SEO promotion on YouTube: 3 steps to promote videos on YouTube

Table of content

First stage — the collection of keywords
Second stage — interaction with the audience
Third stage — video optimization

Good content alone is not enough to make your YouTube channel successful. Your video must be viewed by as many people as possible. For this, it is worth going through several stages of SEO promotion.

First stage — the collection of keywords

Create a list of potential keywords that YouTube will offer you: enter a word or phrase in the search engine, and the video hosting will automatically pull up several similar options.
Analyze popular videos in your niche and copy keywords. Keyword optimization is a major SEO tool on YouTube.
Use YouTube Analytics report by traffic sources. On the Views tab, open YouTube Search — queries that led viewers to the video.

Select keywords for promotion from the generated list. Give priority to keywords with the least competition, which is determined by the number of results issued on Google. More results mean a more popular keyword that will be hard to use for promotion.

Second stage — interaction with the audience

The amount of time people spend watching a video is called audience retention. And exactly it affects the ranking in the search results.

Factors that affect the ranking:

Comments to the video. They show the audience’s interest.
Subscription after viewing. For YouTube, this is a confirmation of quality and interesting content.
Video sharing. It has not only a positive impact on rankings, but it increases traffic to your channel as well.
CTR. Create compelling previews with clickable headlines to increase your click-through rate.

Third stage — video optimization

Speak the keywords in the video. So the algorithm will understand that your content corresponds to the request.
The title must contain at least 5 words. Add the primary key to the name.
A video description helps YouTube and Google understand its context. Basic recommendations:

1. Add a key to the first 25 words.
2. The volume of the description is at least 250 words.
3. Use the keyword 2-4 times.

Tags not only help you rank better, but also allow you to appear more often in the YouTube sidebar among similar videos.

In addition to the basic steps of promotion written above, do not forget to constantly improve the content of your YouTube channel, and study the audience and the interaction with your videos.