With about 2 billion active users and one billion hours of content streamed every day, YouTube is now the second-largest search engine on the internet. With the hottest social networking platform delivering such figures, we surely know that YouTube is the best place to upload any kind of video content.
But, many of us still aren’t aware of the mechanism of YouTube ranking. Most YouTubers have a feeling that the YouTube algorithm selects the most interesting video content, and delivers them in the first results. While this is a partial truth, there are facts and figures beyond that. As we discussed, such a mammoth range of content come into YouTube everyday, which makes mastering the YouTube algorithm a difficult task. Thus, there are some serious aspects that decide the ranking of your content in YouTube searches.
Another Version of Google
Most of us have an idea of how Google search rankings work, and how the pages can be optimized to improve the ranking. But we usually limit this idea into the so-called process of ‘browsing’. Basically, YouTube is also a search engine where we browse videos. So, these videos can also be optimized to have better audience attention and views.
The idea is to consider YouTube as a large library of videos, where you search for a particular video or solution, using a set of words. The first results that you get are the ones that YouTube finds most relevant to the set of words you searched with. These set of words are the YouTube keywords, which play an important role in ranking your content.
Mastering the Technique
The first step to optimize your videos comes before making it, that is, knowing your audience. You can entertain and engage your target audience only if you know what they are looking for.
Understanding your audience- why and what are they looking for – can help you to identify the most searched keywords that are relevant to your subject.
Keyword research can be simply done by randomly timing words in the search bar that are relatable to your content. Now, YouTube will give you a list of popular searches, from which you can select the specific keywords that fit right in your content. But some of these may have been highly used in the market, leading to a higher competition. The best way to identify them is to look for them in the other videos which have a huge number of views. This way, you can eliminate the keywords with a higher competition. Consulting a digital marketing agency in Dubai can also help you a lot more.
You can also compare your potential keywords through the ‘YouTube search’ option in Google trends. But, rather than the keyword volume or popularity, its perfect usage in your video is the most important aspect.
How To Use Keywords
Once you come up with a set of perfect keywords, it’s the time to attach them to your videos. The areas where you can add your keywords include video file name, title, transcript, description, tags and even in the video.
- Using keywords in your file name is the first way of optimizing your videos.
- Then comes a punchy title, where you can add your keyword at the beginning, which will drive in more attention.
- In the description box, YouTube allows upto 5000 characters. So, include your keywords, relevant information about your video and a strong call to action to make it worthy.
- The video transcript also entertains keywords, by providing the additional texts that are used by YouTube’s ranking algorithm.
- The final step is tagging, where you add the most relevant tags to your video, which includes specific keywords and phrases, channel name, other popular keywords etc. But always keep these tags precise and clear, as too many general tags can make your video look ‘unspecific’.
Other than all these, you can also include the right keywords in your video presentation. The YouTube algorithm radars the audio contents too, especially when subtitles are also available for your video. Thus, you can add these keywords as part of your script to churn out better results. In such a way, your channel will have a unique identity, with which the algorithm will find it.
