#This Video Explain You about the Following Topics in MS Access What are Queries Create Query Type of Queries Create Query with one table C
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DCA 1st sem MS Access Unit 3 part 3
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Spring & Hibernate for Beginners (includes Spring Boot)
Spring & Hibernate for Beginners (includes Spring Boot)
Spring 5: Learn Spring 5 Core, AOP, Spring MVC, Spring Security, Spring REST, Spring Boot 2, Thymeleaf, JPA & Hibernate
What you'll learn
Spring & Hibernate for Beginners (includes Spring Boot)
Develop a REAL-TIME project with Spring MVC, Spring REST, Spring Boot and Hibernate CRUD ... all from SCRATCH
You will TYPE IN EVERY LINE of code with me in the videos. I EXPLAIN every line of code to help you learn!
LEARN key Spring 5 features: Core, Annotations, Java Config, AOP, Spring MVC, Hibernate and Maven
I am a RESPONSIVE INSTRUCTOR ... post your questions and I will RESPOND in 24 hours.
POPULAR VIDEOS for Spring Boot 2, Spring Security, Spring REST, Spring Data JPA, Spring Data REST and Thymeleaf
Join an ACTIVE COMMUNITY of 110,000+ students that are already enrolled! Over 33,000+ Reviews - 5 STARS
Students have LANDED NEW JOBS with the skills from this course. Spring and Hibernate developers are in HIGH-DEMAND!
You can DOWNLOAD all videos, source code, and PDFs. Perfect for o
Requirements
Basic Java knowledge is required
Basic HTML knowledge is helpful
Description
SPRING BOOT SECTION NOW INCLUDES OVER 6.5 HOURS OF NEW VIDEOS
#1 BESTSELLING SPRING-HIBERNATE COURSE ON UDEMY - OVER 35,000 REVIEWS - 5 STARS! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
---
THIS COURSE COVERS SPRING 5
LEARN these HOT TOPICS in Spring 5:
Spring Framework 5
Spring Core
Spring Annotations
Spring Java Configuration (all Java, no XML)
Spring AOP
Spring MVC
Hibernate CRUD
JPA CRUD
Spring Security
Spring REST
Maven
SPRING BOOT
Spring Boot Starters
Spring Boot and Hibernate
Spring Boot and Spring Data JPA
Spring Boot and Spring Data REST
Spring Boot, Thymeleaf and Spring MVC
REAL-TIME PROJECTS
Spring MVC and Hibernate CRUD real-time project
Spring Security (with password encryption in the database)
Spring REST (with full database CRUD real-time project)
Spring Boot REST (with full database CRUD real-time project)
Spring Boot with JPA and Spring Data JPA (with full database CRUD real-time project)
Spring Boot with Spring Data REST (with full database CRUD real-time project)
Spring Boot with Thymeleaf (with full database CRUD real-time project)
---
[COURSE UPDATES]:
Added Spring Boot and Thymeleaf videos ... 12 videos, 2.5 hours of new content
Added Spring Boot videos ... 34 videos, 4 hours of new content
Added Spring Security Role-based Registration lecture
Added ADVANCED Spring REST videos ... 40 videos, 3 hours of new content
Added Spring REST videos ... 18 videos, 1.5 hours of new content
Added Spring Security User Registration Lecture
Added Spring Security JDBC videos ... 16 new videos, 1 hour of new content
Added more Spring Security videos ... 52 videos, 3.5 hours of new content
Updated course to SPRING 5, Tomcat 9 and Eclipse Oxygen
Added Spring Security videos ... 16 new videos, 1 hour of new content
New Advanced Hibernate videos ... 57 new videos, 4 hours of new content
---
This course covers the LATEST VERSIONS of Spring 5 and Hibernate 5! The course also includes Spring Boot and Spring Data JPA
Build a complete Spring MVC + Hibernate CRUD web app ... all from scratch! (real-time project)
You will learn about: Spring Core, AOP, Spring MVC, Spring Security, Spring REST, Spring Boot, Spring Data JPA, Spring Data REST, Thymeleaf and Hibernate ... all connected to a MySQL database
---
By the end of this course, you will create all of the source code for a complete Spring MVC - Hibernate CRUD real-time project.
You will also develop Spring REST APIs for a full CRUD REST API real-time project.
You will type in every line of code with me in the videos ... all from scratch.
I explain every line of code that we create. So this isn't a copy/paste exercise, you will have a full understanding of the code.
---
I am a RESPONSIVE INSTRUCTOR .... post your questions and I will RESPOND in 24 hours.
---
Join 118,000+ students that are already enrolled!
Over 35,000+ Reviews! (the most reviews for any Spring-Hibernate course on Udemy, more than DOUBLE the nearest competitor)
---
Sample of the reviews:
★★★★★
I worked in some company, so I can say that this course is 100% industry oriented. The best course for learning Spring Framework. Getting replies within 24 hours. - Premang
★★★★★
Chad Darby has done a superb job organizing this course and has made Spring Framework, MVC, AOP, Hibernate, Security easy to learn and use. I have a bs and ms in CS, have been developing software for 25 years, and have taken many courses over the years at the different companies I've been at and Chad is easily the best instructor I've had.
He's extremely well-organized and knowledgeable and lays out this course in a step-by-step approach to fully cover the material and make it easy to learn. I highly recommend this course and Chad as an instructor.
I'm adding to my review following Chad's recent updates to his course to cover Spring Boot, JPA, etc. After finishing the course originally, I found another Spring Boot class, and after working on this other class, I appreciate more what Chad has done here. He's made Spring Boot for CRUD applications with Thymeleaf very easy to follow and learn. I've taken half a dozen other software courses, and while other instructors might be good, Chad is the gold standard here. I can't recommend him highly enough. - Dave Zeltserman
★★★★★
This is the best tutorial I've seen so far for Spring/Hibernate, each step is well explained and the tutorial videos are made to a high standard. I highly recommend this course! - Rob
★★★★★
Hats off to you Chad, the best Spring fundamentals course I have done on Udemy thus far. You never disappoint. - More body Modise
★★★★★
Chad is an excellent natural teacher. His course is well organized. He makes difficult concepts very easy to understand. - Julie Hodgson
---
Live Coding - I code all of the real-time projects from scratch
All source code is available for download
Responsive Instructor - All questions answered within 24 hours
---
PDFs of all lectures are available for download
Closed-Captions / Subtitles available for English and other languages (new!)
Professional video and audio recordings (check the free previews)
---
This course includes mini-courses on Maven, Spring Security, Spring REST and Spring Boot. These mini-courses are designed to help you quickly get started with Maven, Spring Security, Spring REST and Spring Boot.
Mini-Courses
Maven mini-course includes 16 videos (1 hour of video)
Spring Security mini-course includes 68 videos (5 hours of video)
Spring REST mini-course includes 55 videos (4.5 hours of video)
Spring Boot mini-course includes 39 videos (6.5 hours of video)
This is all included in this existing course. :)
---
What Is Spring?
Spring is an enterprise Java framework. It was designed to simplify Java EE development and make developers more productive. Spring makes use of Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection to promote good software coding practices and speed up development time.
This course covers Spring Core, Annotations, All Java Spring Configuration, Spring AOP, Spring MVC, Spring Security, Spring REST, Spring Boot and Spring Data JPA.
What Is Hibernate?
Hibernate is an Object-to-Relational-Mapping (ORM) framework. It simplifies database access for Java applications. By using the framework, you can easily store and retrieve Java objects by setting up some simple configuration mappings.
This course covers basic Hibernate CRUD. Also, advanced Hibernate mappings are covered for one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many.
ALSO DOWNLOAD: NodeJS - The Complete Guide (incl. MVC, REST APIs, GraphQL)
Benefits of Taking This Spring and Hibernate Course
Knowing Spring and Hibernate can get you a job or improve the one you have. It's a skill that will put you more in demand in the enterprise Java industry, and make your software life easier, that's why it's so popular.
Nearly every job posting asks for skills in Spring and Hibernate!
This course will help you quickly get up to speed with Spring and Hibernate. I will demystify the technology and help you understand the essential concepts to build a real Spring and Hibernate application from scratch.
You, Will, Learn How To
Spring Core
Build a complete Spring MVC and Hibernate CRUD Project ... all from scratch
Set up your Spring and Hibernate development environment with Tomcat and Eclipse
Wire beans together in the Spring container using Inversion of Control
Configure the Spring container for Dependency Injection
Define Spring Beans using the @Component annotation
Perform auto-scanning of Spring beans to minimize configuration
Automatically wire beans together using @Autowired annotation
Apply all Java configuration to Spring Beans (no XML)
Spring MVC
Set up your Spring MVC environment with configs and directories
Create controllers using @Controller annotation
Read HTML form data using @RequestParam
Leverage Spring MVC model to transport data between controller and view page
Define Request Mappings for GET and POST requests
Minimize coding with Spring MVC Form data binding
Apply Spring MVC form validation on user input
Create custom Spring MVC form validation rules
Hibernate
Perform object/relational mapping with Hibernate
Leverage the Hibernate API to develop CRUD apps
Develop queries using the Hibernate Query Language (HQL)
Apply advanced Hibernate mappings: one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many
Create a real-time project using Spring and Hibernate together in a Real-Time Project
Spring AOP
Apply Aspect-Oriented-Programming AOP for cross-cutting concerns
Examine AOP use-cases and how AOP can resolve code-tangling
Create AOP pointcut expressions to match on method invocations
Leverage AOP annotations: @Before, @After, @AfterReturning, @AfterThrowing, @Around
Create a real-time project using AOP and Spring MVC together in a Real-Time Project
Spring Security
Secure your web application with Spring Security
Set up your Maven pom.xml file with compatible Spring Security dependencies
Configure Spring Security with all Java configuration (no XML)
Create custom Spring Security login pages with Bootstrap CSS
Add logout support using default features of Spring Security
Leverage Spring Security support for Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
Define users and roles for authentication
Display user login info and role using Spring Security tags
Restrict access to URLs based on user role
Hide and Display content based on user role
Add JDBC authentication, store user accounts and passwords in the database
Store encrypted passwords in the database using bcrypt
Register new users and encrypt passwords using Java code
Create a Spring Security Real-Time Project using authorization, authentication and database encryption
Spring REST Web Services - Spring REST APIs
Overview of REST Web Services - REST APIs
Investigating Spring REST support
Sending JSON data over HTTP
JSON Data Binding with the Jackson project
Converting JSON data to Java POJO with Jackson
Processing nested JSON objects and JSON arrays
Developing a Spring REST API
Setting up a Spring REST project with Maven
Creating the Spring REST Controller using @RestController
Running the Spring REST Controller with Eclipse and Tomcat
Testing Spring REST Web Services with Postman
Parameterize REST API endpoints using @PathVariable
Add Spring REST exception handling with @ExceptionHandler
Integrate global REST exception handling with @ControllerAdvice
Leverage ResponseEntity for fine-grained control of Spring REST HTTP response
Build REST API to execute CRUD actions on the Database with Hibernate
Create a Real-Time Project using REST API with full database CRUD
Spring Boot
What is the Spring Boot?
Creating a Project with Spring Boot Initializr
Develop a REST API Controller with Spring Boot
Explore the Spring Boot Project Structure
Leverage Spring Boot Starters - A Curated List of Dependencies
Inherit Defaults with Spring Boot Starter Parents
Automatically Restart with Spring Boot Dev Tools
Add DevOps functionality with Spring Boot Actuator Endpoints
Secure Spring Boot Actuator Endpoints
Run Spring Boot apps from the Command-Line
Use the Spring Boot Maven Plugin to package and run Spring Boot apps
Inject custom application properties into a Spring Boot REST Controller
Spring Boot REST API CRUD
Develop a REST API Controller with Spring Boot with full CRUD support
Configure Spring Boot Data Source for MySQL Database
Create DAO implementations using JPA Entity Manager
Apply Best Practices by integrating a Service Layer
Expose REST API endpoints in Controller code (GET, POST, PUT and DELETE)
Access the REST API using Postman
Add support for Standard JPA API
Learn the benefits of the JPA API in Spring Boot applications
Spring Boot and Spring Data JPA
Minimize boilerplate code with Spring Data JPA and the JpaRepository
Refactor existing REST API to integrate with Spring Data JPA
Leverage new features of the Java Optional pattern with JpaRepository
Test the Spring Data JPA repository with Postman
Spring Boot and Spring Data REST
Accelerate your development process with Spring Data REST
Leverage Spring Data REST to eliminate custom code for controllers and service
Automatically expose REST endpoints for your JPA Repositories
Customize REST base path endpoints
Apply pagination and sorting to REST API endpoints
Configure default page sizes for REST APIs
Investigate HATEOAS compliant REST responses
Test Spring Data REST with Postman
Spring Boot and Thymeleaf
Develop view templates with Thymeleaf in Spring Boot projects
Compare the functionality of Thymeleaf to JSP
Examine the auto-configuration of Thymeleaf in Spring Boot projects
Create a Spring Boot project with Thymeleaf using the Spring Initializer website
Develop a Spring MVC Controller and a Thymeleaf template
Leverage Thymeleaf expressions to access data from the Spring MVC Model
Apply CSS stylesheets to your Thymeleaf templates
Spring Boot, Thymeleaf and Database CRUD
Develop a real-time project with Thymeleaf and Spring Boot with full database CRUD support
Integrate the @Repository to execute CRUD actions on the Database with Spring Data JPA
Apply best practices with the @Service layer design pattern
Create a @Controller to handle web browser requests
Develop Thymeleaf templates to render database results
Beautify your Thymeleaf templates with Bootstrap CSS
Maven
Simplify your build process with Maven
Create Maven POM files and add dependencies
Search Central Maven repository for Dependency Coordinates
Run Maven builds from the Eclipse IDE
Use Maven during the development of Real-Time Projects for Spring MVC, Spring Security, Spring REST, Spring Boot and Hibernate.
