A Beginner's Guide to Video SEO on YouTube

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We all know that the most important thing when it comes to making good video content is, well… making your video content good. That comes down to a number of things, but if you're already making quality content, how can you make sure it's really getting seen?

I recently ran a workshop, and a lot of participants were curious about the technical side of YouTube. Remember, YouTube is part social media platform, part search engine. In fact, did you know that YouTube is the biggest search engine in the world after Google? That means that when it comes to being strategic on YouTube, SEO (search engine optimisation) plays a big part in making sure that we appear in YouTube's search results. Plus, it’s owned by Google, so if you play your cards right, your video might even come up as a top result on Google itself if it ranks well for the same term on YouTube.

There are many other factors that can help your video to perform better on YouTube, but SEO is a big one. So, I decided to put my YouTube video SEO tips in one resource.

BASICS OF VIDEO SEO


Just like in traditional SEO you want your content to be one of the top ranking for the specific search terms/phrases that your target audience is searching for. The same is true of YouTube.

That doesn’t necessarily mean picking the search term “cupcake” for our cupcake business. There’s not so much chance of our content competing with the millions of results for such a vague term. So let’s pick something a little more specific… what type of cupcakes? Where in the world are you offering these cupcakes? Perhaps even a term relating to why your audience want the cupcake in the first place (this is where the cupcake analogy falls apart a bit, because obviously we all want cupcakes).

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HOW TO IMPLEMENT VIDEO SEO ON YOUTUBE


There will be other factors that come into play on how your video is ranked, but there are three big ones that you can directly control.



1. Video Title
2. Video Tags
3. Video Description


If you want to learn even more about this, make sure you’re signed up for my video marketing and production mailing list. In each newsletter I build on the topic covered in that week's blog post and offer further tips on each week’s theme. For now, let’s break each of these points down further.



1. VIDEO TITLE

 
My title on a sample YouTube video via the YouTube Studio space.. Keywords I wanted to focus on include “Albania” and “Travel Vlog”.

My title on a sample YouTube video via the YouTube Studio space.. Keywords I wanted to focus on include “Albania” and “Travel Vlog”.

 


Every video has a title. This helps the viewer to know what the video is about. But more than that, it’s an important piece of data which will be read by YouTube's technology to place your video in the search engine's algorithm.

These keywords are some of the most important in letting YouTube understand what your video is about and what other videos it might be related to when recommending it and ranking it in searches. Pick your main keyword/phrase carefully, and include in the title. If you can repeat your keyword more than once in the title, that’s even better. However, it’s important that your title is easy to read for your audience, and titles under 70 characters tend to perform better.



2. VIDEO TAGS

 
The tags that I chose to include for this YouTube video. The numbers alongside them represent the score and where the video ranks for that term (this is a feature of Vid IQ).

The tags that I chose to include for this YouTube video. The numbers alongside them represent the score and where the video ranks for that term (this is a feature of Vid IQ).

 



For any keywords you struggled to include naturally in your title, the video tags is the place to put them. Here you have a lot more characters to put words and short phrases describing what your video is about. Use alternate phrasings (e.g. “influencer” instead of “Instagrammer”), and pay attention to the order of your tags. Although Google (the parent company of YouTube) hasn't confirmed this, I’ve found that by placing the most important tags at the beginning and the least important at the end, I’ve increased my chances of being ranked for my priority words and phrases. Remember that unlike the title and description, your video tags are not immediately visible to viewers of your video, although there are ways for them to find your chosen tags if they want to.


3. VIDEO DESCRIPTION

 
Notice my repetition of key terms relating to place names (alternating between country - a more general key term - and towns and cities, which are more specific). I include other keywords relating to travel, travel vlogs and tourism.

Notice my repetition of key terms relating to place names (alternating between country - a more general key term - and towns and cities, which are more specific). I include other keywords relating to travel, travel vlogs and tourism.

