Want to Improve Your YouTube SEO Strategy? Five Quick Tips to Increase Views 

YouTube is huge. It’s bigger than all other social media platforms and every website except for Google, its parent company. With over 2 billion users logged in monthly, YouTube provides content creators, businesses, and all other users the opportunity to attract new audiences and grow their reach. The quickest way to do this is to focus on YouTube SEO. 

While YouTube’s platform design allows videos to be easily shared across states or even countries, SEO is an important component of your media’s success. By optimizing SEO, users can push their videos rankings higher in Google’s search results and gain more exposure to their content.

Why is YouTube SEO Important?

For a video to go viral, Google needs to understand what it is about. By nature, search engine bots rely on text, not video, to order search results. For this reason, it is incredibly important to include text within your YouTube video. The obvious sources include video titles, descriptions, and tags, while additional SEO text, such as captions, subtitles, and transcripts, can significantly boost your ranking. 

Below are five ways to boost your video SEO and maximize YouTube views:

Upload high-quality closed captions, not YouTube ASR captions

YouTube ASR captions, while free, are only 50-80% accurate at best, making them problematic for your YouTube SEO. Since search engine bots index text to find your appropriate keywords, inaccurate keywords can mislead these bots into thinking your content is entirely different or worse be labeled as spam. On the other hand, third-party captioning, such as cielo24, can guarantee captioning quality up to 99% and provide additional SEO materials such as transcripts and specialized keywords. 

As if increased SEO isn’t motivation enough, providing high-quality closed captions also increases your user experience, search ranking, and overall web experience. Captioned videos rank higher in YouTube’s search results and receive 4% more views, allowing you to reach larger audiences.

Choose an accurate overall keyword

Keyword selection is huge. Choosing the correct word can mean the difference between cohesive and user-intuitive SEO and a scatter, unsuccessful misinterpretation of your content. When choosing a keyword for your media two things are important:

1. An accurate description of your content
2. Terms and phrases users will search in hopes of finding content like yours

Both of these components are important and should work together to draw audiences in and create a positive user experience that will lead to more views, shares, and overall media success.

Include your keyword in all SEO text

Including your keyword in all possible fields will help pull together all of your SEO elements into one cohesive, successful marketing strategy. Keywords should be included in your title, meta-description, tags, thumbnails, captions, playlists, and links to increase your video’s rank in search queries. However, if you plan to post your video on other platforms other than YouTube, make sure to vary your keywords just slightly so you don’t compete against yourself.

Translate your content with subtitles

YouTube is not limited to English-only audio. Content from across the globe is uploaded daily with many foreign videos becoming some of the most-viewed content on the internet. For example, the most popular video on YouTube as of August 2020 is the Spanish-language song “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi and Puerto Rican rapper Daddy Yankee. The song currently has 6.93 billion views since its release date. This kind of global success would not be possible without subtitles. 

Your SEO will also benefit from adding foreign language subtitles. Published subtitles allow search engines to crawl through your translated content and include your video in search results in that language. This allows your content to rank higher for non-English keywords.

Add the audio transcript to your video description

Your video description is a prime location for search engines to index. With up to 4,850 characters available, include your video transcript, or as much as you can fit, to maximize your YouTube SEO. Naturally, your transcript will include keywords that only add to your SEO ranking. An easy copy and paste from your third-party captioner to the description box can make all the difference.

Pay attention to your viewers’ activity

The most important consideration for high ranking videos is their user engagements. Google only cares about how viewers interact with your video because that is what keeps them on their site. Important user activity includes:

• Watch Time: Did your viewers click out after the first 30 secs? If so, why?
• Retention Rate: Are viewers coming back to see your new content?
• Session Watch Time: After viewing your video, did users continue to watch related videos on YouTube?
• Subscriber Base: Are you constantly gaining more subscribers and video interaction?

cielo24 YouTube SEO Solutions

cielo24 has a direct YouTube integration for all use cases.

Our Self Serve web app also allows you to add accurate, high-quality captions to YouTube videos in 3 easy steps:

1. Copy and paste the URL of your desired YouTube video in the Self Serve file upload screen
2. Select your accuracy and turnaround times and place your order
3. Retrieve your .srt file and add it to the already uploaded YouTube video file

All new Self Serve users are given one free transcription and can then order more machine or human-verified captions and transcripts for less than a dollar per minute.

Our Enterprise accounts link directly to your YouTube account. Videos that are captioned through your Enterprise dashboard will be automatically loaded into your YouTube profile. Enterprise level captioning and transcription also helps companies comply with WCAG standards and can be built around your specific video needs. These accounts come with the help of an account executive, as well as our full suite of features, including 16+ foreign language translations, advanced media data, and our video wrapper.

 Try our video captioning now >>