ALSO DOWNLOAD: Learning Python for Data Analysis and Visualization
Compared to other Spring/Hibernate courses
This course is fully up to date and covers the latest versions of Spring 5 and Hibernate 5. The course also includes new content on Spring Boot, Spring Data JPA, Spring Data REST and Thymeleaf.
Beware of other Udemy Spring/Hibernate courses. Most of them are outdated and use old versions of Spring and Hibernate. Don’t waste your time or money on learning outdated technology.
Also, I create all of the code from scratch in this course. Beware of other courses, those instructors simply copy/paste from their GitHub repo or they use pre-written code. Their approach is not ideal for real-time learning.
Take my course where I show you how to create all of the code from scratch. You can type the code along with me in the videos, which is the best way to learn.
I am a very responsive instructor and I am available to answer your questions and help you work through any problems.
Finally, all source code is provided with the course along with setup instructions.
Student Reviews Prove This Course's Worth
Those who have reviewed the course have pointed out that the instruction is clear and easy to follow, as well as thorough and highly informative.
Many students had also taken other Spring and Hibernate courses in the past, only to find that this Spring and Hibernate course was their favorite. They enjoyed the structure of the content and the high-quality audio/video.
Sample of the Student Reviews:
★★★★★
I worked in some company, so I can say that this course is 100% industry oriented. The best course for learning Spring Framework. Getting replies within 24 hours. - Premang
★★★★★
Chad Darby has done a superb job organizing this course and has made Spring Framework, MVC, AOP, Hibernate, Security easy to learn and use. I have a bs and ms in CS, have been developing software for 25 years, and have taken many courses over the years at the different companies I've been at and Chad is easily the best instructor I've had.
He's extremely well-organized and knowledgeable and lays out this course in a step-by-step approach to fully cover the material and make it easy to learn. I highly recommend this course and Chad as an instructor.
I'm adding to my review following Chad's recent updates to his course to cover Spring Boot, JPA, etc. After finishing the course originally, I found another Spring Boot class, and after working on this other class, I appreciate more what Chad has done here. He's made Spring Boot for CRUD applications with Thymeleaf very easy to follow and learn. I've taken half a dozen other software courses, and while other instructors might be good, Chad is the gold standard here. I can't recommend him highly enough. - Dave Zeltserman
★★★★★
This is the best tutorial I've seen so far for Spring/Hibernate, each step is well explained and the tutorial videos are made to a high standard. I highly recommend this course! - Rob
★★★★★
Hats off to you Chad, the best Spring fundamentals course I have done on Udemy thus far. You never disappoint. - More body Modise
★★★★★
Chad is an excellent natural teacher. His course is well organized. He makes difficult concepts very easy to understand. - Julie Hodgson
Quality Material
You will receive a quality course, with solid technical material and excellent audio and video production. This is my fifth course at Udemy.
My first four courses on Udemy were:
Eclipse IDE for Beginners
Java Database Connection (JDBC)
JavaServer Faces (JSF) for Beginners
JSP and Servlets for Beginners
These courses have received rave 5-star reviews and over 220,000 students have taken the courses. Also, these courses are the most popular courses in their respective categories.
Similar thing for this Spring course, it is ranked as #1 best seller for Spring courses.
I also have an active YouTube channel where I post regular videos. In the past year, I’ve created over 300 video tutorials (public and private). My YouTube channel has over 4.5 million views and 33k subscribers. So I understand what works and what doesn’t work for creating video tutorials.
No-Risk – Money-Back Guarantee
Finally, there is no risk. You can preview 25% of the course for free. Once you purchase the course, if for some reason you are not happy with the course, Udemy offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.
So you have nothing to lose, sign up for this course and learn how to build Spring and Hibernate Real-Time Projects from scratch!
Target Audience
Java Developers with basic Java experience
Who this course is for:
The course is appropriate for all Java developers: beginners to advanced
Spring & Hibernate for Beginners (includes Spring Boot)
Created by Chad Darby
Last updated 1/2020
English
English, French [Auto-generated]
Size: 16.00 GB
DOWNLOAD COURSE
Content From: https://ift.tt/2Xfd5dX
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YouTube Optimization: Complete Guide
When you think SEO, naturally you think Google. Some of you might even think Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, or Baidu depending on your target location.
But the often-forgotten search engine when it comes to prioritizing your optimization efforts is YouTube.
According to Alexa’s global traffic rankings, YouTube is the second most visited website in the world.
It’s also arguably the second biggest search engine in the world that you haven’t yet properly optimized for — despite this very topic featuring at Mozcon over four years ago!
Why YouTube?
“YouTube viewers watch a lot of video — over 4 billion hours a month at last count. But the average household also watches several hours of video per day on their TVs. So for YouTube to become the most important media in more people’s lives, we’ve got a lot of growing to do.”
Source: YouTube Creators
Unlocking the potential within YouTube means you can access millions of viewers every day. This gives you a new channel for your promotional videos along with your more generally helpful content. In return, you can boost your overall online presence.
Ok, so a lot of YouTube is soppy cat videos and watching people inadvertently hurt themselves. But the platform does offer quite a bit for businesses to take advantage of, presenting those who embrace it with ample opportunity to:
Capture more attention
Garner better integration with social media content
Nurture a highly-engaged, loyal audience
Take advantage of the inherent benefit from better search engine rankings
That last one is the kicker.
Below, we will see how TOP can help you optimize your videos to increase your YouTube rankings, create engagement and why should you promote and embed your branded videos in your website’s
Targeting your videos – Understanding searcher intent, keyword research and video creation.
Optimizing your videos – Creating a branded presence, optimizing titles, tags and descriptions.
Promoting your videos – Getting real, engaged views on your videos, building links and embeds to your videos.
Easy as the Alphabet: Google and YouTube
Google shows more than just articles in their SERPs. They also rank videos, images, books and more.
The more content you create, in more varieties, the more you are increasing your chances of being picked up and ranked in Google SERPs for related search terms.
Considering that Google owns YouTube, it does not come as a surprise that you can increase your organic visibility by spending some time optimizing your video content on YouTube and embedding videos on your website.
It is important to know that embedding videos won’t directly improve your rankings in Google SERPs, according to Google’s John Mueller.
However, having useful videos within your content can help you keep a visitor on the page longer. That should eventually help you increase your niche authority, which should see you increasing your organic rankings.
In short, once your visitors see that your site is sharing informative and helpful content they are most likely to return. Thus, over time making your site authoritative and engaging source rewarded by Google.
Based on your keyword research (explained further in this guide) you will be able to create video content useful for your targeted audience, that will result in your viewers seeing you as a trusted resource of information.
Before we dive into more detailed steps on how to optimize your videos, let’s take a look at the main YouTube ranking factors.
YouTube ranking factors
YouTube has cited Audience Retention as one of its main ranking factors. In short, this is how long people watch your videos before exiting.
The Audience Retention report analyses :
Average view duration for all videos on your channel
Top videos or channels listed by watch time
Audience retention data for a specific video for different time frames
Relative audience retention for a video compared to the YouTube average for similar videos
Other YouTube ranking factors surrounding engagement:
Video comments
Subscribers – after watching a video
Video shares
Click-through rate
Thumbs up/Thumbs down
Also, according to the YouTube SEO Ranking Factor Study, published on Briggsby, the most important aspects of ranking well on YouTube are:
Watch time
Channel authority
Positive sentiment & engagement
Broad match keyword targeting across title, description, and keyword tags
Now that we know what are some of the key ranking factors on YouTube let’s dive in and see how can you discover topics and how to optimize your videos to increase its chances to rank better on YouTube.
(T) Keyword research
The YouTube SEO process starts just like any content creation process, with a keyword, search query and topic research. If you are new to keyword research, check out Moz’s great guide on the topic or watch our very own ‘Wolfgang Bites’ and learn how can you ‘Read Your Customers’ Minds’.
The goal you are trying to achieve here is to understand searcher intent, what kind of information users are looking for and which search terms are relevant to your business and your audience.
An additional bonus would be to discover trending search terms or keywords related to your industry.
Find relevant topics with high volume keywords and low competition.
As highlighted in MOZ’s keyword research, you should ask yourself…
Is the keyword relevant to your website’s content?
Will searchers find what they are looking for on your site when they search using these keywords?
Will they be happy with what they find?
And, will this traffic result in financial rewards or other organizational goals?
Now that you know how to do a keyword research, let’s see how can you discover your potential keywords using YouTube.
YouTube’s Search Suggest
To start discovering industry related search topics, you can use YouTube’s search suggest feature. Just type something into YouTube search and you’ll see a list of suggested topics appear. If you have the Keywords Everywhere Extension plugged in too, you’ll even get some additional competition and volume information too.
Keywords Everywhere – Mozilla Firefox
Keywords Everywhere – Google Chrome
It doesn’t matter if you use MS Office Excel or Google Sheets, as long you create a database with search volume for your targeted keywords. Once you have at least 50 different keywords, you are ready to make your analysis. Based on your analysis, you should be able to discover which keywords are more valuable to you.
Bear in mind that by using YouTube’s search suggest you would have to type the data in your sheets manually for each targeted keyword.
Considering that this process can be time-consuming, we would suggest creating a database of targeted search terms (topics and keywords related to your services). Using tools such are SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner you will be able to discover the most valuable keywords.
As an alternative to Google Keyword Planner you can use KeywordTool.io. This tool allows you to find keywords and you will be able to compare keyword search volume in YouTube, as opposed to search volume from Google.
Unfortunately, the free version is fairly limited and you need a pro version in order to unlock the following awesome features:
Keyword suggestions (variants stemming from your entry)
Related keywords (not keyword variants, but related, e.g. same semantic area)
Questions (similar to Answer The Public and the likes, great for Featured Snippet opportunities. etc)
Prepositions (again, similar to Answer The Public and the likes, great for increasing your site’s chances of appearing in Featured Snippets and ‘People Also Ask’ query suggestions)
Industry related topics and videos
Another way of finding the industry related topics and keywords is to analyze your competitor’s videos. Analyzing their videos, you can discover topics, gather ideas and aim to create a better and more engaging video. Your ultimate goal here: ‘Steal’ their viewers.
The process here is rather straightforward. Visit your competitor’s branded YouTube profile and see which videos have the most views and comments. Analyze the keywords and topics they’ve used for their best performing videos and 10x it! Make it better!
Vid IQ and TubeBuddy are freemium browser plugins that allow you to spy on competitor tags, while providing additional performance data about selected YouTube video. Using one of these tools should help you discover what tags and keywords are your competitors use when uploading their videos.
Branded YouTube profile report
Using your business’ YouTube search report, you can discover how viewers are engaging with your content, a total watch time, average view duration, a total number of views, etc.
To view your YouTube analytics, navigate to Creator Studio Dashboard from your profile image (top right) or click here, once you’re logged into your YouTube account.
Within YouTube Analytics, navigate to ‘Traffic Sources’ -> ‘YouTube Search.’
You will be able to see which search terms were used by viewers on YouTube to discover your content. Based on your previous keyword research, you should be able to notice if you’ve missed any important keywords.
Additionally, with knowing how users are discovering your videos, you will have a clear picture of what your most important keywords are for targeting purposes.