 


The first characters of your description are equally important in telling YouTube what your video is about. You should repeat the keywords you chose for your title and include some that you identified to use in your tags. The different between the video description and tags is that your audience can read your description, so make sure it is easy to read instead of a list of incoherent keywords. I would recommend dedicating the first 150-170 characters to a really easy-to-read, keyword-rich introduction. The next paragraph could be a continuation of this, although viewers will need to click “see more” to read this, so keep in mind that it is less likely to be seen. After this, you can include any other information that is important to your video, such as credits. Please note if you’re trying to drive viewers to a link, while it may not be conducive to your SEO goals, place it at the start of your description. Viewers are less likely to click on it if it doesn’t appear in the 150-170 character preview of your video.

There are reports of videos performing less well if there are too many external links in the description, since YouTube wants to keep you on their platform. YouTube does not tend to share information on how its algorithm works, and while I have not noticed this hypothesis to be true, I also have not conducted sufficient testing to confirm or deny this claim.

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YOUTUBE VIDEO SEO TOOLS


While it’s possible to carry out these tips on your own using analytics and some strategic thinking, there are some tools that will make a lot of the steps way more simple and quick. I use Vid IQ which is a chrome plugin designed to help your YouTube videos to perform better. This tool allows me to see how competitive a term is when I search for it on YouTube, explore the search terms and analytics on another user’s individual video, and it even helps me to optimise the three categories above when I am uploading my video. There are different tiers available with more/fewer functionalities, but the most basic version is free. An alternative to VidIQ is TubeBuddy which offers a similar range of functions.

When choosing my search terms I also use Keywords Everywhere which can help me to analyse how competitive a search term is both on Google and on YouTube. In the most basic sense, the sweet spot of a search term will be the one(s) that is searched for a lot but does not yet have a huge library of content already on the search engine to compete with. Experiment with different terms to get to grips with the tool and find your niche's sweet spot. VidIQ also has a scale to help you to determine this "sweet spot" when you are using YouTube's search function.


There's a lot to learn about YouTube, and I want to cover it in detail in the coming weeks.

Do you have specific questions on getting your videos discovered? Let me know in the comments!

How to Caption Videos for Social Media

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Subtitles and captions... they can seem like more technical details when it comes to video campaigns & content marketing strategy, but they can be really important in making your video engaging.

You may have heard people before saying that you need to make sure you include subtitles in your videos, but here’s some more info on the reasons behind doing this, and how to save yourself some time when you do it.

Subtitling with simple editing software such as iMovie can be tricky, since usually only more advanced editors like Premiere Pro or DaVinci include functionalities that allow you to generate captions within the software itself. But I've got a trick for you that'll speed up your time creating subtitles or captions if your editing suite doesn't have the capability to generate captions.

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Subtitles are a great idea if you’re creating video for social media platforms where people are likely to be scrolling, as they may not have (or want to have) their audio turned on. In this case, subtitles are a great way to make sure that your audience can follow your story when there is dialogue involved. Let's not forget helping out our hearing-impaired friends, too!

Another instance where subtitles can be a great decision, is when you have a video that you need to distribute in more than one language. Of course it’s almost always easier to engage an audience by including dialogue in their own language, but for whatever reason, sometimes this isn’t an option, and this is where subtitling comes in.

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Creating subtitles for your video can be time-consuming. Here is my favourite trick for quickly creating subtitles for numerous social media platforms that should save you some time transcribing!


1. Upload your video to YouTube as a private video. Even if your final video will have a different format or export settings, export a temporary version that you can upload to YouTube for this step.


2. Find your auto-generated captions for the video by going to your YouTube Studio > Videos > Select (your video name) > Transcriptions. You'll see your auto-generated captions there.


3. Now click on where it says "published" next to the auto-generated captions to enter into the editing screen.


4. Select "edit" at the top right of the screen, and correct any mistakes on the auto-generated captions by typing your corrections in the left-hand window. Make sure they appear at the correct timecode by watching the video back on this screen, too.


5. If you’re only uploading to YouTube and you don’t need to translate into other languages, then your job is done here! Remember to save your changes by clicking "Publish Edits".

If you’re using the subtitles for another platform…
6. When you have saved your caption edits on YouTube, stay on the same screen and click on the "actions" button, then select ".srt" to download an srt file of your auto-generated captions. (This is one of the industry standard formats to work with captions and subtitles)


7. If you need to upload the subtitles in more than one language, save a second copy of the original .srt file and translate each phrase on the document in a program like “Text Edit” or “Word Pad” (right click on the file, select "Open with" and select your preferred program). Remember to respect the format of the file (where page breaks occur etc.). These files can be uploaded to your video on YouTube, Facebook and more!




