YouTube. The second-largest social network in the world, with a total of nearly 2 billion users worldwide — with over 1 billion hours of YouTube videos watched every day.
YouTube is arguably one of the most important platforms that you can use to market your business. Both in terms of using their advertisements and generating engaging content that helps promote your brand while offering value to your viewers.
It’s reported that around 90% of people said that they’d discovered new brands through YouTube — this shows the massive importance of the platform for all businesses.
Creating YouTube videos can be easy, but getting them to rank amongst the millions of videos uploaded daily can be difficult.
In this article, we’re going to outline 3 awesome YouTube SEO hacks that you can implement today to improve your video’s ranking instantly.
#1 Optimize Your Thumbnails
Optimizing your thumbnails for YouTube is one of the most important steps you can take. Especially when you’re looking to improve your overall ranking as well as click-through rates.
Let’s face it; we often choose objects (or in this case, videos) that stand out the most. Making your YouTube thumbnail stand out is crucial. Luckily, creating eye-catching thumbnail images has never been easier, thanks to online image creation tools such as Canva.
When creating your image, you want to use bright colors. You also want to include a significant image from your video. Lastly use big, bold text. All of these will help you to give an insight into your video’s topic.
#2 Use Video Tags To Rank As Suggested
The next best thing to showing up in the top selection of search results for a specific keyword is to appear as a suggested video that relates to another popular video.
Using video tags to help rank and categorize your video is common-knowledge. This is especially true if you’ve previously uploaded content to YouTube. However, using insightful tools such as TubeBuddy will help you find the exact tags of popular videos that relate to your content.
Once you’ve collected relevant tags from related YouTube videos, you can apply these tags to your content. This will help your video appear as a similar suggestion.
#3 Optimize Your Title
An engaging, eye-catching title is crucial if you want people to view your content on YouTube.
There are many different copywriting hacks that you can apply when it comes to creating an excellent title for your content.
Keyword Placement
Placing the specific keywords you want to rank for at the beginning of the title is one way that will help dramatically improve how you rank on YouTube.
For example, let’s say you want to rank for the keyword “Banana Smoothies”. Instead of having a title saying “Here’s My Amazing Recipe For Banana Smoothies”, you can optimize it by saying “Banana Smoothies: My Amazing Recipe”.
Using Parentheses
Another awesome way of optimizing your title is by using parentheses, i.e. brackets “( )”.
Using brackets is a brilliant way to improve your click-thru rates. A study conducted by HubSpot found that simply using brackets in video titles increased overall content views by 33%! You can use brackets and other parentheses in many ways to help improve views and the overall ranking of your videos. Here’s a list of examples that you can apply to your video today. Simply start with “Banana Smoothies: My Amazing Recipe” but at the end add one of the options below.
- (QUICK & EASY)
- (SIMPLE!)
- (VEGAN)
- (DELICIOUS!)
A bonus tip that ties into the use of brackets and other parentheses is to include the current year into your video title. It’s common for people to search for a specific keyword and add the current year to improve their search results. For example, you could edit your title to say “Banana Smoothies: My Amazing Recipe (2019)”. This will instantly give your SEO ranking a boost and will also make your video look current.
Bottom Line
YouTube is a fantastic marketing tool that can help you connect with your audience on a deeper level. The platform will directly help grow your business and overall brand awareness.
Creating content that helps promote your business can be fun, but getting your videos to rank in YouTube’s search results can be tricky.
Using these 3 quick & easy steps, you’ll be able to dramatically improve your chances of ranking highly on YouTube — leading to more views and engagement on your videos.
Written by Lewis James