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Why You Need to Optimize Videos for Youtube Search

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Why You Need to Optimize Videos for Youtube Search

A strong presence on YouTube is one of your greatest assets. After all, the video-sharing website is the world’s second largest search engine, after Google. There are billions of views per day, and that’s not just folks entertaining themselves with funny animal videos. People are there learning about various products and services, making purchasing decisions, commenting on their experiences, and interacting with companies, which is why you need YouTube videos to market your business.

In fact, Forbes discovered that 90% of consumers make their purchasing decisions by watching video content. The 2018 State of Inbound report found that 45% of marketers were looking to invest more in this area. YouTube marketing has therefore become a major focus; and here is why.

What You Get from High YouTube Rankings

Uploading lots of YouTube videos, if done right, can yield many benefits in return. The website has an algorithm that works similar to (although not exactly like) Google’s search ranking algorithm. While you can easily track likes and comments, YouTube measures watch time and visitor engagement to rank content. Higher rankings mean greater visibility (even on Google, which includes videos/thumbnails in its search engine results pages). In fact, video optimization can improve rankings on Google queries as well.

A strong YouTube presence isn’t something you want to take for granted. With improved rankings, you can:

Expanded Brand Reach

YouTube is accessible on every computer, tablet, and smartphone. Millions of users are logged on at any given time, bringing your brand reach to a whole new level. According to Nielsen, television viewing time has declined but, in a single year (December 2013 to December 2014) it found 18-49 year olds increased their time on YouTube by 44%. You can therefore reach millions of more people who may be interested in your product or service. That’s why you need YouTube videos.

Connection with Your Audience

Many people are enticed by attractive images. Many even like reading about products and learning from texts. To reach the most people and make a connection, videos bring your brand to a new level. Introduce your product/service or explain anything you want to about it. Does your product need assembly out of the box or are there uses one wouldn’t know about unless you explain it to them? Videos give you an opportunity to explain things step by step in a format an average user can understand.

There are two types of connections to focus on—emotional and educational.

  • Emotional videos tend to be the most effective. If a video prompts an emotional reaction, the consumer can relate to it on a personal level. An emotional reaction in turn boosts the chances a customer or prospect takes an action you would like them to—visit your website, sign up for a newsletter or email list, or make a purchase.
  • Educational videos target viewers who are intent on learning. They may or may not have yet purchased your product. An informative video can nonetheless tell them something about, for example, software installation. Rather than reading through vague instructions, your video can guide them each step of the way in plain language, from how to install the program to applying it to specific applications in their business.

Improved Customer Engagement

Engagement is another reason why you need to optimize videos for YouTube. Once you connect with your audience, you want to keep the traffic flowing. The level of engagement coincides with your interaction with customers. React to their comments and concerns. Reveal where they can find resources to help them get more out of your product.

Encourage people to become more familiar with your brand. If you have a YouTube page for your product or company, encourage viewers to go there. Provide links to and notify people about your website. Thus, an opportunity to build brand awareness and improve your chances of obtaining new leads and conversions.

How do you measure engagement? On YouTube, the most readily available metrics include the number of views, thumbs up/thumbs down, favorites, comments, and social shares. Viewers also have the opportunity to embed your videos on other websites, potentially further expanding your reach.

 

Inner Workings of YouTube SEO

Every month, more than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube, and 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute. You’ll therefore need rankings for viewers to see your videos. Keywords are part of optimizing your video for SEO, but YouTube’s search engine works differently that Google’s. It does not track keywords in videos as Google does in written content on websites (although keywords are still important).

YouTube’s algorithm adjusts the rankings of videos based on the following factors:

  • Keyword relevance: Keywords are used a little differently but are equally important as YouTube provides an opportunity to include them in video titles, descriptions, and tags, to help them appear in related search results.
  • Watch time: Important is not only why you need YouTube videos, but how long people stick around and watch them. Tracking watch time is essentially the opposite of measuring bounce rate. The more time people spend watching your video(s), the greater the level of engagement.
  • Video length: Most YouTube videos are around 4 to 6 minutes long. Successful content is generally brief, but long enough to deliver the types of content the visitor is looking for. Producing a video that’s too long or too short can have a negative effect on viewership.
  • Number of Subscribers: YouTube assigns higher rankings to videos and channel pages with larger numbers of subscribers. Having more subscribers equates to content with value and video publishers that have established authority in their industry.
  • Video Quality: YouTube’s search algorithm operates more as a recommendation engine. Rather than scoring videos by which are most related to others, rankings are generated by gauging video quality. Therefore, videos are ranked by tracking view count and upload time, as well as feedback-based mechanisms such as user ratings, commenting, favoriting, and sharing.

Now, we’ll delve a little deeper into how YouTube ranks videos. Videos may also receive a relatedness score based on whether they’re like other videos in the user’s search history (user specificity). If other videos are too similar, YouTube uses a diversity method to remove them and provide users with a broader set of selections. In fact, the recommendation engine determines what videos a user is more likely to watch. How it does this isn’t completely associated with a video’s specific content.

Co-visitation is how YouTube maps a video to a similar set of videos. It accounts for the relationship between videos, how many times they were viewed in a certain time period, and a candidate video’s popularity. With this method, a relatively unpopular video may receive a high relatedness score; that is, if adjustments aren’t factored in to account for watch time, video metadata, etc.

Therefore, optimizing your videos on this level is challenging. But there are various ways you can optimize videos for YouTube search. You can focus on video length and relevance, and on optimization strategies that leverage how you can tweak content on YouTube to attract viewers, leads, and conversions.

Optimizing Your YouTube Channel for Search

How do you get videos to make your business and brand seem appealing? And how do you get them to be seen by such a wide audience? These are critical reasons why you need to optimize videos for YouTube.

In fact, there are several optimization strategies that not only focus on your videos, but also descriptions and other metadata provided when you upload them. Using appropriate titles, descriptions, and tags is as equally important as having great content, and so is promoting your video using various online channels. Doing so will expose your videos to as diverse an audience as possible.

In today’s media-driven marketplace, you must grab attention and get to the point, quickly. It is a challenge to get and keep a prospect’s or customer’s attention. That’s why you need YouTube videos. A viewer may be on their desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile phone. You want them to easily find your videos online and choose them over your competitors’ posts.

“How do I get noticed on YouTube?” you may ask.

That’s why optimizing for YouTube is becoming so crucial. Now that you’ve learned why it’s so important, learn how you can properly optimize your Youtube videos.

 

Written By:

andrew@adleverage.com


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