List of targeted keywords
When you compile a group of targeted keywords for your video, it’s time to see the amount of search volume for each keyword. It’s good practice to ensure that target keywords generate at least 100-1k searches per month in Google.
While it is a good practice to discover keywords with high search volume (at least 100-1k searches per month), it is important to know that some topics or industries don’t generate high search volume.
So, knowing your own industry this should not come as a surprise. You can prioritize your keywords even if the search volume is below 100-1k searches per month.
Using Google Keyword Planner or KeywordTool.io you will be able to pull search volume for your targeted keywords.
Once you have a set of 50 – 100 targeted keywords, you can set up a campaign to track your YouTube rankings.
One of the tools that allow you to track your rankings on YouTube is Rank Tracker from Link Assistant. Similar to Google SERPs rankings campaign in Moz, Rank Tracker will show you performance and rankings for your YouTube videos.
Creating a Video that Retains Attention
At Wolfgang, we often say attention is the modern digital commodity so you want your video to retain a viewer’s attention for as long as possible.
This means your video content needs to be high quality and engaging. In short, if your video keeps viewers on YouTube, the chances are increased that YouTube will rank your video higher in the platform’s search results.
Additionally, responding to people’s questions or comments on your videos can create conversations that help your audience learn more about your company and the topic of your video.
Knowing how your viewers think can be used to create in-depth and topically related videos or content for your blog.
Using Google Trends can help you determine when is the best time to share your videos with your audience.
In the example below, we can see that January is the best month to share and create videos related to health insurance topics:
While car insurance topics are mostly researched between June and August:
Optimize like it’s… 2009
Sometimes, optimizing your YouTube videos might even feel like you’re going back in time and optimizing for Google Search a decade ago, roundabout when Susan Boyle was setting YouTube alight with her mind-blowing Britain’s Got Talent performance (the most watched clip of the year, amazingly!).
To increase your video’s chances of striking the high notes and being picked up by search engines, every YouTube video should have relevant title name and description along with the ever-critical relevant tags.
It’s important you don’t simply create video content for the sake of it. Always stop to consider whether or not the content will be helpful for your audience. Also, check if there is a similar content out there and ask yourself how can you create something like this, but better. Try to apply 10X content strategy on your videos.
(O) YouTube video optimization
Keywords and search queries are just as important to YouTube as they are to Google.
As touched upon earlier, once the targeted keyword has been selected and a relevant video has been created, including metadata in your videos is important. Considering that YouTube cannot fully index the content within your video, it needs to rely on the content you provide.
The following parts will cover:
Video title
Video description
Tags
Video thumbnails
The title, description and tags will help influence where and when your video appears in YouTube search results, as well as within the actual vocal copy of your suggested videos.
Video title
We’d highly recommended that the video title is at least 5 words long and up to 70 characters in length. Having a catchy, relevant and descriptive video title will enable you to include targeted keywords.
If possible, placing the targeted keywords closer to the beginning of the title is recommended. However, keep in mind that your video title should entice viewer to watch your video.
YouTube’s very own, awesome Creator Academy features some effective tips that can help you create a title that should entice a viewer to click through:
Keep titles concise (between 60 and 70 characters) with the most important information up front.
Save episode numbers and branding towards the end.
Check that your titles don’t get cut-off in suggested videos, search results, and mobile
We also suggest including additional items that they haven’t flagged:
Use your targeted keyword in the video title
Include intent modifier (e.g. best, compare, free, local (Irish, American etc.), top, review etc.)
Video description
While video descriptions can be up to 5,000 characters in length, you should ensure that the key message is at the beginning of your description. In his YouTube study, Justin found out that the optimal word count is between 300 – 350 characters long.
A tailored video description can even attract some views coming from Google results. Using search terms in your video description that are searched on Google, not just on YouTube.
The description can also help drive relevant traffic to your website. Including a link to your domain within your video description can bring additional traffic to your site.
Video tags
A tag is pretty much just a keyword that you add to your video and it can help you grow your YouTube audience. You need to ensure that your tags precisely describe the topic and content of your video. Including relevant and related keywords should help you gather more views. Create tags that are based on your topic and are relevant to your targeted keyword.
In order to find tags for your videos, you can start with the YouTube search bar and type in your targeted search term, as in the example below:
If we take these four keywords and if you look at the search volume, it becomes quite clear which keywords you can and should utilize within your tagging logic.
Health insurance – High search volume
Volume: 673,000/mo | CPC: $12.22 | Competition: 0.89
Health insurance ireland – Medium search volume
Volume: 6,600/mo | CPC: $3.91 | Competition: 0.74
Health insurance broker – – Medium search volume
Volume: 4,400/mo | CPC: $8.60 | Competition: 0.63
Health insurance advisor – Low search volume
Volume: 390/mo | CPC: $8.63 | Competition: 0.66
If you don’t have access to any paid keyword volume tools and perhaps find Keyword Planner a little cumbersome for this task, you can use Keywords Everywhere to find out the search volume for each keyword, free n’ easy within the SERPs.
Use the data discovered in keyword and tag research and use it when creating video titles and video descriptions.
Video thumbnails
When you have a verified YouTube account you are able to upload your own image for your thumbnail video. Which means that you can edit your image to make it stand out from other videos in your niche.
It is recommended to use high resolution image for your video thumbnail – width: 1280p and height: 720p.
However, it is important to know that there’s a limit of of 2MB and the supported thumbnail image formats are .JPG, .GIF, .BMP, or .PNG.
Once you upload your video you will see an option to choose a Custom thumbnail under the “Video thumbnails” section. You can also upload thumbnail image for any of your previously published videos.
Using YouTube SEO Checklist can help you track your video optimization steps and help you optimize your video to give it a better chance to rank higher. Unfortunately, this extension is only available for Google Chrome.
(P) Promoting your videos to increase your overall brand awareness
In the opening section we’ve mentioned YouTube’s ranking signals, where we listed video subscribers, video shares, comments and Click Through Rate as important ranking signals (engagement).
To increase the number of users that will watch, subscribe and share your videos, you need to promote the video content also. You have to reach the audience.
By incorporating YouTube content into your ongoing marketing strategy for your business, you are increasing the chances to draw more visits and views to your branded YouTube channel. The more views and engagements you have on your videos, the more authoritative and relevant your videos are in Google’s eyes.
Linking to your video in your email signature
A simple link to your video in your email signature can be an effective driver of traffic. As mentioned earlier, comments, shares and likes (thumbs up) are important ranking signals. Considering that your email recipients are most likely your service users, they are the audience most likely to be interested in video content related to the news and services that your business provides. Furthermore, a satisfied customer will more likely share the video if they find it useful.
Embedding videos in blog posts
Creating some written content on your website gives you the opportunity to embed the YouTube video or recommend that readers watch your video to find more information. This creates another link between your site and the video for Googlebot to consider.
Embedding videos in blog posts or landing pages is the most direct and advantageous way to integrate your content and YouTube videos.
When you include videos in your articles, your posts become more dynamic and engaging. Writing new articles, related to your video topic, can help you reuse the same video content multiple times. Presenting older videos to a new audience will help you gather more views, subscribers and engagements in general.
You can follow Google’s own guidelines on embedding YouTube videos.
Take advantage of Playlist functionality
Perhaps one of the simplest high-value feature inclusions you should embrace on your YouTube page; the utilization of playlists as part of your optimization strategy.
Playlists can be excellent for garnering that ‘snowball effect’ and to help keep users clicking and rolling through your semantically related videos with ease. They help ramp up the view count and generally tend to rank higher than standalone videos in the search results, making them a no-brainer for inclusion in your YouTube optimization arsenal.
Engagement matters
It’s no secret that video content is a popular way to grab attention and drive home a key message, but it seems many brands are just creating video for the sake of it.
As covered in-depth within this guide, ranking well on YouTube search requires some smart thinking to increase your likelihood of winning some vital engagement. That means obsessing over important metrics like:
“Dwell time” (how long people are watching your videos for)
Share rate (social)
Links and embeds on other sites
Channel subscriber count (real ones)
Therefore, assuming your video quality is of a high standard of course, spending some time to optimize your videos for your potential YouTube in terms of quality and searchability should see your videos attract more views and dominate that vital second search engine that we as SEOs are often quite guilty of neglecting — never more if you follow these steps to a tee!
Measuring ongoing performance
Last, but by no means least, we’d highly recommend that you analyze your current video performance using Google Data Studio and YouTube analytics.
These tools allow you to discover how your content is performing up to date (average number of views, comments, watch time, thumbs up, etc) and to generate reports after you optimize your videos with custom thumbnails, video tags, tailored video title and description.
Mastering the art of calculating your overall watched time on YouTube is important, especially if you’re comparing stats versus other social video ad platforms.
While a number of great rank tracking tools can help you track your YouTube rankings for your targeted search terms, you can use integrate their API feeds with Data Studio to create daily, weekly or monthly performance reports. It shouldn’t be hard, but you need to know your way around Google Data Studio to configure this report.
Using the information provided above, you should be able to start creating video content that will be informative and useful to your targeted audience.
For more about YouTube SEO, check out:
YouTube SEO: Optimizing your channel in 5 steps
Video and search: YouTube, Google, the alternatives and the future
5 YouTube optimization tips to improve your video rankings
How to optimize your videos for YouTube: Best-practice tips
Google videos vs. YouTube: Which is the best video search engine?
Ivan Crnomaric is SEO Executive at Wolfgang Digital.
The post YouTube Optimization: Complete Guide appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/02/04/youtube-optimization-guide/
0 notes
Text
YouTube Optimization: Complete Guide
When you think SEO, naturally you think Google. Some of you might even think Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, or Baidu depending on your target location.
But the often-forgotten search engine when it comes to prioritizing your optimization efforts is YouTube.
According to Alexa’s global traffic rankings, YouTube is the second most visited website in the world.
It’s also arguably the second biggest search engine in the world that you haven’t yet properly optimized for — despite this very topic featuring at Mozcon over four years ago!
Why YouTube?
“YouTube viewers watch a lot of video — over 4 billion hours a month at last count. But the average household also watches several hours of video per day on their TVs. So for YouTube to become the most important media in more people’s lives, we’ve got a lot of growing to do.”
Source: YouTube Creators
Unlocking the potential within YouTube means you can access millions of viewers every day. This gives you a new channel for your promotional videos along with your more generally helpful content. In return, you can boost your overall online presence.
Ok, so a lot of YouTube is soppy cat videos and watching people inadvertently hurt themselves. But the platform does offer quite a bit for businesses to take advantage of, presenting those who embrace it with ample opportunity to:
Capture more attention
Garner better integration with social media content
Nurture a highly-engaged, loyal audience
Take advantage of the inherent benefit from better search engine rankings
That last one is the kicker.
Below, we will see how TOP can help you optimize your videos to increase your YouTube rankings, create engagement and why should you promote and embed your branded videos in your website’s
Targeting your videos – Understanding searcher intent, keyword research and video creation.
Optimizing your videos – Creating a branded presence, optimizing titles, tags and descriptions.
Promoting your videos – Getting real, engaged views on your videos, building links and embeds to your videos.
Easy as the Alphabet: Google and YouTube
Google shows more than just articles in their SERPs. They also rank videos, images, books and more.
The more content you create, in more varieties, the more you are increasing your chances of being picked up and ranked in Google SERPs for related search terms.
Considering that Google owns YouTube, it does not come as a surprise that you can increase your organic visibility by spending some time optimizing your video content on YouTube and embedding videos on your website.
It is important to know that embedding videos won’t directly improve your rankings in Google SERPs, according to Google’s John Mueller.
However, having useful videos within your content can help you keep a visitor on the page longer. That should eventually help you increase your niche authority, which should see you increasing your organic rankings.
In short, once your visitors see that your site is sharing informative and helpful content they are most likely to return. Thus, over time making your site authoritative and engaging source rewarded by Google.
Based on your keyword research (explained further in this guide) you will be able to create video content useful for your targeted audience, that will result in your viewers seeing you as a trusted resource of information.
Before we dive into more detailed steps on how to optimize your videos, let’s take a look at the main YouTube ranking factors.
YouTube ranking factors
YouTube has cited Audience Retention as one of its main ranking factors. In short, this is how long people watch your videos before exiting.
