If you optimise your videos properly, they will show up in Google results as well as in YouTube itself. Try our tips to help boost your video rankings.
Channel Settings:
1. First things first, add your company name and ideally the most relevant search term within the title of your YouTube channel.
2. Ensure that you have checked the visibility box, to make the channel visible to the public.
3. If people are likely to know your company email address, check the box so that they can find your channel by searching for your email.
4. Add a description to your channel, including 3-5 relevant search terms, such as topics you will be posting videos about. Also include links to your social media channels.
5. Use your company logo within your YouTube channel, to boost awareness of your branding and to help users recognise that your account is genuine.
Profile Settings:
6. Use your business name as the YouTube profile name.
7. Add the correct URL in the website section of your profile.
8. In the ‘About Me’ section, write a short description of your company, including relevant keywords.
Video Content:
9. Try to create engaging, high quality content for your videos – make it something related to the services or goods which you are trying to promote within your website.
10. Target ‘video keywords’ where possible- search terms that bring up YouTube videos within Google search results, such as ‘How to…’.
Video Settings:
11. Make sure that you select your uploaded videos to appear in the featured content box, and always set one of your own videos as the featured video on your channel page.
12. Check the relevant box to make the featured video play automatically.
13. Include your company name and a relevant keyword in all video titles.
14. Add your website URL to the beginning of the video description, followed by your company name.
15. Include 3-5 keywords again in the video description, as well as links to your social media channels.
16. Always add video tags – use 3-5 keywords and separate them using quotation marks. For example – “Video Optimisation”, “Search Engine Optimisation”, “YouTube SEO” and so on.
17. Always choose a visually appealing thumbnail for each video to attract viewers.
YouTube Settings:
18. Make sure that the privacy of your videos is set to public. Select the standard YouTube license when asked. Also, allow comments, comment voting, video responses, ratings, embedding and syndication.
19. YouTube converts videos into Java, which stops Google from being able to properly crawl any YouTube videos. You can get around this by uploading a caption file. If your video doesn’t contain any speech, then you can make use of the annotations feature instead, to show the relevance of any video content.
Promote Your Videos:
20. You can embed YouTube videos in a variety of blogs and websites – ensure that it is placed within any company blogs or websites you may have. Include a link to the YouTube URL where the video is located, also. You should also post links to your videos on your social media channels- Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on.
If you would like further advice on optimising your videos, then get in touch with the SEO professionals at Varn today.
This post was originally posted in January 2015, and updated in May 2017.
