Your presence on YouTube is almost as critical as your presence in search engines — after all, it is arguably the world's most visited website. With over 2 billion users on YouTube per month, it's critical that your videos rank high in order to tap into the massive audience that YouTube provides. You can rank highly on YouTube in the same way as you can in search engines like Google — by search engine optimization (SEO). But how exactly does YouTube SEO work? How popular is your YouTube channel?
If your business will profit from creating video tutorials or walkthroughs, visually-driven instructional material, product reviews, or interviews, then this social media site is a must for reaching their over 2 billion monthly users. Video is the only type of content that works well on YouTube. Long-form and short-form video content will also fit well on this site, depending on your type of business and your target audience. Most audiences tune in for a mix of education and entertainment, so if you're educating your audience about new marketing strategies or streaming video game play, work hard to keep their attention throughout your videos.
What exactly is YouTube SEO?
Let us describe YouTube SEO before we answer the question, "How does YouTube SEO work?"
YouTube SEO is best described as the process of optimizing your YouTube videos and channel so that they rank high in YouTube search queries. This optimization process often involves tasks such as:
- Increasing the effectiveness of your video descriptions and meta descriptions
- Including closed captions in video
- Choosing the Best Keywords
YouTube SEO, when done correctly, will help your videos rank at the top of YouTube results pages, increasing brand recognition, video views, website traffic, and revenue.
How YouTube SEO works
If you're familiar with SEO for your website, you'll find YouTube SEO to be very close. It is the method of optimizing your YouTube channel and videos in order to maximize your visibility in search results on YouTube. Increased exposure in Google improves the website traffic, conversion rate, and revenue; similarly, YouTube SEO can help increase important metrics such as follower count, brand recognition, website visits, and revenue.
YouTube's ranking algorithm - YouTube, like Google, has a ranking algorithm that decides how the content ranks. While ranking algorithms on any platform are rarely completely disclosed, the following is what we know about how YouTube ranks videos:
- Ranks videos based on their relevance to the viewer
- Video engagement, rather than clicks, is rewarded
- Consider how the descriptions and meta descriptions relate to the needs of your users
- Takes into account how many videos a single user has seen on your channel
- Takes into account, a user's viewing history
- Consider view velocity, which is the number of viewers who watch your video immediately after it is uploaded
- Takes into account the number of subscribers
