We won’t teach you anything by telling you that videos are, and will keep being a powerful (if not the most powerful) tool in terms of content marketing. Videos are a great means to create strong emotional connections by visually capturing the attention of customers, leading to higher brand engagement and increased leads and sales. According to recent studies (Forbes), by the end of 2019 video will represent 80% of global internet traffic, which is huge.
YouTube is the second most visited site on the web worldwide, right after Google. Despite this, most digital marketers still tend to consider it as another social media site. However, the key of success on YouTube is not about posting content, but optimizing it - exactly like it is for your website.
In order to better understand the value of SEO on YouTube, and let you understand why you should make every effort possible to improve your positioning, here are some figures :
- As mentioned, YouTube is the second most used Search Engine
- It’s 2 billion active monthly users, 30+ million daily !
- More than 60% of YouTube traffic comes from mobile.
- YouTube reaches more adults aged 18 to 35 than any of traditional Television channel.
- 60% of people prefer video platforms to live television.
YouTube was bought in 2006 by Google for $1,65 billion as a way to combine they search and organization competenties with YouTube’s video library.
When it comes to YouTube SEO, most of the optimization process can be encapsulated in a process that you can apply to all your old videos, and then to all video that you’ll publish.
Why is it important to Optimise SEO On YouTube ?
As we already mentioned, Google acquired YouTube in 2006 and seeks to highlight it for maximum profitability. This implies that YouTube videos are shown on Google, and more and more occupy the top positions.
This is a golden opportunity for any brand, but especially incase of a new or poorly optimised website that has little domain authority and thus low confidence from Google. In that case, YouTube allows to take off since the social network has all the necessary authority needed to position yourself in the top search results, and improving your SEO by doing that (it all works together).
As you might imagine, competition is high on the most used video search engine. The good news is that the number of content producers making actual efforts to optimize their videos is still quite low, but increasing everyday.
Another good point, search results page on YouTube shows up to 20 results on the front page, while Google only shows up to 10 - this means more chances for you to position yourself on the first page of results.
All these are good reasons to start optimizing your YouTube SEO as of now.
Where to start with YouTube Search Optimisation ?
As for all search engine optimisation, the very first step before going any further is to know what you have to optimize for. You got the idea, we’ll talk about keywords again !
Looking into the keyword you want, and should try to position yourself is the cornerstone of any good SEO strategy. For that, keyword research needs to be done, as it will help you identify keywords people are looking for, but also how competitive these will be.
Performing a keyword research on YouTube is quite straightforward - just start by typing some keywords related to the topic you want to get visibility on, for example “SEO optimisation” :
YouTube will automatically show you the most searched queries related to your keywords : it’s that easy, you have your list of most qualitative keywords.
Next step is then to see how competitive these keywords are in order to choose your battles. Once again, the process is rather simple : just look at the results shown for the keywords in your list. It used to be very easy as YouTube was showing the number of results - it’s not the case anymore. What you will do instead is to check the first few results that are shown and see if those seem to be optimized based on the best practices we’ll share with you in the next article.
You’re done with your keyword research ! From your list, select a relevant keyword where there seem to be room for you to rank, and move to the next step : optimizing your video content for that query, by focusing on the key success factors.
More about that in the next article : YouTube SEO: Key Success Factors.
Cédric Lequenne
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