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Optimizing YouTube Videos The Right Way For Google Search

If you are using the social video content platform YouTube to help grow your business and brand, one of the most important ways of driving people to your business is optimizing your Youtube videos. 

Most people are content to publish and wait, or even share the video through their other social channels, but the real growth is in harnessing SEO to put your video in front of more eyeballs with Google Search results.

Why Should You Optimize Your YouTube Videos For Google Search?

Optimizing your YouTube videos for Google Search makes them more accessible for Google’s algorithms to match your content with someone who is searching for information that it will likely contain. Not only is YouTube the most popular video platform, but Google also is the most popular search platform, so making sure your content on one is easily indexed by the other just seems like a good idea, don’t you think?

By getting your video to appear in search engine result pages, or SERPs, as an embedded video can lead to incredible increases in video traffic and views, and can give you valuable insights into who is playing your video and consuming your content.

Develop Your Video To Be Seen

This is a crucial step that many content producers forget. Don’t produce content just to make content, make content that fills a need, answers a question, or helps solve a problem. This increases the chances that it will come up in SERPs.

Conduct Research For Keywords

To find potentially useful topics for a video, use any keyword tool that you may prefer, or YouTube’s autofill video suggestions. You should conduct SEO keyword research just as you would for your conventional SEO tactics.

Conduct Video Research

Once you have your topic, look for similar videos, and keep track of what they do right, and what they do wrong. Read the comments to get a feel for what people want to see more or less of in videos like the one you’re researching. 

Produce The Video

Here is where much of your video research is going to pay off. Since you know what the top results do that draws people in, and you’ve checked their negative comments to see what people wanted to change, you should be in a great position to create more engaging and compelling YouTube videos than your competitors.

Optimize Your Video With SERPs

Video SEO can get unwieldy, there are a lot of things to keep track of, like titles, tags, captions, thumbnail images, descriptions, and of course all of the metadata that will be included. Make sure you use reliable and verifiable data.

Optimize For Key Moments

This is a relatively new feature that Google has added to their search results, adding “Key Moments” to videos that are eligible in the SERPs. This makes it easier for people to jump right to the information they need if the video covers more than just their inquiry. 

This is extremely handy for things like DIY videos with several steps, long speeches, and even documentaries to be quickly viewed and the information that was needed can be extracted. 

To be eligible for a Key Moments inclusion, your video will need not only timestamps for the various sections, steps, or topics, as well as keyword-friendly timestamp titles. Here are some quick tips for your timestamps:

  1. Be sure your timestamps are not in a pinned comment, they need to be in the description.
  2. Be sure you have listed your timestamps in chronological order.
  3. Each timestamp should be on its own line with a title.
  4. Stick to a max of about 10 timestamps per video, more can get obnoxious.

Monitor Your SERP Results & Their Impact

Once you have posted your video, it will take between 2 and 4 weeks for the results of the new Google search video embed traffic to be listed in your external traffic insights. Be sure to monitor the performance over time and adjust keywords periodically.

Average View Duration

This is one of your most important metrics, consisting of the total watch time divided by the total number of views. Lower duration means you aren’t holding your viewer’s attention.

Average Percentage Viewed

This is the measurement of the percent of the video that is seen by the viewer. YouTube grants rank bonuses for videos that keep more people engaged for the full duration of the video. This is important to track for long-term growth.

Optimizing Youtube videos for Google Search visibility is a key success factor for any video marketing campaign.  Be sure to follow the above recommendations and expect your video to rank high on the Google search results.  

This article was originally posted at Virtual Surge.