The Audience Retention report analyses :
Average view duration for all videos on your channel
Top videos or channels listed by watch time
Audience retention data for a specific video for different time frames
Relative audience retention for a video compared to the YouTube average for similar videos
Other YouTube ranking factors surrounding engagement:
Video comments
Subscribers – after watching a video
Video shares
Click-through rate
Thumbs up/Thumbs down
Also, according to the YouTube SEO Ranking Factor Study, published on Briggsby, the most important aspects of ranking well on YouTube are:
Watch time
Channel authority
Positive sentiment & engagement
Broad match keyword targeting across title, description, and keyword tags
Now that we know what are some of the key ranking factors on YouTube let’s dive in and see how can you discover topics and how to optimize your videos to increase its chances to rank better on YouTube.
(T) Keyword research
The YouTube SEO process starts just like any content creation process, with a keyword, search query and topic research. If you are new to keyword research, check out Moz’s great guide on the topic or watch our very own ‘Wolfgang Bites’ and learn how can you ‘Read Your Customers’ Minds’.
The goal you are trying to achieve here is to understand searcher intent, what kind of information users are looking for and which search terms are relevant to your business and your audience.
An additional bonus would be to discover trending search terms or keywords related to your industry.
Find relevant topics with high volume keywords and low competition.
As highlighted in MOZ’s keyword research, you should ask yourself…
Is the keyword relevant to your website’s content?
Will searchers find what they are looking for on your site when they search using these keywords?
Will they be happy with what they find?
And, will this traffic result in financial rewards or other organizational goals?
Now that you know how to do a keyword research, let’s see how can you discover your potential keywords using YouTube.
YouTube’s Search Suggest
To start discovering industry related search topics, you can use YouTube’s search suggest feature. Just type something into YouTube search and you’ll see a list of suggested topics appear. If you have the Keywords Everywhere Extension plugged in too, you’ll even get some additional competition and volume information too.
Keywords Everywhere – Mozilla Firefox
Keywords Everywhere – Google Chrome
It doesn’t matter if you use MS Office Excel or Google Sheets, as long you create a database with search volume for your targeted keywords. Once you have at least 50 different keywords, you are ready to make your analysis. Based on your analysis, you should be able to discover which keywords are more valuable to you.
Bear in mind that by using YouTube’s search suggest you would have to type the data in your sheets manually for each targeted keyword.
Considering that this process can be time-consuming, we would suggest creating a database of targeted search terms (topics and keywords related to your services). Using tools such are SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner you will be able to discover the most valuable keywords.
As an alternative to Google Keyword Planner you can use KeywordTool.io. This tool allows you to find keywords and you will be able to compare keyword search volume in YouTube, as opposed to search volume from Google.
Unfortunately, the free version is fairly limited and you need a pro version in order to unlock the following awesome features:
Keyword suggestions (variants stemming from your entry)
Related keywords (not keyword variants, but related, e.g. same semantic area)
Questions (similar to Answer The Public and the likes, great for Featured Snippet opportunities. etc)
Prepositions (again, similar to Answer The Public and the likes, great for increasing your site’s chances of appearing in Featured Snippets and ‘People Also Ask’ query suggestions)
Industry related topics and videos
Another way of finding the industry related topics and keywords is to analyze your competitor’s videos. Analyzing their videos, you can discover topics, gather ideas and aim to create a better and more engaging video. Your ultimate goal here: ‘Steal’ their viewers.
The process here is rather straightforward. Visit your competitor’s branded YouTube profile and see which videos have the most views and comments. Analyze the keywords and topics they’ve used for their best performing videos and 10x it! Make it better!
Vid IQ and TubeBuddy are freemium browser plugins that allow you to spy on competitor tags, while providing additional performance data about selected YouTube video. Using one of these tools should help you discover what tags and keywords are your competitors use when uploading their videos.
Branded YouTube profile report
Using your business’ YouTube search report, you can discover how viewers are engaging with your content, a total watch time, average view duration, a total number of views, etc.
To view your YouTube analytics, navigate to Creator Studio Dashboard from your profile image (top right) or click here, once you’re logged into your YouTube account.
Within YouTube Analytics, navigate to ‘Traffic Sources’ -> ‘YouTube Search.’
You will be able to see which search terms were used by viewers on YouTube to discover your content. Based on your previous keyword research, you should be able to notice if you’ve missed any important keywords.
Additionally, with knowing how users are discovering your videos, you will have a clear picture of what your most important keywords are for targeting purposes.
List of targeted keywords
When you compile a group of targeted keywords for your video, it’s time to see the amount of search volume for each keyword. It’s good practice to ensure that target keywords generate at least 100-1k searches per month in Google.
While it is a good practice to discover keywords with high search volume (at least 100-1k searches per month), it is important to know that some topics or industries don’t generate high search volume.
So, knowing your own industry this should not come as a surprise. You can prioritize your keywords even if the search volume is below 100-1k searches per month.
Using Google Keyword Planner or KeywordTool.io you will be able to pull search volume for your targeted keywords.
Once you have a set of 50 – 100 targeted keywords, you can set up a campaign to track your YouTube rankings.
One of the tools that allow you to track your rankings on YouTube is Rank Tracker from Link Assistant. Similar to Google SERPs rankings campaign in Moz, Rank Tracker will show you performance and rankings for your YouTube videos.
Creating a Video that Retains Attention
At Wolfgang, we often say attention is the modern digital commodity so you want your video to retain a viewer’s attention for as long as possible.
This means your video content needs to be high quality and engaging. In short, if your video keeps viewers on YouTube, the chances are increased that YouTube will rank your video higher in the platform’s search results.
Additionally, responding to people’s questions or comments on your videos can create conversations that help your audience learn more about your company and the topic of your video.
Knowing how your viewers think can be used to create in-depth and topically related videos or content for your blog.
Using Google Trends can help you determine when is the best time to share your videos with your audience.
In the example below, we can see that January is the best month to share and create videos related to health insurance topics:
While car insurance topics are mostly researched between June and August:
Optimize like it’s… 2009
Sometimes, optimizing your YouTube videos might even feel like you’re going back in time and optimizing for Google Search a decade ago, roundabout when Susan Boyle was setting YouTube alight with her mind-blowing Britain’s Got Talent performance (the most watched clip of the year, amazingly!).
To increase your video’s chances of striking the high notes and being picked up by search engines, every YouTube video should have relevant title name and description along with the ever-critical relevant tags.
It’s important you don’t simply create video content for the sake of it. Always stop to consider whether or not the content will be helpful for your audience. Also, check if there is a similar content out there and ask yourself how can you create something like this, but better. Try to apply 10X content strategy on your videos.
(O) YouTube video optimization
Keywords and search queries are just as important to YouTube as they are to Google.
As touched upon earlier, once the targeted keyword has been selected and a relevant video has been created, including metadata in your videos is important. Considering that YouTube cannot fully index the content within your video, it needs to rely on the content you provide.
The following parts will cover:
Video title
Video description
Tags
Video thumbnails
The title, description and tags will help influence where and when your video appears in YouTube search results, as well as within the actual vocal copy of your suggested videos.
Video title
We’d highly recommended that the video title is at least 5 words long and up to 70 characters in length. Having a catchy, relevant and descriptive video title will enable you to include targeted keywords.
If possible, placing the targeted keywords closer to the beginning of the title is recommended. However, keep in mind that your video title should entice viewer to watch your video.
YouTube’s very own, awesome Creator Academy features some effective tips that can help you create a title that should entice a viewer to click through:
Keep titles concise (between 60 and 70 characters) with the most important information up front.
Save episode numbers and branding towards the end.
Check that your titles don’t get cut-off in suggested videos, search results, and mobile
We also suggest including additional items that they haven’t flagged:
Use your targeted keyword in the video title
Include intent modifier (e.g. best, compare, free, local (Irish, American etc.), top, review etc.)
Video description
While video descriptions can be up to 5,000 characters in length, you should ensure that the key message is at the beginning of your description. In his YouTube study, Justin found out that the optimal word count is between 300 – 350 characters long.
A tailored video description can even attract some views coming from Google results. Using search terms in your video description that are searched on Google, not just on YouTube.
The description can also help drive relevant traffic to your website. Including a link to your domain within your video description can bring additional traffic to your site.
Video tags
A tag is pretty much just a keyword that you add to your video and it can help you grow your YouTube audience. You need to ensure that your tags precisely describe the topic and content of your video. Including relevant and related keywords should help you gather more views. Create tags that are based on your topic and are relevant to your targeted keyword.
In order to find tags for your videos, you can start with the YouTube search bar and type in your targeted search term, as in the example below:
If we take these four keywords and if you look at the search volume, it becomes quite clear which keywords you can and should utilize within your tagging logic.
Health insurance – High search volume
Volume: 673,000/mo | CPC: $12.22 | Competition: 0.89
Health insurance ireland – Medium search volume
Volume: 6,600/mo | CPC: $3.91 | Competition: 0.74
Health insurance broker – – Medium search volume
Volume: 4,400/mo | CPC: $8.60 | Competition: 0.63
Health insurance advisor – Low search volume
Volume: 390/mo | CPC: $8.63 | Competition: 0.66
If you don’t have access to any paid keyword volume tools and perhaps find Keyword Planner a little cumbersome for this task, you can use Keywords Everywhere to find out the search volume for each keyword, free n’ easy within the SERPs.
Use the data discovered in keyword and tag research and use it when creating video titles and video descriptions.
Video thumbnails
When you have a verified YouTube account you are able to upload your own image for your thumbnail video. Which means that you can edit your image to make it stand out from other videos in your niche.
It is recommended to use high resolution image for your video thumbnail – width: 1280p and height: 720p.
However, it is important to know that there’s a limit of of 2MB and the supported thumbnail image formats are .JPG, .GIF, .BMP, or .PNG.
Once you upload your video you will see an option to choose a Custom thumbnail under the “Video thumbnails” section. You can also upload thumbnail image for any of your previously published videos.
Using YouTube SEO Checklist can help you track your video optimization steps and help you optimize your video to give it a better chance to rank higher. Unfortunately, this extension is only available for Google Chrome.
(P) Promoting your videos to increase your overall brand awareness
In the opening section we’ve mentioned YouTube’s ranking signals, where we listed video subscribers, video shares, comments and Click Through Rate as important ranking signals (engagement).
To increase the number of users that will watch, subscribe and share your videos, you need to promote the video content also. You have to reach the audience.
By incorporating YouTube content into your ongoing marketing strategy for your business, you are increasing the chances to draw more visits and views to your branded YouTube channel. The more views and engagements you have on your videos, the more authoritative and relevant your videos are in Google’s eyes.
Linking to your video in your email signature
A simple link to your video in your email signature can be an effective driver of traffic. As mentioned earlier, comments, shares and likes (thumbs up) are important ranking signals. Considering that your email recipients are most likely your service users, they are the audience most likely to be interested in video content related to the news and services that your business provides. Furthermore, a satisfied customer will more likely share the video if they find it useful.
Embedding videos in blog posts
Creating some written content on your website gives you the opportunity to embed the YouTube video or recommend that readers watch your video to find more information. This creates another link between your site and the video for Googlebot to consider.
Embedding videos in blog posts or landing pages is the most direct and advantageous way to integrate your content and YouTube videos.
When you include videos in your articles, your posts become more dynamic and engaging. Writing new articles, related to your video topic, can help you reuse the same video content multiple times. Presenting older videos to a new audience will help you gather more views, subscribers and engagements in general.
You can follow Google’s own guidelines on embedding YouTube videos.
Take advantage of Playlist functionality
Perhaps one of the simplest high-value feature inclusions you should embrace on your YouTube page; the utilization of playlists as part of your optimization strategy.
Playlists can be excellent for garnering that ‘snowball effect’ and to help keep users clicking and rolling through your semantically related videos with ease. They help ramp up the view count and generally tend to rank higher than standalone videos in the search results, making them a no-brainer for inclusion in your YouTube optimization arsenal.
Engagement matters
It’s no secret that video content is a popular way to grab attention and drive home a key message, but it seems many brands are just creating video for the sake of it.
As covered in-depth within this guide, ranking well on YouTube search requires some smart thinking to increase your likelihood of winning some vital engagement. That means obsessing over important metrics like:
“Dwell time” (how long people are watching your videos for)
Share rate (social)
Links and embeds on other sites
Channel subscriber count (real ones)
Therefore, assuming your video quality is of a high standard of course, spending some time to optimize your videos for your potential YouTube in terms of quality and searchability should see your videos attract more views and dominate that vital second search engine that we as SEOs are often quite guilty of neglecting — never more if you follow these steps to a tee!
Measuring ongoing performance
Last, but by no means least, we’d highly recommend that you analyze your current video performance using Google Data Studio and YouTube analytics.
