Everyone wants to get a lot of views and subscribers on their videos. Everyone wants results, but most people don’t get them. Why is this? It’s probably (at least partly) because their tags and titles SUCK. That may come across as a bit blunt, but it’s true. If you want to see results with your content, then you need to know how to optimize your videos in a way that gets you noticed. Luckily for you, I’m going to teach you exactly how to do this! Stay tuned, because 7 ways to optimize your YouTube tags & title SEO is coming now.
How To Optimize Your Video Title
Your video title is one of the most crucial and overlooked parts of video production. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: If YouTube gives you a spot to put something into your video, it’s there for a reason. If it’s there then it’s IMPORTANT and you should never overlook these features! With that said, let me share a few things with you that I know will help your title quality to skyrocket.
Do Your Keyword Research
This isn’t optional, it’s critical. Chances are, other people have already made a video like you’re wanting to make now. Do a quick search on YouTube, or even through Google and take notice of some video or article titles that show up in your search results. After doing this, gather your thoughts and notes together, and brainstorm a title up. Go ahead and maybe use parts of other people’s titles, or even rearrange the words of other popular titles to make a new, but similar one.
Be sure to take your time doing this and don’t rush it. Ask yourself a few questions like:
- If this title was on someone else’s video, would it make me want to click it more than the competitors titles?
- Does your title accurately describe or hint at what your video will be about?
- Does the title sound intelligent like it was written by an adult and not a kid?
Asking yourself these basic questions can help to give yourself an idea of whether your title is leaning in the right direction, or if you need to go back and do a little bit more revising.
Use the Right Keywords
Keywords are not something that are limited to the video tags only. Keywords are the words that you’re targeting to rank for in the search engine results, such as “YouTube help” or “video marketing”. It can take some practice to really start understanding keywords and how your viewers use them. However, it’s very important to understand that not all keywords are good keywords.
Some are bad because of the high number of people who are all competing to rank for those same keyword(s). Other keywords will generate traffic but no sales, while others generate unwanted traffic by pulling in viewers that are actually looking for something completely different, which will just kill your watch-time, and your ranking.
A tool mentioned in my easily increase your viewer watch time tutorial, which can help you to find good keywords to target, and will even give you information such as the search popularity and the amount of competition it has. If you haven’t already, be sure to check it out in the link above!
Use Clickbait Titles… Appropriately
We’ve all seen those ads around Facebook or Twitter that go something like “How you can lose 15 lbs of belly fat in 3 days” and they’re hardly ever filled with viable and good information. After a while (actually about 30 seconds), humans get quite annoyed at these titles and don’t want to click them because they don’t see them as relevant or trustworthy information.
Research has been done to show that if you use a clickbait title that’s actually relevant to the video you uploaded and your video contains quality information, it can substantially increase your video views. If you have a video with the title “15 Deadliest Foods in Your Kitchen”, that will spark a lot of interest AND positivity as long as your video is actually about deadly foods that can be in the kitchen. You see what I’m saying? Clickbait titles are fine as long as you use them appropriately!
Optimize Your Video Tags
Tags are just as important as your title. They tell YouTube what your video is about, and what sort of keywords you should rank for in the search results. With YouTube being the 2nd biggest search engine in the world, well, you should see why ranking for the appropriate terms is so important, and how the tags can help drive a ton of traffic to your channel.
Big tip: Use your channel name as one of your tags, your website name as a tag, and your biggest competitors channel name as tag. This will make your other videos show up in the relevant videos to the right, when someone is watching your video, or your competitions similar video using the same tag.
Go Relevant or Go Home
Using relevant keywords in your tags – I cannot begin to express just how important this is. So many times I see beginner video makers using keywords like “Minecraft” and “Call of Duty” in their tutorial that teaches you how to correctly dribble a basketball. Those tags are not relevant to the video because the video has NOTHING to do with video games in general, let alone those 2.
Don’t use a keyword just because they may have a high monthly search volume. Use keywords that are, again, relevant to your video. For instance, you may use tags such as “youtube support” and “video seo” in your video that teaches people how to correctly get their video ranked in any search engine. Notice how those 2 tags are relevant to the video made? That’s what you need to do every time. No more of this unrelated tag stuff, as you now know what you’re doing.
Use Long Tail Keywords
More often than not, I see people who have small and big channels alike using only short tail keywords in their tags without using any long tail keywords. This is a huge mistake! What you need to do is use the two together. For those of you who don’t know, a long tail keyword is when a string of multiple words is put together to make a long tail keyword. Opposite goes for a short tail keyword.
So, let’s say I make a Minecraft tutorial video. I could use “minecraft redstone tutorial” for a long tail keyword, and I could use “minecraft” & “redstone” for 2 other keywords. All I did there was break up the long tail keyword and it gave me 2 more separate tags that I can try to rank for. The use of both of these together can prove to be one mighty weapon.
Conclusion
So, there you have it. These 5 easy to use tips can really help to boost your rankings in both the Google and YouTube search results pages! I know for a fact they’ll also work to help drive more viewers and subscribers to your channel.
Be sure to check out the previous part to this tutorial where I show you how to increase your YouTube video viewer retention.