We all know that YouTube is one traffic source with boundless potential. The site gets up to 30 million visitors each day. But how can you get people watch your videos? How can you drive traffic to your videos and eventually to your website?
Optimize it. Always take the time to optimize your videos instead of just randomly uploading it as this is a way you can penetrate YouTube and Google search market.
Here’s how…
1. Use Relevant Title – Make sure your title best describes the video. This is one of the factors you need to focus on as this affects your Click-Through Rate (CTR). Use your keywords but write the title to attract the click.
2. Add Long Video Descriptions – Utilize your keywords and ensure your descriptions are no less than 200 words. In fact, the longer, the better, the max is 5000 characters which may not make sense in every scenario but for those tough keywords, it can be worth the effort. This is important because this is how Google and YouTube understand your video’s subject. Also, add a link to your website as this is a call to action that you need to drive them to your website. Don’t be lazy! We highly recommend adding the description before publishing the video, this allows Google to index the description immediately instead of waiting for them to crawl the video a second time.
3. Add Relevant Tags – Use about ten or more tags and use keywords. YouTube is pretty lenient with keywords in tags but avoid overusing the same word. For example, using ‘best seo’ ‘top seo’ ‘greatest seo’ ‘smartest seo’ might be a little overboard, instead use synonyms like ‘best seo’ ‘top search engine optimization’ ‘greatest search marketer’. Also, a little secret if you are uploading more than one video to your channel, use a Tag that is specific to you in all of your videos. It helps Google to show your videos in the suggested videos section.
4. Optimize for “Video Keywords” – These are the keywords that tend to show video results on Google. Consider checking and choosing a keyword that has YouTube video results that appear on the first page of Google.
When it does, then it is a good sign that you could use these to rank in both YouTube and Google. If you tend to optimize a video around a keyword that doesn’t have video results in Google, you’ll only get traffic from people searching on YouTube.
5. Create Keyword-Rich Playlists – Organize your videos neatly into keyword-rich playlists since it will give YouTube deeper information about your video’s topic. Don’t be shy about including other videos by other users in your playlist…just not your competitors. If you include videos from leaders in your niche that aren’t competing with you this can help Google, YouTube and viewers to see you as an expert.
6. Choose an Engaging Video Thumbnail – YouTube will auto generate random screens from your video. You can choose from those screenshots but make sure it is engaging. Or you can add a custom thumbnail to your video that you think could increase click-through rate (CTR). This may not send signals to YouTube, but it affects engagement. Click here for more info on how to add thumbnails.
7. Gather Video Views from Online Communities – Since YouTube considers high audience retention. Share your video on online groups. Make sure you are not just trying to spam links throughout the community. Instead, use your link to provide help and value just like answering a question and eventually suggesting your video for reference and more information.
8. Promote Subscribing and Liking – Subscribing and liking are two of the most important user experience signals that YouTube uses. At the end of your video, try prompting and asking your viewers to like and subscribe to your videos.
9. Link to Your Other Videos – We all know internal linking is important and YouTube is no different. In your description link to a few of your other relevant videos. You can even link to your playlists or main channel page. Just make sure to use the full URL with ‘https://www.’ so the link is clickable.
Optimizing your YouTube videos for traffic is a lot like optimizing any other type of content. You really can’t simply expect to post great videos and expect traffic from it on their own. This takes a lot of hard work. If you do it right, you can even get your YouTube videos to rank in Google searches.