Optimise Your YouTube Videos With These Five Tips

It can take a considerable number of hours, and a decent budget, to put together good videos to post to a YouTube channel. The chances are you’ve created videos to help your customers make informed purchases, or perhaps your videos help people who have bought your products get the most out of them. You may even be producing video content as part of a wider content marketing strategy.

Whatever your reason for producing videos, if they are not well optimised then you could be missing out on views and you may be limiting your videos’ reach in search engines like Google and Bing.

This week’s blog post offers five easy and quick tips to optimise your YouTube videos. Implementing these simple edits could increase the likelihood of your video appearing in the Google search results.

Optimise Your Video’s Title

Carefully consider the title you give your video on YouTube. Make sure it is descriptive and contains keywords your customers would use to find videos like yours. By keeping the title to fewer than 70 characters, the whole title will be displayed in Google’s/YouTube’s search results. Anything exceeding 70 characters could be chopped off and not shown, resulting in a poor appearance which may lower the click-through rate (CTR).

Optimise Your Video’s Description

Keep the most important part of your description to 112 characters or less. This is the part of the description that will be visible on both Google Search results pages and the YouTube search results. Bearing this in mind, your description should be useful, snappy and compelling. Make sure your key points are highlighted first and consider what your customers are looking for when searching and what might stand out to them.

Choose a Good Thumbnail Image

The thumbnail is the image people will see when presented with your video in the YouTube or Google search results. Make sure it’s compelling and draws the eye.

Add Relevant ‘Tags’ to your Videos

Tags are best thought of as keywords. These are words, or preferably phrases, that are relevant to your video and its content. Using keyword research tools will help you determine what keywords to use in your video tags, and also the words to use in your video’s description and title.

Make the Most of Annotations

This is a handy feature offered by YouTube that you can use to provide more information or encourage social shares or other user engagement. Within annotations, you can also insert links which can be used for many purposes, from cross-selling products or promoting lead generation to linking to other videos which might form part of a series, for example.

There’s such a lot to YouTube and optimising video content and we know it can be confusing and time-consuming, but having good video content that is well optimised can play a pivotal role in your online marketing strategy. If you want a hand – just get in touch with SilverDisc!