Option A) If you’re using the subtitles for a native Facebook video…


- Once your video is uploaded on Facebook, click on "videos" along the left menu on your Facebook page to manage your videos. Select the video you want to upload your subtitles to by clicking on it.


- Click on the three dots at the bottom right of your video, and select "edit video".


- A pop-up edit window should appear. Click on "Subtitles & Captions" on the right menu of this window.


- Select which language your video is in at the top.


- Delete the automatic captions (third field on the pop-up window).


- Go to your .srt file and if your video is in English, add ".en_US" before the .srt (e.g. "captions.srt" should become "caption.US_en.srt"). If your video is in another language, continue with the following steps below and Facebook will inform you of the correct suffix to add to your video.


- Where it says "add new captions" back on the edit window of your Facebook video, select "upload" and choose your .srt file.


- Repeat above steps if uploading subtitles in more than one language.


- Remember to save your changes!




Option B) If you’re using the subtitles for any video type on Instagram (or another platform where you cant upload an srt file)…


- Unfortunately Instagram doesn’t currently offer you the option to upload .srt files directly. But your .srt file includes the exact phrases and time codes for your subtitles, so open the .srt file in Word Pad or Text Editor (by right clicking and selecting "open with" > choose your preferred program).


- Copy each phrase, and paste the text at the corresponding timecode directly on your preferred video editor and format it as easy-to-read text at the bottom of the frame before exporting.



And that's it! It may seem like a lot, but once you've done it once, you'll get the hang of it, and particularly on longer videos this will save you a lot of time from transcribing your videos manually!



Did you find this tip useful? Have an idea for a future blog post?
Let me know in the comments!

How to Find Legal Music for Online Video (for free!)

Finding legal music to use in your online videos can be a struggle, and there's a lot of misinformation flying out there about what can or can't be used. For example, did you know that royalty-free and free music are not the same thing, and getting them mixed up could get you into a lot of trouble? In the words of a certain orange-faced politician, FAKE NEWS.

This week I’m here to share some quick tips and bust those myths on finding music that you can legally use (for free!) in your online video project.

Just remember - I am not a lawyer. You’re responsible for doing your own research. Please don’t sue me.

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It’s not true that you can use any piece of music as long as you give credit.

There are copyright laws and royalty laws that protect people’s music from being used by anyone online. Some platforms, like YouTube, have a unique licence with many (not all) copyright owners of songs so that they can be compensated when you use their song in your video. You can access a list of songs that fall under these music policies here. This does not mean you’re free to use this song anywhere online, and getting caught breaking the rules could lead to a hefty fine.


Royalty-free is not the same as free

There are a lot of great resources for royalty-free (meaning you don’t have to pay royalties for the song) music that is also free (meaning you don’t need to pay anything in the first place for a licence to use the song). Start out with some of my favourite resources like BenSound and Incompetech.com. Most of these allow you to use the content on something called a Creative Commons Licence. This means you can use it, but there are still some legal conditions such as the type of project and how you give credit, so read up and remember to give credit if the piece requests it!


If you don’t want to give credit and you want quality music, you have other options!

There are so many great options for music that you pay a one-time licence fee for, or even subscription-based services that give you access to a library of music. This is great because you’re also helping to support the creative musicians that have created the music for you, and these options usually have a more diverse and higher quality range of music available.

Try checking out Artlist.io and MusicBed for subscription-based music libraries, and Audio Jungle and Premium Beats to licence single tracks. Epidemic Sound is also a great subscription-based option for YouTube videos, but also have other licensing options available. And don’t forget the power of reaching out to individual musicians on SoundCloud if you’re willing to put in some more time and effort!



It can seem overwhelming, but these tips should cover the basics and get you started to finding a music solution that works for you and you can fall back on every time.

Do you have any other questions about music for online video that weren’t covered in this blog post?

Let me know by replying and I'll do my best to answer!