These tools allow you to discover how your content is performing up to date (average number of views, comments, watch time, thumbs up, etc) and to generate reports after you optimize your videos with custom thumbnails, video tags, tailored video title and description.
Mastering the art of calculating your overall watched time on YouTube is important, especially if you’re comparing stats versus other social video ad platforms.
While a number of great rank tracking tools can help you track your YouTube rankings for your targeted search terms, you can use integrate their API feeds with Data Studio to create daily, weekly or monthly performance reports. It shouldn’t be hard, but you need to know your way around Google Data Studio to configure this report.
Using the information provided above, you should be able to start creating video content that will be informative and useful to your targeted audience.
For more about YouTube SEO, check out:
YouTube SEO: Optimizing your channel in 5 steps
Video and search: YouTube, Google, the alternatives and the future
5 YouTube optimization tips to improve your video rankings
How to optimize your videos for YouTube: Best-practice tips
Google videos vs. YouTube: Which is the best video search engine?
Ivan Crnomaric is SEO Executive at Wolfgang Digital.
The post YouTube Optimization: Complete Guide appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/02/04/youtube-optimization-guide/
0 notes
Text
YouTube Optimization: Complete Guide
When you think SEO, naturally you think Google. Some of you might even think Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, or Baidu depending on your target location.
But the often-forgotten search engine when it comes to prioritizing your optimization efforts is YouTube.
According to Alexa’s global traffic rankings, YouTube is the second most visited website in the world.
It’s also arguably the second biggest search engine in the world that you haven’t yet properly optimized for — despite this very topic featuring at Mozcon over four years ago!
Why YouTube?
“YouTube viewers watch a lot of video — over 4 billion hours a month at last count. But the average household also watches several hours of video per day on their TVs. So for YouTube to become the most important media in more people’s lives, we’ve got a lot of growing to do.”
Source: YouTube Creators
Unlocking the potential within YouTube means you can access millions of viewers every day. This gives you a new channel for your promotional videos along with your more generally helpful content. In return, you can boost your overall online presence.
Ok, so a lot of YouTube is soppy cat videos and watching people inadvertently hurt themselves. But the platform does offer quite a bit for businesses to take advantage of, presenting those who embrace it with ample opportunity to:
Capture more attention
Garner better integration with social media content
Nurture a highly-engaged, loyal audience
Take advantage of the inherent benefit from better search engine rankings
That last one is the kicker.
Below, we will see how TOP can help you optimize your videos to increase your YouTube rankings, create engagement and why should you promote and embed your branded videos in your website’s
Targeting your videos – Understanding searcher intent, keyword research and video creation.
Optimizing your videos – Creating a branded presence, optimizing titles, tags and descriptions.
Promoting your videos – Getting real, engaged views on your videos, building links and embeds to your videos.
Easy as the Alphabet: Google and YouTube
Google shows more than just articles in their SERPs. They also rank videos, images, books and more.
The more content you create, in more varieties, the more you are increasing your chances of being picked up and ranked in Google SERPs for related search terms.
Considering that Google owns YouTube, it does not come as a surprise that you can increase your organic visibility by spending some time optimizing your video content on YouTube and embedding videos on your website.
It is important to know that embedding videos won’t directly improve your rankings in Google SERPs, according to Google’s John Mueller.
However, having useful videos within your content can help you keep a visitor on the page longer. That should eventually help you increase your niche authority, which should see you increasing your organic rankings.
In short, once your visitors see that your site is sharing informative and helpful content they are most likely to return. Thus, over time making your site authoritative and engaging source rewarded by Google.
Based on your keyword research (explained further in this guide) you will be able to create video content useful for your targeted audience, that will result in your viewers seeing you as a trusted resource of information.
Before we dive into more detailed steps on how to optimize your videos, let’s take a look at the main YouTube ranking factors.
YouTube ranking factors
YouTube has cited Audience Retention as one of its main ranking factors. In short, this is how long people watch your videos before exiting.
The Audience Retention report analyses :
Average view duration for all videos on your channel
Top videos or channels listed by watch time
Audience retention data for a specific video for different time frames
Relative audience retention for a video compared to the YouTube average for similar videos
Other YouTube ranking factors surrounding engagement:
Video comments
Subscribers – after watching a video
Video shares
Click-through rate
Thumbs up/Thumbs down
Also, according to the YouTube SEO Ranking Factor Study, published on Briggsby, the most important aspects of ranking well on YouTube are:
Watch time
Channel authority
Positive sentiment & engagement
Broad match keyword targeting across title, description, and keyword tags
Now that we know what are some of the key ranking factors on YouTube let’s dive in and see how can you discover topics and how to optimize your videos to increase its chances to rank better on YouTube.
(T) Keyword research
The YouTube SEO process starts just like any content creation process, with a keyword, search query and topic research. If you are new to keyword research, check out Moz’s great guide on the topic or watch our very own ‘Wolfgang Bites’ and learn how can you ‘Read Your Customers’ Minds’.
The goal you are trying to achieve here is to understand searcher intent, what kind of information users are looking for and which search terms are relevant to your business and your audience.
An additional bonus would be to discover trending search terms or keywords related to your industry.
Find relevant topics with high volume keywords and low competition.
As highlighted in MOZ’s keyword research, you should ask yourself…
Is the keyword relevant to your website’s content?
Will searchers find what they are looking for on your site when they search using these keywords?
Will they be happy with what they find?
And, will this traffic result in financial rewards or other organizational goals?
Now that you know how to do a keyword research, let’s see how can you discover your potential keywords using YouTube.
YouTube’s Search Suggest
To start discovering industry related search topics, you can use YouTube’s search suggest feature. Just type something into YouTube search and you’ll see a list of suggested topics appear. If you have the Keywords Everywhere Extension plugged in too, you’ll even get some additional competition and volume information too.
Keywords Everywhere – Mozilla Firefox
Keywords Everywhere – Google Chrome
It doesn’t matter if you use MS Office Excel or Google Sheets, as long you create a database with search volume for your targeted keywords. Once you have at least 50 different keywords, you are ready to make your analysis. Based on your analysis, you should be able to discover which keywords are more valuable to you.
Bear in mind that by using YouTube’s search suggest you would have to type the data in your sheets manually for each targeted keyword.
Considering that this process can be time-consuming, we would suggest creating a database of targeted search terms (topics and keywords related to your services). Using tools such are SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner you will be able to discover the most valuable keywords.
As an alternative to Google Keyword Planner you can use KeywordTool.io. This tool allows you to find keywords and you will be able to compare keyword search volume in YouTube, as opposed to search volume from Google.
Unfortunately, the free version is fairly limited and you need a pro version in order to unlock the following awesome features:
Keyword suggestions (variants stemming from your entry)
Related keywords (not keyword variants, but related, e.g. same semantic area)
Questions (similar to Answer The Public and the likes, great for Featured Snippet opportunities. etc)
Prepositions (again, similar to Answer The Public and the likes, great for increasing your site’s chances of appearing in Featured Snippets and ‘People Also Ask’ query suggestions)
Industry related topics and videos
Another way of finding the industry related topics and keywords is to analyze your competitor’s videos. Analyzing their videos, you can discover topics, gather ideas and aim to create a better and more engaging video. Your ultimate goal here: ‘Steal’ their viewers.
The process here is rather straightforward. Visit your competitor’s branded YouTube profile and see which videos have the most views and comments. Analyze the keywords and topics they’ve used for their best performing videos and 10x it! Make it better!
Vid IQ and TubeBuddy are freemium browser plugins that allow you to spy on competitor tags, while providing additional performance data about selected YouTube video. Using one of these tools should help you discover what tags and keywords are your competitors use when uploading their videos.
Branded YouTube profile report
Using your business’ YouTube search report, you can discover how viewers are engaging with your content, a total watch time, average view duration, a total number of views, etc.
To view your YouTube analytics, navigate to Creator Studio Dashboard from your profile image (top right) or click here, once you’re logged into your YouTube account.
Within YouTube Analytics, navigate to ‘Traffic Sources’ -> ‘YouTube Search.’
You will be able to see which search terms were used by viewers on YouTube to discover your content. Based on your previous keyword research, you should be able to notice if you’ve missed any important keywords.
Additionally, with knowing how users are discovering your videos, you will have a clear picture of what your most important keywords are for targeting purposes.
List of targeted keywords
When you compile a group of targeted keywords for your video, it’s time to see the amount of search volume for each keyword. It’s good practice to ensure that target keywords generate at least 100-1k searches per month in Google.
While it is a good practice to discover keywords with high search volume (at least 100-1k searches per month), it is important to know that some topics or industries don’t generate high search volume.
So, knowing your own industry this should not come as a surprise. You can prioritize your keywords even if the search volume is below 100-1k searches per month.
Using Google Keyword Planner or KeywordTool.io you will be able to pull search volume for your targeted keywords.
Once you have a set of 50 – 100 targeted keywords, you can set up a campaign to track your YouTube rankings.
One of the tools that allow you to track your rankings on YouTube is Rank Tracker from Link Assistant. Similar to Google SERPs rankings campaign in Moz, Rank Tracker will show you performance and rankings for your YouTube videos.
Creating a Video that Retains Attention
At Wolfgang, we often say attention is the modern digital commodity so you want your video to retain a viewer’s attention for as long as possible.
This means your video content needs to be high quality and engaging. In short, if your video keeps viewers on YouTube, the chances are increased that YouTube will rank your video higher in the platform’s search results.
Additionally, responding to people’s questions or comments on your videos can create conversations that help your audience learn more about your company and the topic of your video.
Knowing how your viewers think can be used to create in-depth and topically related videos or content for your blog.
Using Google Trends can help you determine when is the best time to share your videos with your audience.
In the example below, we can see that January is the best month to share and create videos related to health insurance topics:
While car insurance topics are mostly researched between June and August:
Optimize like it’s… 2009
Sometimes, optimizing your YouTube videos might even feel like you’re going back in time and optimizing for Google Search a decade ago, roundabout when Susan Boyle was setting YouTube alight with her mind-blowing Britain’s Got Talent performance (the most watched clip of the year, amazingly!).
To increase your video’s chances of striking the high notes and being picked up by search engines, every YouTube video should have relevant title name and description along with the ever-critical relevant tags.
It’s important you don’t simply create video content for the sake of it. Always stop to consider whether or not the content will be helpful for your audience. Also, check if there is a similar content out there and ask yourself how can you create something like this, but better. Try to apply 10X content strategy on your videos.
(O) YouTube video optimization
Keywords and search queries are just as important to YouTube as they are to Google.
As touched upon earlier, once the targeted keyword has been selected and a relevant video has been created, including metadata in your videos is important. Considering that YouTube cannot fully index the content within your video, it needs to rely on the content you provide.
The following parts will cover:
Video title
Video description
Tags
Video thumbnails
The title, description and tags will help influence where and when your video appears in YouTube search results, as well as within the actual vocal copy of your suggested videos.
Video title
We’d highly recommended that the video title is at least 5 words long and up to 70 characters in length. Having a catchy, relevant and descriptive video title will enable you to include targeted keywords.
If possible, placing the targeted keywords closer to the beginning of the title is recommended. However, keep in mind that your video title should entice viewer to watch your video.
YouTube’s very own, awesome Creator Academy features some effective tips that can help you create a title that should entice a viewer to click through:
Keep titles concise (between 60 and 70 characters) with the most important information up front.
Save episode numbers and branding towards the end.
Check that your titles don’t get cut-off in suggested videos, search results, and mobile
We also suggest including additional items that they haven’t flagged:
Use your targeted keyword in the video title
Include intent modifier (e.g. best, compare, free, local (Irish, American etc.), top, review etc.)
Video description
While video descriptions can be up to 5,000 characters in length, you should ensure that the key message is at the beginning of your description. In his YouTube study, Justin found out that the optimal word count is between 300 – 350 characters long.
A tailored video description can even attract some views coming from Google results. Using search terms in your video description that are searched on Google, not just on YouTube.
The description can also help drive relevant traffic to your website. Including a link to your domain within your video description can bring additional traffic to your site.
Video tags
A tag is pretty much just a keyword that you add to your video and it can help you grow your YouTube audience. You need to ensure that your tags precisely describe the topic and content of your video. Including relevant and related keywords should help you gather more views. Create tags that are based on your topic and are relevant to your targeted keyword.
In order to find tags for your videos, you can start with the YouTube search bar and type in your targeted search term, as in the example below:
If we take these four keywords and if you look at the search volume, it becomes quite clear which keywords you can and should utilize within your tagging logic.
