The Importance of Optimizing Your YouTube Content

YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google, receiving traffic from almost one billion users a day. In fact, the website generates more traffic than Bing, Yahoo!, and Ask.com combined. This equates to over one-third of all people on the Internet. As a result, it is pivotal that companies utilize YouTube as a valuable tool toward their success.  

YouTube also brings in over $4 billion each year in ad revenue, leaving users ample opportunity to make money with their videos. Marketing through YouTube creates credibility, authority, and delivers content that is more engaging to the viewer.

Along with advertisements on your videos, there are many best practices that can help marketers get the most out of YouTube.

Best Practices for Creating Quality Content and a Positive User Experience

There are many components that Marketers must keep in mind in order to create quality content, and an overall positive YouTube user experience. Marketers must pay attention to the variety of components that go into making quality YouTube content. Overall, you should follow YouTube’s “Community Guidelines,” meaning your videos cannot contain violent, hateful, or graphic content, and do not violate any copyrights.

Marketers should be creating valuable, relevant videos that stay true to their brand. Long videos are often boring, but “bite-sized” videos of two minutes or less may leave viewers hungry for more of your content.

Simple housekeeping such as including an interesting thumbnail, writing a detailed “About” section, and adding helpful annotations can make your video seem more professional and well-done. More than half of YouTube’s viewers today are on mobile devices, so it is imperative that your videos are optimized for mobile devices.

Providing multi-lingual captions allows your channel to connect with an international audience as well. Youtube currently allows users to navigate the site in 75 different languages, covering 95% of the internet population. In fact, YouTube says over 80% of views were from outside the US.

By following these simple practices, marketers can ensure that their viewers have an all-around positive experience.

Optimization: How to Make Sure People View Your Content

Making high quality content is only half of the work, however. YouTubers must also take steps to ensure that they optimize their reach and achieve high numbers of views.

Of the many practices, optimization is the key factor in Google’s ranking of your video.

YouTube’s ranking system is based off various criteria. This criteria can control how well content is optimized by YouTube’s users.

Adding a transcript to go along with your video can not only be helpful to the user, but can also increase your relevancy with Google. With a transcript, a video can now be picked up with a multitude of keywords, rather than just the given title. This contributes to YouTube’s overall ranking of the video, making it more valuable. Including relevant target keywords in a video’s description and tags, also helps this ranking.

User engagement controls a video’s ranking as well. If a video has a high number of views or a channel has a high number of subscribers, rightfully YouTube values that content more. Engagement can also be determined by the number of people interacting with a video through likes or comments.

Most of the time users will come across a video because of it’s relevance to the search. Creating a video that engages the user, whether it be educationally or emotionally, is most useful in the viewership.

Finally, make sure to include a prominent Call to Action. Encourage viewers to subscribe, watch other videos, or link them to a landing page. By engaging viewers to stay tuned for more content, you’ll increase your retention rate for future content that’s created.

Final Thoughts

If marketers do not follow the right steps in creating and promoting YouTube content, they can miss out on a valuable opportunity to make the most of their efforts.  However, YouTube offers an opportunity to create content that people actually want to watch, beyond the paid advertisements seen attached to YouTube videos. This hiqh quality YouTube content can be extremely helpful in promoting your brand and, ultimately, in increasing your profits.

Want a bigger picture view? Read our study on the biggest social media marketing trends of 2017.

Interested in incorporating video in your strategies? Read our post on How to Use Video in Your SEO Strategy.

For more information on search marketing, local SEO, paid advertising, content writing and social media, follow Arcalea’s blog.