YouTube SEO How To Increase Video Rankings on YouTube [2022]

September 1, 2022

18 6 minutes read

YouTube SEO should be a part of every video creator’s plan if they want their videos to rank higher and their channel to grow as a whole.

Also, more brands and businesses are posting videos on YouTube, which makes it harder to grow a channel and get more views.
Businesses and brands can get a leg up on other YouTube creators by using a good YouTube SEO strategy.

In this article, you’ll find out what YouTube SEO is, why it’s important to have a YouTube SEO strategy, and the basics of YouTube SEO.

So, keep reading if you have your own YouTube channel or are part of a marketing team.

What is YouTube SEO?

YouTube SEO is the process of tweaking and optimizing different parts of a YouTube channel and videos to improve or increase their rankings on the YouTube search results page.

In a nutshell, optimizing some of the following parts of a YouTube channel is what YouTube SEO is all about:

Video title
Video description
Video metadata
Channel description

YouTube SEO Step-by-Step

Now that you know how important it is to have a YouTube SEO strategy, let’s talk about how you can optimize your YouTube channel and videos to get more views, clicks, and higher rankings.

YouTube Keyword Research

Researching keywords is the first step in any YouTube SEO plan.
Keywords are an important part of how YouTube searches work.

A YouTube SEO strategy starts with keyword research since you’ll use keywords in different places on your channel.
Video keyword research, like regular keyword research for SEO, tries to find the best keywords that get a lot of searches.
You should make videos about things that people are searching for on YouTube and are interested in.
YouTube to find popular words and phrases that are related to your topic.
You can also look for keywords on YouTube by using the YouTube Search Suggestions feature in the search bar.
People have used these terms to find videos on YouTube, so they are great search suggestions.
You can also look at what other people are doing in your niche to get ideas for keywords.
For instance, let’s say you have a YouTube channel about cooking.

Why is YouTube SEO Important for Brands and Creators.

Did you know that YouTube is the world’s second biggest search engine?

What used to be a place where people could upload videos is now a full-fledged search engine and marketing platform.
Here are some interesting YouTube statistics:
Every month, more than 3 billion searches are done.
It is bigger than Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and AOL put together.
Every minute, 100 hours’ worth of videos are uploaded.
If you do the math, that’s a LOT of video content, which makes it even harder to stand out.
Since YouTube is a search engine, like regular SEO on Google, you need to follow certain best practices if you want the YouTube algorithm to show your content for relevant search queries.
YouTube uses a complicated algorithm to rank videos based on a number of factors.
The goal of YouTube SEO is to improve the things that help your video rank.
If brands and creators want their content and videos to show up in relevant YouTube searches, they need to use SEO best practices.

Track YouTube Video Rankings

Creators and brands should keep an eye on how their video rankings change over time.
If your YouTube SEO efforts are working or not, you’ll be able to tell by how your video ranks change.
What’s the point of putting time into YouTube SEO if you can’t tell if your efforts have improved your rankings?
You could probably keep track of your video rankings by hand, but that would take a lot of time and work.
You can instead use a YouTube rank tracker tool to measure and keep track of how your videos are doing.

Mention Target Keyword At Start Of Video

The next thing you should do to improve your YouTube SEO is to say your target keyword at the beginning of your video.
Since YouTube automatically transcribes your videos, if you say your keyword at the beginning of your video, it will be picked up.
This gives YouTube creators another way to tell YouTube what their videos are about by adding their target keyword to them.
When YouTube knows what your content is about, it can put your videos in front of people who are searching for things that are related to your content.

YouTube Video Title Optimization

YouTube uses the title to index and rank content, so it’s one of the most important things you can do to improve your video’s rank.
Not only that, but the title of the video is often the first thing that people see when they look through the search results, so it’s important to make a title that is short, clear, and different enough to make people want to click.
Since you’ve already done your keyword research, it won’t be hard to make a title for your YouTube video that is keyword-optimized.
Your video titles need to include the target keyword or keywords that you found when you did keyword research.
Creators should put their main keyword as close to the beginning of the YouTube video title as possible and a similar word or phrase at the end.

YouTube Video Description Optimization

Another very important part of YouTube SEO is the video description.
The video description field gives the person who made the video another chance to explain what it’s about.
This field is used by YouTube to figure out what’s going on in the video so that it can match it to the best search query.
The video description is for both YouTube’s algorithm and the people who use the site.
Creators can use the video description to tell people what the video is about.
The first tip for optimizing your video description is to put your target keyword as close to the beginning as possible.
YouTube puts a small piece of the video description on the search results page. Because of this, creators should try to put their target keyword as close to the beginning of the video description as possible—ideally within the first 25 words.

Add Target Keyword To File Name

The next YouTube SEO tip you should use is to change the file name of your video so that it includes your main keyword.
Instead of uploading a video to YouTube with a name like VID 32a, which is just a bunch of random numbers and letters, you should change the file name to something like how-to-swim-freestyle, which includes your target keyword.
Before you think about putting it on YouTube, you should do this.

Create a YouTube Playlist

YouTube playlist of videos that are similar or related, you can get people to watch more of your videos.

Making a playlist can help YouTube creators get more Watch Time, and it’s also good for YouTube SEO because playlists can also rank for your target keywords.

Embed YouTube Videos On Your Website

One way to get more views and higher rankings for your videos is to promote them on social media and on your own website.
Remember that YouTube needs people to watch your videos in order to figure out if they are interesting.
This affects where your YouTube videos will rank.
If you have a WordPress site, this WordPress YouTube plugin from Elfsight makes it easy to add your YouTube videos to your site.
You can put YouTube videos anywhere on your WordPress site with this plugin.
You can get more people to watch your videos by sharing them on social media and embedding them on your website. This will have an effect on how your videos rank in search results.

Boost Audience Engagement

Engagement from the audience is probably one of the most important ranking signals on YouTube.
Likes, comments, shares, saves, and “subscribes” are all ways to get your audience more involved.
So, when you make videos, make sure to get people to do something.
You can talk about things such as:
“Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below.”
“Don’t forget to click the Subscribe button and the bell icon to get notified when we post new videos.”

Conclusion

We hope that the tips in this guide to SEO for YouTube have been helpful and informative for you.

Like we said before, YouTube uses a complicated set of algorithms to figure out which videos to put at the top of the list for certain search queries.

As a creator, you should always be testing to see which optimizations have the biggest effect on your video’s ranking and a number of views.

And if you’re ever not sure what to do, just look at the most popular videos and channels in your niche to see what works.