Health insurance – High search volume
Volume: 673,000/mo | CPC: $12.22 | Competition: 0.89
Health insurance ireland – Medium search volume
Volume: 6,600/mo | CPC: $3.91 | Competition: 0.74
Health insurance broker – – Medium search volume
Volume: 4,400/mo | CPC: $8.60 | Competition: 0.63
Health insurance advisor – Low search volume
Volume: 390/mo | CPC: $8.63 | Competition: 0.66
If you don’t have access to any paid keyword volume tools and perhaps find Keyword Planner a little cumbersome for this task, you can use Keywords Everywhere to find out the search volume for each keyword, free n’ easy within the SERPs.
Use the data discovered in keyword and tag research and use it when creating video titles and video descriptions.
Video thumbnails
When you have a verified YouTube account you are able to upload your own image for your thumbnail video. Which means that you can edit your image to make it stand out from other videos in your niche.
It is recommended to use high resolution image for your video thumbnail – width: 1280p and height: 720p.
However, it is important to know that there’s a limit of of 2MB and the supported thumbnail image formats are .JPG, .GIF, .BMP, or .PNG.
Once you upload your video you will see an option to choose a Custom thumbnail under the “Video thumbnails” section. You can also upload thumbnail image for any of your previously published videos.
Using YouTube SEO Checklist can help you track your video optimization steps and help you optimize your video to give it a better chance to rank higher. Unfortunately, this extension is only available for Google Chrome.
(P) Promoting your videos to increase your overall brand awareness
In the opening section we’ve mentioned YouTube’s ranking signals, where we listed video subscribers, video shares, comments and Click Through Rate as important ranking signals (engagement).
To increase the number of users that will watch, subscribe and share your videos, you need to promote the video content also. You have to reach the audience.
By incorporating YouTube content into your ongoing marketing strategy for your business, you are increasing the chances to draw more visits and views to your branded YouTube channel. The more views and engagements you have on your videos, the more authoritative and relevant your videos are in Google’s eyes.
Linking to your video in your email signature
A simple link to your video in your email signature can be an effective driver of traffic. As mentioned earlier, comments, shares and likes (thumbs up) are important ranking signals. Considering that your email recipients are most likely your service users, they are the audience most likely to be interested in video content related to the news and services that your business provides. Furthermore, a satisfied customer will more likely share the video if they find it useful.
Embedding videos in blog posts
Creating some written content on your website gives you the opportunity to embed the YouTube video or recommend that readers watch your video to find more information. This creates another link between your site and the video for Googlebot to consider.
Embedding videos in blog posts or landing pages is the most direct and advantageous way to integrate your content and YouTube videos.
When you include videos in your articles, your posts become more dynamic and engaging. Writing new articles, related to your video topic, can help you reuse the same video content multiple times. Presenting older videos to a new audience will help you gather more views, subscribers and engagements in general.
You can follow Google’s own guidelines on embedding YouTube videos.
Take advantage of Playlist functionality
Perhaps one of the simplest high-value feature inclusions you should embrace on your YouTube page; the utilization of playlists as part of your optimization strategy.
Playlists can be excellent for garnering that ‘snowball effect’ and to help keep users clicking and rolling through your semantically related videos with ease. They help ramp up the view count and generally tend to rank higher than standalone videos in the search results, making them a no-brainer for inclusion in your YouTube optimization arsenal.
Engagement matters
It’s no secret that video content is a popular way to grab attention and drive home a key message, but it seems many brands are just creating video for the sake of it.
As covered in-depth within this guide, ranking well on YouTube search requires some smart thinking to increase your likelihood of winning some vital engagement. That means obsessing over important metrics like:
“Dwell time” (how long people are watching your videos for)
Share rate (social)
Links and embeds on other sites
Channel subscriber count (real ones)
Therefore, assuming your video quality is of a high standard of course, spending some time to optimize your videos for your potential YouTube in terms of quality and searchability should see your videos attract more views and dominate that vital second search engine that we as SEOs are often quite guilty of neglecting — never more if you follow these steps to a tee!
Measuring ongoing performance
Last, but by no means least, we’d highly recommend that you analyze your current video performance using Google Data Studio and YouTube analytics.
These tools allow you to discover how your content is performing up to date (average number of views, comments, watch time, thumbs up, etc) and to generate reports after you optimize your videos with custom thumbnails, video tags, tailored video title and description.
Mastering the art of calculating your overall watched time on YouTube is important, especially if you’re comparing stats versus other social video ad platforms.
While a number of great rank tracking tools can help you track your YouTube rankings for your targeted search terms, you can use integrate their API feeds with Data Studio to create daily, weekly or monthly performance reports. It shouldn’t be hard, but you need to know your way around Google Data Studio to configure this report.
Using the information provided above, you should be able to start creating video content that will be informative and useful to your targeted audience.
For more about YouTube SEO, check out:
YouTube SEO: Optimizing your channel in 5 steps
Video and search: YouTube, Google, the alternatives and the future
5 YouTube optimization tips to improve your video rankings
How to optimize your videos for YouTube: Best-practice tips
Google videos vs. YouTube: Which is the best video search engine?
Ivan Crnomaric is SEO Executive at Wolfgang Digital.
The post YouTube Optimization: Complete Guide appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
source https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/02/04/youtube-optimization-guide/ from Rising Phoenix SEO http://risingphoenixseo.blogspot.com/2019/02/youtube-optimization-complete-guide.html
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YouTube Optimization: Complete Guide
When you think SEO, naturally you think Google. Some of you might even think Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, or Baidu depending on your target location.
But the often-forgotten search engine when it comes to prioritizing your optimization efforts is YouTube.
According to Alexa’s global traffic rankings, YouTube is the second most visited website in the world.
It’s also arguably the second biggest search engine in the world that you haven’t yet properly optimized for — despite this very topic featuring at Mozcon over four years ago!
Why YouTube?
“YouTube viewers watch a lot of video — over 4 billion hours a month at last count. But the average household also watches several hours of video per day on their TVs. So for YouTube to become the most important media in more people’s lives, we’ve got a lot of growing to do.”
Source: YouTube Creators
Unlocking the potential within YouTube means you can access millions of viewers every day. This gives you a new channel for your promotional videos along with your more generally helpful content. In return, you can boost your overall online presence.
Ok, so a lot of YouTube is soppy cat videos and watching people inadvertently hurt themselves. But the platform does offer quite a bit for businesses to take advantage of, presenting those who embrace it with ample opportunity to:
Capture more attention
Garner better integration with social media content
Nurture a highly-engaged, loyal audience
Take advantage of the inherent benefit from better search engine rankings
That last one is the kicker.
Below, we will see how TOP can help you optimize your videos to increase your YouTube rankings, create engagement and why should you promote and embed your branded videos in your website’s
Targeting your videos – Understanding searcher intent, keyword research and video creation.
Optimizing your videos – Creating a branded presence, optimizing titles, tags and descriptions.
Promoting your videos – Getting real, engaged views on your videos, building links and embeds to your videos.
Easy as the Alphabet: Google and YouTube
Google shows more than just articles in their SERPs. They also rank videos, images, books and more.
The more content you create, in more varieties, the more you are increasing your chances of being picked up and ranked in Google SERPs for related search terms.
Considering that Google owns YouTube, it does not come as a surprise that you can increase your organic visibility by spending some time optimizing your video content on YouTube and embedding videos on your website.
It is important to know that embedding videos won’t directly improve your rankings in Google SERPs, according to Google’s John Mueller.
However, having useful videos within your content can help you keep a visitor on the page longer. That should eventually help you increase your niche authority, which should see you increasing your organic rankings.
In short, once your visitors see that your site is sharing informative and helpful content they are most likely to return. Thus, over time making your site authoritative and engaging source rewarded by Google.
Based on your keyword research (explained further in this guide) you will be able to create video content useful for your targeted audience, that will result in your viewers seeing you as a trusted resource of information.
Before we dive into more detailed steps on how to optimize your videos, let’s take a look at the main YouTube ranking factors.
YouTube ranking factors
YouTube has cited Audience Retention as one of its main ranking factors. In short, this is how long people watch your videos before exiting.
The Audience Retention report analyses :
Average view duration for all videos on your channel
Top videos or channels listed by watch time
Audience retention data for a specific video for different time frames
Relative audience retention for a video compared to the YouTube average for similar videos
Other YouTube ranking factors surrounding engagement:
Video comments
Subscribers – after watching a video
Video shares
Click-through rate
Thumbs up/Thumbs down
Also, according to the YouTube SEO Ranking Factor Study, published on Briggsby, the most important aspects of ranking well on YouTube are:
Watch time
Channel authority
Positive sentiment & engagement
Broad match keyword targeting across title, description, and keyword tags
Now that we know what are some of the key ranking factors on YouTube let’s dive in and see how can you discover topics and how to optimize your videos to increase its chances to rank better on YouTube.
(T) Keyword research
The YouTube SEO process starts just like any content creation process, with a keyword, search query and topic research. If you are new to keyword research, check out Moz’s great guide on the topic or watch our very own ‘Wolfgang Bites’ and learn how can you ‘Read Your Customers’ Minds’.
The goal you are trying to achieve here is to understand searcher intent, what kind of information users are looking for and which search terms are relevant to your business and your audience.
An additional bonus would be to discover trending search terms or keywords related to your industry.
Find relevant topics with high volume keywords and low competition.
As highlighted in MOZ’s keyword research, you should ask yourself…
Is the keyword relevant to your website’s content?
Will searchers find what they are looking for on your site when they search using these keywords?
Will they be happy with what they find?
And, will this traffic result in financial rewards or other organizational goals?
Now that you know how to do a keyword research, let’s see how can you discover your potential keywords using YouTube.
YouTube’s Search Suggest
To start discovering industry related search topics, you can use YouTube’s search suggest feature. Just type something into YouTube search and you’ll see a list of suggested topics appear. If you have the Keywords Everywhere Extension plugged in too, you’ll even get some additional competition and volume information too.
Keywords Everywhere – Mozilla Firefox
Keywords Everywhere – Google Chrome
It doesn’t matter if you use MS Office Excel or Google Sheets, as long you create a database with search volume for your targeted keywords. Once you have at least 50 different keywords, you are ready to make your analysis. Based on your analysis, you should be able to discover which keywords are more valuable to you.
Bear in mind that by using YouTube’s search suggest you would have to type the data in your sheets manually for each targeted keyword.
Considering that this process can be time-consuming, we would suggest creating a database of targeted search terms (topics and keywords related to your services). Using tools such are SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner you will be able to discover the most valuable keywords.
As an alternative to Google Keyword Planner you can use KeywordTool.io. This tool allows you to find keywords and you will be able to compare keyword search volume in YouTube, as opposed to search volume from Google.
Unfortunately, the free version is fairly limited and you need a pro version in order to unlock the following awesome features:
Keyword suggestions (variants stemming from your entry)
Related keywords (not keyword variants, but related, e.g. same semantic area)
Questions (similar to Answer The Public and the likes, great for Featured Snippet opportunities. etc)
Prepositions (again, similar to Answer The Public and the likes, great for increasing your site’s chances of appearing in Featured Snippets and ‘People Also Ask’ query suggestions)
Industry related topics and videos
Another way of finding the industry related topics and keywords is to analyze your competitor’s videos. Analyzing their videos, you can discover topics, gather ideas and aim to create a better and more engaging video. Your ultimate goal here: ‘Steal’ their viewers.
The process here is rather straightforward. Visit your competitor’s branded YouTube profile and see which videos have the most views and comments. Analyze the keywords and topics they’ve used for their best performing videos and 10x it! Make it better!
Vid IQ and TubeBuddy are freemium browser plugins that allow you to spy on competitor tags, while providing additional performance data about selected YouTube video. Using one of these tools should help you discover what tags and keywords are your competitors use when uploading their videos.
Branded YouTube profile report
Using your business’ YouTube search report, you can discover how viewers are engaging with your content, a total watch time, average view duration, a total number of views, etc.
To view your YouTube analytics, navigate to Creator Studio Dashboard from your profile image (top right) or click here, once you’re logged into your YouTube account.
Within YouTube Analytics, navigate to ‘Traffic Sources’ -> ‘YouTube Search.’
You will be able to see which search terms were used by viewers on YouTube to discover your content. Based on your previous keyword research, you should be able to notice if you’ve missed any important keywords.
Additionally, with knowing how users are discovering your videos, you will have a clear picture of what your most important keywords are for targeting purposes.
