When you launch your YouTube channel, it can take a while to get discovered. To set the ball rolling, you will need to optimise your video to rank in search engines results.
If you follow these steps, you’ll slowly start to see positive gains. Here’s how you can grow your channel from nada to prada:
- Find 1-2 focus keywords. Type in a couple of words that sum up what your video is about on the YouTube search feature.
2. Once you find your keywords on YouTube suggest, throw in your keywords into keyword planning tools to narrow your search. KWFinder and Google Trends can help you filter the best performing keywords.
3. Find keywords that have a high search volume and are less competitive. For example, the word waterfall has a high Keyword Difficulty (KD) score of 52. Find words that score less than 40. The keyword ‘water features’ has a low KD and high search volume which makes it a better alternative.
- Use long tail keywords. Rather than using one keyword like ‘waterfall’ use a combination of keywords like ‘best waterfall in USA’. These long tail keywords are highly targeted and more likely to perform well against competitive keywords. If you use keywords that are being used by many competitors, your video is going to get buried.
5. Include keywords in your YouTube channel’s ‘about section’, in your video’s title and description and tags.
6. Put your primary keywords towards the beginning of your description and video title
7. Make your descriptions more than 200 words long – use your most powerful statements in the first 100 words of your descriptions, beyond which users must click on ‘show more’ to view the full description.
- Your video title should be less than 60 characters long to ensure that it doesn’t get cut off from the results page.
- Categorize your video – after uploading your video, categorize under advanced settings. It groups your videos with similar content and pops up in search engines when people type in a related keyword.
Go to YouTube Studio > Pick Videos > Select the video you want to add the category to > click the dropdown menu next to ‘edit’.
Select ‘category’
Now select the category you want, from the list of options available.
- Upload video transcripts
Go to video manager again > video > click on the dropdown menu next to the video you want to edit > click on subtitles/ CC
When a new screen pops up, click the button ‘English (Automatic)’
Click on edit video at the top right corner of the screen
Now the subtitles should populate automatically as you talk in your video. If the words are unclear, you can make edits by directly clicking on the subtitle text box and changing the words.
- Tag your videos. Research tags that other YouTubers in your niche are using.
Install Tube Buddy from Chrome Extensions > Sign into Tube Buddy from your YouTube account > Now when you open videos from your YouTube account, you can see the tags pop up to the right side of your screen.
- Use hashtags in your descriptions. They work great with trending content like news or upcoming events. The top hashtags will automatically populate above your video titles. Make sure you use less than 15 hashtags or YouTube will categorise your video as spam.
- Change your video title, description and tags on your raw video file before uploading it to YouTube.
Right click on your video file > select properties
Click on the ‘general’ tab and change your title
Next, click on the ‘details’ tab and add your tags. Update your video description in the comment section.
Though optimising your YouTube videos to rank may seem daunting when you first start off, it really is easy as pie once you get the hang of it. Just follow the above steps and you’re golden.
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