Mastering YouTube SEO: Essential Tips on How to Rank YouTube Videos

YouTube might seem com­pli­cat­ed and intim­i­dat­ing for busi­ness own­ers. Still, when look­ing at some of those videos gar­ner­ing mil­lions of views, we kind of can’t help but be a bit jeal­ous and say to our­selves: Why can’t I do that? What’s the miss­ing ingre­di­ent? How can you rank a YouTube video high, so I can actu­al­ly grow my busi­ness with the help of the platform? 

If you’ve want­ed to hire experts in SEO ser­vices in Mia­mi and Fort Laud­erdale, FL, to help you boost your pres­ence on YouTube, then you prob­a­bly know that sim­ply upload­ing a video and hop­ing for the best sim­ply won’t work. 

The expert team at Rosy Strate­gies will help you debunk the myths sur­round­ing rank­ing on YouTube.

How To Rank YouTube Videos? 

Before start­ing, you shouldn’t for­get that EVERY SINGLE chan­nel start­ed with zero sub­scribers and zero views. This means that the play­ing field is lev­eled at the start, and it’s up to the sci­ence of YouTube SEO to help you gar­ner more views, clicks, sub­scrip­tions, and more. What’s the key to YouTube SEO? Opti­miza­tion, naturally. 

Ranking on YouTube: Demystifying YouTube SEO 

At its core, YouTube is also a search engine, just like Google or Bing. That said, com­plex algo­rithms also deter­mine your video rankings. 

As with Google and Bing, you don’t have to put in all that time and effort to under­stand every aspect of these algo­rithms, but instead, focus on one thing: deliv­er­ing high-qual­i­ty video con­tent to your poten­tial view­ers. Give your audi­ence what they want to see, and start from there. 

If you want to focus on the YT algo­rithm, there are two main fac­tors you should consider:

• Tech­ni­cal SEO aspects: These are video descrip­tions, tags, tran­scripts, and titles that basi­cal­ly tell the search engine what the video is about.
• “Human” SEO aspects: These tell the algo­rithm the content’s per­for­mance from the viewer’s point of view, mea­sur­ing watch time, view­er reten­tion, click rate, and user engagement. 

In this aspect, YouTube SEO is a bit less com­pli­cat­ed than in the case of more tra­di­tion­al search engines because you don’t real­ly have to both­er with domain met­rics and back­link pro­files to rank high­er. Rank­ing on YouTube pret­ty much boils down to cre­at­ing an opti­mized video that will sat­is­fy the search intent of your viewers. 

So, how to rank on YouTube? Hope­ful­ly, the fol­low­ing tips will help you get started.

Research Focus Keywords 

If you want to rank a YouTube video, you should start by tar­get­ing a rel­e­vant key­word that serves as the base of your video opti­miza­tion process. 

Sim­i­lar­ly to all oth­er search engines, YouTube also looks for terms and key­words that match your con­tent and user intent and will show­case the best results. 

You can lit­er­al­ly bor­row some of your key­words from your ongo­ing SEO strat­e­gy, if you have one, or you can always reach out to an expert to help you get start­ed. Still, remem­ber that key­words, while cru­cial to suc­cess, aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly every­thing in rank­ing high on YouTube. 

Optimize Your Titles

After you’ve found your keyword(s), you can move on to the next steps of the process to help you rank on YouTube. The sim­plest way to make your video more vis­i­ble to search engines would be to include your focus key­word in the video title. 

A sim­ple key­word in the title won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean instant suc­cess. So, instead of just sim­ply includ­ing your key­word, also make an effort to promise some­thing in the title: let your view­ers know that they will be enter­tained, that you will teach them some­thing, or that they are in for a surprise. 

For exam­ple, instead of say­ing: Ten Mar­ket­ing Hacks for Law Firms, con­sid­er nam­ing your video “Ten Law Firm Mar­ket­ing Hacks THAT WORK.”

While this might sound a bit like click­bait or slang, it will actu­al­ly let your audi­ence know what they’re about to see, and you give them all the more rea­son to click and watch the video until the end.

Optimize Your Descriptions

Opti­miz­ing your descrip­tions enables you to give your view­ers more depth about the video. Not only can you give more info about the con­tent, but you can fur­ther opti­mize the video with addi­tion­al keywords. 

Since your view­ers will prob­a­bly be read­ing the descrip­tion, it’s always a good idea to make it engag­ing and unique and enrich it with your company’s social han­dles, web­site, and oth­er use­ful links. Rank­ing on YouTube isn’t just about algorithms. 

Include Tags

How to rank YouTube videos with the help of tags? After choos­ing your focus key­words, adding a descrip­tion, and a few valu­able links, it’s time to put some of your key­words into the tags sec­tion. These are for YouTube only to help the plat­form cat­e­go­rize your content.

Don’t Skip The Scripts

Can you rank a YouTube video with the help of scripts? Sure, they are awk­ward and tedious, but a well-writ­ten script can help you come off as nat­ur­al, spon­ta­neous, and cohe­sive while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly  keep­ing the flow going and mak­ing your video eas­i­er to watch.

With­out a script, the worst thing that can hap­pen is that your view­ers get side­tracked. This can result in increased bounce rates and short­er watch times, and if you keep the trend up, you might even risk los­ing a few of your sub­scribers and casu­al viewers. 

All in all, hav­ing a good script can great­ly improve the over­all qual­i­ty of your video as it will give you guid­ance, help­ing you work toward an ulti­mate con­clu­sion instead of just talk­ing about a sub­ject that might end up being a bit incoherent. 

Embrace Longer Content

Even though we’re liv­ing in an age when shorts and reels are insane­ly pop­u­lar, when it comes to stan­dard YT video con­tent, longer videos typ­i­cal­ly out­per­form short­er formats. 

On that note, some experts actu­al­ly believe that the plat­form looks at total view dura­tion as a mas­sive rank­ing fac­tor. And it kind of makes sense – the more you watch some­thing, the more engaged you become. Also, the longer you watch, the more like­ly you will see ads, which will also help YouTube from a com­mer­cial point of view. 

While length is a cru­cial fac­tor to con­sid­er, you don’t want to make over­ly lengthy videos that feel dragged out. Instead of focus­ing on dura­tion alone, make sure to ful­ly answer every ques­tion that might inter­est your view­ers and explore oth­er relat­ed top­ics briefly to ensure your con­tent remains high-quality. 

There’s More

At this point, we still haven’t talked about oth­er impor­tant fac­tors such as engage­ment, cre­at­ing playlists, excit­ing thumb­nails, and the pow­er of closed captions.

If you want to learn more about them and wish to explore the ben­e­fits of excelling in YouTube SEO, feel free to reach out to our experts today. With our help, you can mas­ter this pres­ti­gious and fun search engine.