna share it on
other social media platforms. You can
do this in slightly different ways so if
you don't share to Twitter or Facebook
directly from YouTube that's not too
much of a concern if you have another
plan of action. When it comes to
monetization enabled obviously that's
something you'll be wanting to do if
making a income stream from your content
is important to you. Added to a playlist,
all videos should be added to some form
of playlist and you should be adding
playlists on a regular basis. People
watching videos in playlists
watch more of your content. Again it
ups the watch time. Making the video
public goes without saying, obviously. You
may have set one of your live streams to
unlisted so it's worth checking that
just in case you've made that mistake.
And of course more engagement options
down at the bottom here making sure that
you've either pinned one of your own
comments to add more information about
the video or pinning your favorite
comments from your audience that really
does inspire them when you do that. And
of course if you're going to read the
comments you want to heart them. It sends
a notification to the viewer and they
feel good about themselves that the
video creator has taken time to read
their comments. Ao that's what the video
optimization checklist looks like for
one of your own videos, how does that
differ to a video if it's not one of
your own? If we visit this video tutorial
from Sean Cannell at Think Media, thank you
very much Sean for the awesome tutorial,
the scorecard is on the right hand side
as we can see but if we scroll down to
the video optimization checklist it
includes ten checkpoints not fifteen.
Some of the data that we collect is
private to your own content so we only
share it on your videos but this content
here is public. The ones that you won't
see on other people's videos are custom
thumbnails, closed captions, reply to a
recent comment, the monetization enabled
checkpoint, and added to a playlist.
These are all private things to your
channel which is why we don't share them
and other people's channels but as we
can see here Sean at Think Media, big
thumbs up of course, he's an expert at
YouTube optimization and he has a more or
less perfectly
optimizes video. Not shared it on Twitter
maybe he's done that through a
different source or
link which can't be detected at through
our checklist. So that's how a
near-perfect video is optimized but what
we haven't looked at yet is when a video
hasn't been optimized at all and it
looks a little like this. So right now
this video isn't absolute dumpster
fire but we can save it because it
hasn't been published yet. We need to add
cards
endscreens, custom thumbnails, all sorts of
things need to be fixed here and you
also see our recommendations for titles,
tags, and descriptions. If I mouse over it
will give me a recommendation of putting
the title between 20 and 60 characters
it looks like here it's over 60
characters, same with tags we've probably
not added any at all and the description
is too short, we haven't done anything
with our description. That needs fixing
Now one of the good things we have
here on optimization is when you haven't
optimized it provides links with these
arrows so say if I need to add some
video cards to this video I simply click
on the arrow and that will automatically
take me to the video card section of
this video so I can then add some cards
which will send my audience to more
videos on my content and you can do that
with the end screens and over options
from the video optimization checklist.
Now for some awesome news, everything
you've seen so far in this optimization
checklist is 100% free when you download
the vidIQ Chrome extension. There is
one paid aspect to this optimization
checklist and this is for pro and boost
users and that is the controversial
keywords checker. Now if I look at a
another person's video such as
Sean Cannell's again we have a potential
controversial keyword here which is the
word shoot. He's included that in his
video description here so it's just a
warning that your content may be flagged
for demonetization when you include some
of the words that we have in our
controversial keyword checker.
There are plenty more what you might
describe as a saucy comments in there. This
is not a defacto this will be
demonetised warning, it's a guide to make
sure that if you are using particular
words how YouTube may interpret them.
So there you have it folks the video
optimization checklist tool, not only an
opportunity to audit your own content
but to spy on your competition as well
all from the YouTube watch page. We'd
love to hear your thoughts on this tool
let us know in the comments below and of
course this is all part of our vidIQ
Chrome extension a link is in the
description and as we said it's free
to download. Enjoy the rest of your video
making day bye for now