List of targeted keywords
When you compile a group of targeted keywords for your video, it’s time to see the amount of search volume for each keyword. It’s good practice to ensure that target keywords generate at least 100-1k searches per month in Google.
While it is a good practice to discover keywords with high search volume (at least 100-1k searches per month), it is important to know that some topics or industries don’t generate high search volume.
So, knowing your own industry this should not come as a surprise. You can prioritize your keywords even if the search volume is below 100-1k searches per month.
Using Google Keyword Planner or KeywordTool.io you will be able to pull search volume for your targeted keywords.
Once you have a set of 50 – 100 targeted keywords, you can set up a campaign to track your YouTube rankings.
One of the tools that allow you to track your rankings on YouTube is Rank Tracker from Link Assistant. Similar to Google SERPs rankings campaign in Moz, Rank Tracker will show you performance and rankings for your YouTube videos.
Creating a Video that Retains Attention
At Wolfgang, we often say attention is the modern digital commodity so you want your video to retain a viewer’s attention for as long as possible.
This means your video content needs to be high quality and engaging. In short, if your video keeps viewers on YouTube, the chances are increased that YouTube will rank your video higher in the platform’s search results.
Additionally, responding to people’s questions or comments on your videos can create conversations that help your audience learn more about your company and the topic of your video.
Knowing how your viewers think can be used to create in-depth and topically related videos or content for your blog.
Using Google Trends can help you determine when is the best time to share your videos with your audience.
In the example below, we can see that January is the best month to share and create videos related to health insurance topics:
While car insurance topics are mostly researched between June and August:
Optimize like it’s… 2009
Sometimes, optimizing your YouTube videos might even feel like you’re going back in time and optimizing for Google Search a decade ago, roundabout when Susan Boyle was setting YouTube alight with her mind-blowing Britain’s Got Talent performance (the most watched clip of the year, amazingly!).
To increase your video’s chances of striking the high notes and being picked up by search engines, every YouTube video should have relevant title name and description along with the ever-critical relevant tags.
It’s important you don’t simply create video content for the sake of it. Always stop to consider whether or not the content will be helpful for your audience. Also, check if there is a similar content out there and ask yourself how can you create something like this, but better. Try to apply 10X content strategy on your videos.
(O) YouTube video optimization
Keywords and search queries are just as important to YouTube as they are to Google.
As touched upon earlier, once the targeted keyword has been selected and a relevant video has been created, including metadata in your videos is important. Considering that YouTube cannot fully index the content within your video, it needs to rely on the content you provide.
The following parts will cover:
Video title
Video description
Tags
Video thumbnails
The title, description and tags will help influence where and when your video appears in YouTube search results, as well as within the actual vocal copy of your suggested videos.
Video title
We’d highly recommended that the video title is at least 5 words long and up to 70 characters in length. Having a catchy, relevant and descriptive video title will enable you to include targeted keywords.
If possible, placing the targeted keywords closer to the beginning of the title is recommended. However, keep in mind that your video title should entice viewer to watch your video.
YouTube’s very own, awesome Creator Academy features some effective tips that can help you create a title that should entice a viewer to click through:
Keep titles concise (between 60 and 70 characters) with the most important information up front.
Save episode numbers and branding towards the end.
Check that your titles don’t get cut-off in suggested videos, search results, and mobile
We also suggest including additional items that they haven’t flagged:
Use your targeted keyword in the video title
Include intent modifier (e.g. best, compare, free, local (Irish, American etc.), top, review etc.)
Video description
While video descriptions can be up to 5,000 characters in length, you should ensure that the key message is at the beginning of your description. In his YouTube study, Justin found out that the optimal word count is between 300 – 350 characters long.
A tailored video description can even attract some views coming from Google results. Using search terms in your video description that are searched on Google, not just on YouTube.
The description can also help drive relevant traffic to your website. Including a link to your domain within your video description can bring additional traffic to your site.
Video tags
A tag is pretty much just a keyword that you add to your video and it can help you grow your YouTube audience. You need to ensure that your tags precisely describe the topic and content of your video. Including relevant and related keywords should help you gather more views. Create tags that are based on your topic and are relevant to your targeted keyword.
In order to find tags for your videos, you can start with the YouTube search bar and type in your targeted search term, as in the example below:
If we take these four keywords and if you look at the search volume, it becomes quite clear which keywords you can and should utilize within your tagging logic.
Health insurance – High search volume
Volume: 673,000/mo | CPC: $12.22 | Competition: 0.89
Health insurance ireland – Medium search volume
Volume: 6,600/mo | CPC: $3.91 | Competition: 0.74
Health insurance broker – – Medium search volume
Volume: 4,400/mo | CPC: $8.60 | Competition: 0.63
Health insurance advisor – Low search volume
Volume: 390/mo | CPC: $8.63 | Competition: 0.66
If you don’t have access to any paid keyword volume tools and perhaps find Keyword Planner a little cumbersome for this task, you can use Keywords Everywhere to find out the search volume for each keyword, free n’ easy within the SERPs.
Use the data discovered in keyword and tag research and use it when creating video titles and video descriptions.
Video thumbnails
When you have a verified YouTube account you are able to upload your own image for your thumbnail video. Which means that you can edit your image to make it stand out from other videos in your niche.
It is recommended to use high resolution image for your video thumbnail – width: 1280p and height: 720p.
However, it is important to know that there’s a limit of of 2MB and the supported thumbnail image formats are .JPG, .GIF, .BMP, or .PNG.
Once you upload your video you will see an option to choose a Custom thumbnail under the “Video thumbnails” section. You can also upload thumbnail image for any of your previously published videos.
Using YouTube SEO Checklist can help you track your video optimization steps and help you optimize your video to give it a better chance to rank higher. Unfortunately, this extension is only available for Google Chrome.
(P) Promoting your videos to increase your overall brand awareness
In the opening section we’ve mentioned YouTube’s ranking signals, where we listed video subscribers, video shares, comments and Click Through Rate as important ranking signals (engagement).
To increase the number of users that will watch, subscribe and share your videos, you need to promote the video content also. You have to reach the audience.
By incorporating YouTube content into your ongoing marketing strategy for your business, you are increasing the chances to draw more visits and views to your branded YouTube channel. The more views and engagements you have on your videos, the more authoritative and relevant your videos are in Google’s eyes.
Linking to your video in your email signature
A simple link to your video in your email signature can be an effective driver of traffic. As mentioned earlier, comments, shares and likes (thumbs up) are important ranking signals. Considering that your email recipients are most likely your service users, they are the audience most likely to be interested in video content related to the news and services that your business provides. Furthermore, a satisfied customer will more likely share the video if they find it useful.
Embedding videos in blog posts
Creating some written content on your website gives you the opportunity to embed the YouTube video or recommend that readers watch your video to find more information. This creates another link between your site and the video for Googlebot to consider.
Embedding videos in blog posts or landing pages is the most direct and advantageous way to integrate your content and YouTube videos.
When you include videos in your articles, your posts become more dynamic and engaging. Writing new articles, related to your video topic, can help you reuse the same video content multiple times. Presenting older videos to a new audience will help you gather more views, subscribers and engagements in general.
You can follow Google’s own guidelines on embedding YouTube videos.
Take advantage of Playlist functionality
Perhaps one of the simplest high-value feature inclusions you should embrace on your YouTube page; the utilization of playlists as part of your optimization strategy.
Playlists can be excellent for garnering that ‘snowball effect’ and to help keep users clicking and rolling through your semantically related videos with ease. They help ramp up the view count and generally tend to rank higher than standalone videos in the search results, making them a no-brainer for inclusion in your YouTube optimization arsenal.
Engagement matters
It’s no secret that video content is a popular way to grab attention and drive home a key message, but it seems many brands are just creating video for the sake of it.
As covered in-depth within this guide, ranking well on YouTube search requires some smart thinking to increase your likelihood of winning some vital engagement. That means obsessing over important metrics like:
“Dwell time” (how long people are watching your videos for)
Share rate (social)
Links and embeds on other sites
Channel subscriber count (real ones)
Therefore, assuming your video quality is of a high standard of course, spending some time to optimize your videos for your potential YouTube in terms of quality and searchability should see your videos attract more views and dominate that vital second search engine that we as SEOs are often quite guilty of neglecting — never more if you follow these steps to a tee!
Measuring ongoing performance
Last, but by no means least, we’d highly recommend that you analyze your current video performance using Google Data Studio and YouTube analytics.
These tools allow you to discover how your content is performing up to date (average number of views, comments, watch time, thumbs up, etc) and to generate reports after you optimize your videos with custom thumbnails, video tags, tailored video title and description.
Mastering the art of calculating your overall watched time on YouTube is important, especially if you’re comparing stats versus other social video ad platforms.
While a number of great rank tracking tools can help you track your YouTube rankings for your targeted search terms, you can use integrate their API feeds with Data Studio to create daily, weekly or monthly performance reports. It shouldn’t be hard, but you need to know your way around Google Data Studio to configure this report.
Using the information provided above, you should be able to start creating video content that will be informative and useful to your targeted audience.
For more about YouTube SEO, check out:
YouTube SEO: Optimizing your channel in 5 steps
Video and search: YouTube, Google, the alternatives and the future
5 YouTube optimization tips to improve your video rankings
How to optimize your videos for YouTube: Best-practice tips
Google videos vs. YouTube: Which is the best video search engine?
Ivan Crnomaric is SEO Executive at Wolfgang Digital.
The post YouTube Optimization: Complete Guide appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/02/04/youtube-optimization-guide/
0 notes
Text
YouTube Optimization: Complete Guide
When you think SEO, naturally you think Google. Some of you might even think Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, or Baidu depending on your target location.
But the often-forgotten search engine when it comes to prioritizing your optimization efforts is YouTube.
According to Alexa’s global traffic rankings, YouTube is the second most visited website in the world.
It’s also arguably the second biggest search engine in the world that you haven’t yet properly optimized for — despite this very topic featuring at Mozcon over four years ago!
Why YouTube?
“YouTube viewers watch a lot of video — over 4 billion hours a month at last count. But the average household also watches several hours of video per day on their TVs. So for YouTube to become the most important media in more people’s lives, we’ve got a lot of growing to do.”
Source: YouTube Creators
Unlocking the potential within YouTube means you can access millions of viewers every day. This gives you a new channel for your promotional videos along with your more generally helpful content. In return, you can boost your overall online presence.
Ok, so a lot of YouTube is soppy cat videos and watching people inadvertently hurt themselves. But the platform does offer quite a bit for businesses to take advantage of, presenting those who embrace it with ample opportunity to:
Capture more attention
Garner better integration with social media content
Nurture a highly-engaged, loyal audience
Take advantage of the inherent benefit from better search engine rankings
That last one is the kicker.
Below, we will see how TOP can help you optimize your videos to increase your YouTube rankings, create engagement and why should you promote and embed your branded videos in your website’s
Targeting your videos – Understanding searcher intent, keyword research and video creation.
Optimizing your videos – Creating a branded presence, optimizing titles, tags and descriptions.
Promoting your videos – Getting real, engaged views on your videos, building links and embeds to your videos.
Easy as the Alphabet: Google and YouTube
Google shows more than just articles in their SERPs. They also rank videos, images, books and more.
The more content you create, in more varieties, the more you are increasing your chances of being picked up and ranked in Google SERPs for related search terms.
Considering that Google owns YouTube, it does not come as a surprise that you can increase your organic visibility by spending some time optimizing your video content on YouTube and embedding videos on your website.
It is important to know that embedding videos won’t directly improve your rankings in Google SERPs, according to Google’s John Mueller.
However, having useful videos within your content can help you keep a visitor on the page longer. That should eventually help you increase your niche authority, which should see you increasing your organic rankings.
In short, once your visitors see that your site is sharing informative and helpful content they are most likely to return. Thus, over time making your site authoritative and engaging source rewarded by Google.
Based on your keyword research (explained further in this guide) you will be able to create video content useful for your targeted audience, that will result in your viewers seeing you as a trusted resource of information.
Before we dive into more detailed steps on how to optimize your videos, let’s take a look at the main YouTube ranking factors.
YouTube ranking factors
YouTube has cited Audience Retention as one of its main ranking factors. In short, this is how long people watch your videos before exiting.
