Youtube ranks second among the most popular search platforms in the world, standing just behind Google, its parent company.

Youtube videos appear in 8 video search results out of 10 every time someone searches. The platform seems unstoppable, with more than 500 videos uploaded to the video platform each minute.

So, if you create a video to promote your business, your target users might not see it. How to solve this problem? In the same way, you increase the visibility of your written content on search engines.

Yes, we are talking about the search engine optimization of your youtube videos. Optimizing your youtube videos is as crucial as optimizing your blogs/articles.

You should create a solid SEO strategy to get your content in front of your audience’s eyes on Youtube. While your strategy will depend on your business requirements, some tips can help you along the way.

Let’s dive in.

8 Tips to Boost the Rankings of your Youtube Videos

1- Keywords Win Half the Game — Choose Wisely

Yes, this is right. If you can rank for highly competitive keywords, choose them. Otherwise, you need to perform better-than-ordinary keyword research to find search terms with less keyword difficulty and more search volume.

Use the old ways — search suggests, people also ask, and related searches in Google. And Google keyword planner, Semrush, and Moz are your friends in youtube keyword research, as they help you in keyword research for other platforms.

2- Incorporate the Correct Closed Captions

Youtube automatically rewrites the videos to deliver automatic captions. But the catch is their captions are accurate just 70 percent of the time. It means your video might get humiliating or inarticulate captions.

Many of your audience might access your videos through a Google search. Google penalizes spam, and their definition includes the words “ automatically generated gibberish.”

Unfortunately, many youtube auto-captions fall into the category of this gibberish. Google might penalize your video if it contains incomprehensible auto-captions, which may decrease your search ranking.

So, can you battle the negative impacts of auto-generated captions? Yes, by including error-free closed captions via an SRT file to videos. You can also use an automated transcript in the beginning and manually fix the errors.

If you think you need professional services for that, it’s better to hand over your company’s SEO management to an SEO agency in Dubai. They usually provide multiple packages, so you can opt to just take services for your youtube SEO or the SEO of all kinds of content.

3- Let Your Video Title Do the Trick

You need to place your keywords in your video title as youtube gives it extra importance when ranking and indexing your videos. 

Consider yourself as a searcher and assume you need to search for something similar to the content of your video. What would you write in the search bar to make such content pop up in the results?

Use the search term you come up with as the title of your video and tweak it if necessary. Youtube ranks those videos on top with titles similar to or very close to a user’s search term.

4- Add Keywords in Your Video File

It’s easy, and youtube may consider it when ranking your video in the search results. Just incorporate your primary keyword in the file name of your video, and the chances of your video getting ranked higher increases — and the chances of your video getting more search volume increase too.

5- Use Tags to Win at SEO

Anyone who provides SEO services in Dubai knows that stuffing your meta tags with keywords is no use now. Search engines don’t consider it a ranking factor, as people stuffed tags with keywords for spam. On the flip side, youtube still values meta tags in ranking a video. 

6- Optimize your Video Description

You know that youtube only displays a few first lines of the video description, and after that, you have to hit “show more” to read the remaining part.

It means that you should add significant information in the initial portion of the description. The character limit for youtube video descriptions is 1000 characters, but only 100 of them get shown. 

Therefore, add your CTAs and related links into the initial 100 characters. And you can incorporate a transcript for those watching the video without the volume.

In their research, Backlinko noticed zero correlation between keyword-optimized descriptions of youtube videos and their rankings. That doesn’t mean you should not sprinkle your keywords in the video description.

Descriptions that include your target keywords help you be visible in suggested videos of your audience which can drive a significant amount of quality traffic to your channel.

7- Monitor Your Analytics

Your SEO Company Dubai creates and applies youtube SEO strategies to boost your videos. But how would you know what is working and what isn’t?

The answer is by Youtube analytics. Youtube provides various analytics reports to assist you in tracking your video’s performance.

Some important metrics to track are watch time, card click-through rate, impressions click-through rate, traffic sources, subscriber growth, unique viewers, and more.

Tracking these analytics will show you which videos are gaining traffic and which ones compel viewers enough to watch the whole video or at least a large portion of it. 

Try to identify the differences in the topic, timing, duration, and type of video of the high-performing and underperforming videos. Then tweak your SEO strategy accordingly.

8-  Include Subtitles in Your Videos 

Video subtitles are a great way to convey your message to even those watchers who don’t understand the language of the video dialogues. By reading subtitles in a language they understand, those viewers get what someone says in the video in a language unknown to them.

Another perk of adding subtitles files is that even broad search engines can pick them up.

Bottom Line

We hope that you find our youtube SEO tips useful. Optimizing your youtube videos for search engines is crucial to get your content across, but nothing beats good content. Your audience must find their desired information or something of value when they land on one of your videos.