Have you ever thought about having your videos appear on the first page of the search engine? It’s not magic that will happen organically, but with excellent SEO in the publication, it’s more than possible.
One of the best ways to be present in your life audience and a possible new audience, is gaining more visibility than the competition in searches on a given topic.
In this text, you can check out 9 tips that will transform the way your content stands out in the algorithms, in addition to understanding what SEO is and how it influences your strategy.
Keep reading!
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization, or optimization for search engines, is the union of techniques used in digital materials, such as videos or articles like this one, so that they gain fame in rankings from Google, Yahoo, YouTube and others.
Based on keywords, SEO directly influences algorithms in order to bring internet users the content they are looking for, in the ideal format.
Of course, it is not just with keywords that this technique will work, as the main search engine (Google) has established more than 200 ranking factors to define the position of each of the pages for each search made on the site.
When done correctly, the brand or company gains more and more authority, relevance and performance in the search engine.
Ranking videos on social networks
In the case of videos, it is also necessary to perform a good SEO so that your channel or video is found more easily.
This is because the strict search systems are also present on social networks, such as TikTok, Instagram and, especially, YouTube. The latter is even behind Google and Google Images, beating Yahoo and Bing in terms of number of searches in web browsers, according to a study carried out by Moz in partnership with Jumpshot, in 2017.
Some of the most important points to perform well on the results pages are the engagements (visualizations, comments and likes) and the correct completion of descriptive fields (title, tags and description).
Speaking of importance, it’s time to understand the advantages of being ranked in the best way.
What influences using SEO correctly in videos?
The closer to the top positions, the greater the advantages for the brand. Discover some of the benefits for your business below:
- At the top for quality: although there are investments to improve SEO, climbing, following the rules pre-established by search engines, will be done more for the quality of your content than other aspects.
- Increase in traffic: attracting new audiences allows your main platform to receive a new audience and leverage your sales strategy.
- More authority for the brand: a featured content demonstrates credibility and greater mastery of the topic, which will differentiate your company from the competition.
How do platforms carry out the search return process?
There are several criteria and calculations to establish the ranking, but the return procedure is the same on practically all sites: crawling, indexing and displaying results.
It works like this:
- The robots identify the pages using algorithms that define the prioritization and indexing frequency of the pages (in the case of Google, enter the 200 factors for definition);
- Any changes or deletions detected on the websites or platforms are updated at all times;
- Afterwards, the bots include the crawled pages in the indexes, including all the information (content, publication date and other data);
- Finally, after the diagnosis of relevance and compliance with the rules, all the results are displayed, including even the autocomplete, the famous “search instead for…”.
9 tips to make your videos number one in search engines
Now that you know how algorithms work and what it takes to keep your brand high on the first pages of search engines, it’s time to learn how to do that.
1. Search keywords
They are essential for the platform to identify the theme of the video, index the content and associate it with user searches.
To do this, you can enter them in the title, tags, description and file name so that YouTube collects this information and uses it for ranking.
2. Select keywords
The most popular terms tend to attract more people, however, they have more competitors. These competitors can be big brands and influencers that are harder to compete with. So choose long-tail keywords.
3. Set a good video title
This is one of the most important factors for YouTube to index and rank content. For the video to appear well positioned, the title should be as close as possible to the user’s search.
4. Put tags in the video
They are one of the factors that YouTube uses to identify the subjects of a video and make the correct indexing, but also to recommend related videos.
In this field, YouTube allows you to use 120 characters. We recommend that you use 6 to 8 words so as not to confuse the algorithm with words that are far from your content.
5. Make smart descriptions
The description is another important field that must be filled in when uploading the video. This text should bring information about what the video says, in the most descriptive way possible.
If the title needs to be concise, the description can be longer and more detailed. You can use up to 5000 characters for this. Here, you must include keywords that represent the topics covered in the video. This way you increase the chances of ranking for those terms.
In the text you can include CTAs (call to action) as an invitation to subscribe to the channel or download material from the website. Always use shortened links.
Another idea is to use time frame to direct users to more important content in the video, especially longer ones. It is possible to insert hashtags in the text to generate links that help users to find other content on that topic.
Do not exaggerate! If you use more than 15 hashtags, YouTube will ignore all of them.
6. Choose a good filename
Instead of uploading with the name of codes and numbers, use the descriptive name with keywords inserted. Thus, the platform can identify in the name of the file what it is about.
7. Make transcripts and subtitles
YouTube algorithm is not able to read photos and videos. It only understands texts and codes. Therefore, one of the strategies you can adopt so that he understands what your content is about is to transcribe and subtitle.
You can do this transcription manually or use the YouTube tool.
8. Make longer videos
Videos under 2 minutes tend to be poorly positioned. The average duration of the first 5 positions is 11 minutes and 44 seconds. Therefore, it is worth starting to invest in longer videos, with about 10 minutes.
9. Increase CTR in search results
CTR represents the click-through rate of users on your video among search results. Having a high click-through rate means that your video proved to be relevant to that keywords searched by the user.
To increase this, think about how to make your titles even better, whether with a more attractive thumbnail or a better title than your organic competitors.
Are you ready to improve SEO on your YouTube videos?
