Videos are becoming an increasingly valuable form of content for lead-generation and customer engagement. In a recent announcement, YouTube revealed that they would be updating the nature of their algorithm for ranking YouTube videos by factoring in a 'time watched' metric. The new metric has also been added to the YouTube Analytics dashboard, granting video creators with an even greater understanding of their audience's level of engagement with their video content. This can be found under 'Views' and then 'Estimated minutes watched.' This new update provides an opportunity to talk about the oft-neglected art of YouTube video optimisation. Of course you understand the need for a comprehensive search engine optimisation campaign to drive traffic to your website, but are you fully optimising your videos for maximum exposure on YouTube? Second only to Google itself, YouTube is the second largest search engine, attracting millions of viewers daily. When a website is optimised, it's returned near the top of the results page for a particular search query. The algorithms at work when a user searches for content on YouTube are extremely similar
and you should be using similar techniques to optimise your videos. I'll break it down into the different steps that are involved in uploading a video: Titles: Just as with a website's SEO campaign, it's all about keywords! You need keywords related to the content in the title of the video. Ideally, you also want keywords in the file name itself. Not sure which keywords to use? Like Google's Keyword Tool, YouTube Keyword Tool lets you view search numbers for individual keywords by YouTube users. Using this information, you can see which relevant keywords are being used by searchers and optimise your videos for maximum exposure. Descriptions: Your main keywords need to be repeated a few times.The additions of semantically related words will also aid in search rankings. It's important to not over-do it, don't keyword-stuff and make your descriptions organic from a user perspective. The first 5570 characters are shown by YouTube, so make this first segment count! However, you should be aiming for at least four to five sentences of content. Even if the viewer does not read it, the content (if relevant and with effective use of keywords) is still valued by YouTube's ranking algorithm. Remember to use external links to connect to your website/partners/social media accounts. Tags: Try to use up to ten relevant tags. Links: Similar to a link-building strategy in any other SEO campaign, your link profile needs to be relevant and high quality. Social media links are also becoming increasingly valuable. User statistics: In the same way that your website's metrics are evaluated by search engines to determine its quality and visitor engagement scores, video viewer metrics are also assessed to determine whether video content is engaging and valuable to people. These metrics include the following: Time watched: The aforementioned recent update takes into consideration the amount of time spent watching the video to determine whether it engages the viewer throughout. Views: The most obvious metric is the amount of views the video has acquired. This is calculated within a set timeframe (otherwise new videos would never stand a chance of reaching the top of results). Feedback: The amount of feedback, in terms of comments and interactions in the comment section. Playlists: The amount of times the video is added to user playlists. Rating: How positive the feedback isthe amount of likes in comparison to dislikes. Blogs: The amount/quality of blogs that have embedded or linked to the video. Thumbnail Optimisation: The thumbnail you use to represent your video is highly important for increasing click-through rates. This is difficult when YouTube only gives you a choice of three thumbnails. But there is way to calculate the moments in your video that YouTube will thumbnail, allowing you to adjust your video around using the best thumbnail: Divide the length of your video (in seconds) by 4. So if your video is 4 minutes and 36 seconds (276 seconds), YouTube will cut it in these three places:Thumbnail 1 =(276 ÷4 = 69 seconds)Thumbnail 2 = Thumbnail 1 x 2 (69 x 2 = 138 seconds)Thumbnail 3 = Thumbnail 1 x 3 (69 x 3 = 207 seconds) Essentially, YouTube cuts your video into quarters, and chooses thumbnails from each quarter. The benefits of optimising video content to appear high on search results are twofoldYouTube users may find your content via the site itself, but video links appear high on organic search results as well. If your YouTube video is ranked high for a particular keyword on that site, it may appear top of a regular search query on Google. Digital Clicks are internet marketing consultants offering a comprehensive range of services to clients across the country.Post navigation
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