The Audience Retention report analyses :
Average view duration for all videos on your channel
Top videos or channels listed by watch time
Audience retention data for a specific video for different time frames
Relative audience retention for a video compared to the YouTube average for similar videos
Other YouTube ranking factors surrounding engagement:
Video comments
Subscribers – after watching a video
Video shares
Click-through rate
Thumbs up/Thumbs down
Also, according to the YouTube SEO Ranking Factor Study, published on Briggsby, the most important aspects of ranking well on YouTube are:
Watch time
Channel authority
Positive sentiment & engagement
Broad match keyword targeting across title, description, and keyword tags
Now that we know what are some of the key ranking factors on YouTube let’s dive in and see how can you discover topics and how to optimize your videos to increase its chances to rank better on YouTube.
(T) Keyword research
The YouTube SEO process starts just like any content creation process, with a keyword, search query and topic research. If you are new to keyword research, check out Moz’s great guide on the topic or watch our very own ‘Wolfgang Bites’ and learn how can you ‘Read Your Customers’ Minds’.
The goal you are trying to achieve here is to understand searcher intent, what kind of information users are looking for and which search terms are relevant to your business and your audience.
An additional bonus would be to discover trending search terms or keywords related to your industry.
Find relevant topics with high volume keywords and low competition.
As highlighted in MOZ’s keyword research, you should ask yourself…
Is the keyword relevant to your website’s content?
Will searchers find what they are looking for on your site when they search using these keywords?
Will they be happy with what they find?
And, will this traffic result in financial rewards or other organizational goals?
Now that you know how to do a keyword research, let’s see how can you discover your potential keywords using YouTube.
YouTube’s Search Suggest
To start discovering industry related search topics, you can use YouTube’s search suggest feature. Just type something into YouTube search and you’ll see a list of suggested topics appear. If you have the Keywords Everywhere Extension plugged in too, you’ll even get some additional competition and volume information too.
Keywords Everywhere – Mozilla Firefox
Keywords Everywhere – Google Chrome
It doesn’t matter if you use MS Office Excel or Google Sheets, as long you create a database with search volume for your targeted keywords. Once you have at least 50 different keywords, you are ready to make your analysis. Based on your analysis, you should be able to discover which keywords are more valuable to you.
Bear in mind that by using YouTube’s search suggest you would have to type the data in your sheets manually for each targeted keyword.
Considering that this process can be time-consuming, we would suggest creating a database of targeted search terms (topics and keywords related to your services). Using tools such are SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner you will be able to discover the most valuable keywords.
As an alternative to Google Keyword Planner you can use KeywordTool.io. This tool allows you to find keywords and you will be able to compare keyword search volume in YouTube, as opposed to search volume from Google.
Unfortunately, the free version is fairly limited and you need a pro version in order to unlock the following awesome features:
Keyword suggestions (variants stemming from your entry)
Related keywords (not keyword variants, but related, e.g. same semantic area)
Questions (similar to Answer The Public and the likes, great for Featured Snippet opportunities. etc)
Prepositions (again, similar to Answer The Public and the likes, great for increasing your site’s chances of appearing in Featured Snippets and ‘People Also Ask’ query suggestions)
Industry related topics and videos
Another way of finding the industry related topics and keywords is to analyze your competitor’s videos. Analyzing their videos, you can discover topics, gather ideas and aim to create a better and more engaging video. Your ultimate goal here: ‘Steal’ their viewers.
The process here is rather straightforward. Visit your competitor’s branded YouTube profile and see which videos have the most views and comments. Analyze the keywords and topics they’ve used for their best performing videos and 10x it! Make it better!
Vid IQ and TubeBuddy are freemium browser plugins that allow you to spy on competitor tags, while providing additional performance data about selected YouTube video. Using one of these tools should help you discover what tags and keywords are your competitors use when uploading their videos.
Branded YouTube profile report
Using your business’ YouTube search report, you can discover how viewers are engaging with your content, a total watch time, average view duration, a total number of views, etc.
To view your YouTube analytics, navigate to Creator Studio Dashboard from your profile image (top right) or click here, once you’re logged into your YouTube account.
Within YouTube Analytics, navigate to ‘Traffic Sources’ -> ‘YouTube Search.’
You will be able to see which search terms were used by viewers on YouTube to discover your content. Based on your previous keyword research, you should be able to notice if you’ve missed any important keywords.
Additionally, with knowing how users are discovering your videos, you will have a clear picture of what your most important keywords are for targeting purposes.
List of targeted keywords
When you compile a group of targeted keywords for your video, it’s time to see the amount of search volume for each keyword. It’s good practice to ensure that target keywords generate at least 100-1k searches per month in Google.
While it is a good practice to discover keywords with high search volume (at least 100-1k searches per month), it is important to know that some topics or industries don’t generate high search volume.
So, knowing your own industry this should not come as a surprise. You can prioritize your keywords even if the search volume is below 100-1k searches per month.
Using Google Keyword Planner or KeywordTool.io you will be able to pull search volume for your targeted keywords.
Once you have a set of 50 – 100 targeted keywords, you can set up a campaign to track your YouTube rankings.
One of the tools that allow you to track your rankings on YouTube is Rank Tracker from Link Assistant. Similar to Google SERPs rankings campaign in Moz, Rank Tracker will show you performance and rankings for your YouTube videos.
Creating a Video that Retains Attention
At Wolfgang, we often say attention is the modern digital commodity so you want your video to retain a viewer’s attention for as long as possible.
This means your video content needs to be high quality and engaging. In short, if your video keeps viewers on YouTube, the chances are increased that YouTube will rank your video higher in the platform’s search results.
Additionally, responding to people’s questions or comments on your videos can create conversations that help your audience learn more about your company and the topic of your video.
Knowing how your viewers think can be used to create in-depth and topically related videos or content for your blog.
Using Google Trends can help you determine when is the best time to share your videos with your audience.
In the example below, we can see that January is the best month to share and create videos related to health insurance topics:
While car insurance topics are mostly researched between June and August:
Optimize like it’s… 2009
Sometimes, optimizing your YouTube videos might even feel like you’re going back in time and optimizing for Google Search a decade ago, roundabout when Susan Boyle was setting YouTube alight with her mind-blowing Britain’s Got Talent performance (the most watched clip of the year, amazingly!).
To increase your video’s chances of striking the high notes and being picked up by search engines, every YouTube video should have relevant title name and description along with the ever-critical relevant tags.
It’s important you don’t simply create video content for the sake of it. Always stop to consider whether or not the content will be helpful for your audience. Also, check if there is a similar content out there and ask yourself how can you create something like this, but better. Try to apply 10X content strategy on your videos.
(O) YouTube video optimization
Keywords and search queries are just as important to YouTube as they are to Google.
As touched upon earlier, once the targeted keyword has been selected and a relevant video has been created, including metadata in your videos is important. Considering that YouTube cannot fully index the content within your video, it needs to rely on the content you provide.
The following parts will cover:
Video title
Video description
Tags
Video thumbnails
The title, description and tags will help influence where and when your video appears in YouTube search results, as well as within the actual vocal copy of your suggested videos.
Video title
We’d highly recommended that the video title is at least 5 words long and up to 70 characters in length. Having a catchy, relevant and descriptive video title will enable you to include targeted keywords.
If possible, placing the targeted keywords closer to the beginning of the title is recommended. However, keep in mind that your video title should entice viewer to watch your video.
YouTube’s very own, awesome Creator Academy features some effective tips that can help you create a title that should entice a viewer to click through:
Keep titles concise (between 60 and 70 characters) with the most important information up front.
Save episode numbers and branding towards the end.
Check that your titles don’t get cut-off in suggested videos, search results, and mobile
We also suggest including additional items that they haven’t flagged:
Use your targeted keyword in the video title
Include intent modifier (e.g. best, compare, free, local (Irish, American etc.), top, review etc.)
Video description
While video descriptions can be up to 5,000 characters in length, you should ensure that the key message is at the beginning of your description. In his YouTube study, Justin found out that the optimal word count is between 300 – 350 characters long.
A tailored video description can even attract some views coming from Google results. Using search terms in your video description that are searched on Google, not just on YouTube.
The description can also help drive relevant traffic to your website. Including a link to your domain within your video description can bring additional traffic to your site.
Video tags
A tag is pretty much just a keyword that you add to your video and it can help you grow your YouTube audience. You need to ensure that your tags precisely describe the topic and content of your video. Including relevant and related keywords should help you gather more views. Create tags that are based on your topic and are relevant to your targeted keyword.
In order to find tags for your videos, you can start with the YouTube search bar and type in your targeted search term, as in the example below:
If we take these four keywords and if you look at the search volume, it becomes quite clear which keywords you can and should utilize within your tagging logic.
Health insurance – High search volume
Volume: 673,000/mo | CPC: $12.22 | Competition: 0.89
Health insurance ireland – Medium search volume
Volume: 6,600/mo | CPC: $3.91 | Competition: 0.74
Health insurance broker – – Medium search volume
Volume: 4,400/mo | CPC: $8.60 | Competition: 0.63
Health insurance advisor – Low search volume
Volume: 390/mo | CPC: $8.63 | Competition: 0.66
If you don’t have access to any paid keyword volume tools and perhaps find Keyword Planner a little cumbersome for this task, you can use Keywords Everywhere to find out the search volume for each keyword, free n’ easy within the SERPs.
Use the data discovered in keyword and tag research and use it when creating video titles and video descriptions.
Video thumbnails
When you have a verified YouTube account you are able to upload your own image for your thumbnail video. Which means that you can edit your image to make it stand out from other videos in your niche.
It is recommended to use high resolution image for your video thumbnail – width: 1280p and height: 720p.
However, it is important to know that there’s a limit of of 2MB and the supported thumbnail image formats are .JPG, .GIF, .BMP, or .PNG.
Once you upload your video you will see an option to choose a Custom thumbnail under the “Video thumbnails” section. You can also upload thumbnail image for any of your previously published videos.
Using YouTube SEO Checklist can help you track your video optimization steps and help you optimize your video to give it a better chance to rank higher. Unfortunately, this extension is only available for Google Chrome.
(P) Promoting your videos to increase your overall brand awareness
In the opening section we’ve mentioned YouTube’s ranking signals, where we listed video subscribers, video shares, comments and Click Through Rate as important ranking signals (engagement).
To increase the number of users that will watch, subscribe and share your videos, you need to promote the video content also. You have to reach the audience.
By incorporating YouTube content into your ongoing marketing strategy for your business, you are increasing the chances to draw more visits and views to your branded YouTube channel. The more views and engagements you have on your videos, the more authoritative and relevant your videos are in Google’s eyes.
Linking to your video in your email signature
A simple link to your video in your email signature can be an effective driver of traffic. As mentioned earlier, comments, shares and likes (thumbs up) are important ranking signals. Considering that your email recipients are most likely your service users, they are the audience most likely to be interested in video content related to the news and services that your business provides. Furthermore, a satisfied customer will more likely share the video if they find it useful.
Embedding videos in blog posts
Creating some written content on your website gives you the opportunity to embed the YouTube video or recommend that readers watch your video to find more information. This creates another link between your site and the video for Googlebot to consider.
Embedding videos in blog posts or landing pages is the most direct and advantageous way to integrate your content and YouTube videos.
When you include videos in your articles, your posts become more dynamic and engaging. Writing new articles, related to your video topic, can help you reuse the same video content multiple times. Presenting older videos to a new audience will help you gather more views, subscribers and engagements in general.
You can follow Google’s own guidelines on embedding YouTube videos.
Take advantage of Playlist functionality
Perhaps one of the simplest high-value feature inclusions you should embrace on your YouTube page; the utilization of playlists as part of your optimization strategy.
Playlists can be excellent for garnering that ‘snowball effect’ and to help keep users clicking and rolling through your semantically related videos with ease. They help ramp up the view count and generally tend to rank higher than standalone videos in the search results, making them a no-brainer for inclusion in your YouTube optimization arsenal.
Engagement matters
It’s no secret that video content is a popular way to grab attention and drive home a key message, but it seems many brands are just creating video for the sake of it.
As covered in-depth within this guide, ranking well on YouTube search requires some smart thinking to increase your likelihood of winning some vital engagement. That means obsessing over important metrics like:
“Dwell time” (how long people are watching your videos for)
Share rate (social)
Links and embeds on other sites
Channel subscriber count (real ones)
Therefore, assuming your video quality is of a high standard of course, spending some time to optimize your videos for your potential YouTube in terms of quality and searchability should see your videos attract more views and dominate that vital second search engine that we as SEOs are often quite guilty of neglecting — never more if you follow these steps to a tee!
Measuring ongoing performance
Last, but by no means least, we’d highly recommend that you analyze your current video performance using Google Data Studio and YouTube analytics.
These tools allow you to discover how your content is performing up to date (average number of views, comments, watch time, thumbs up, etc) and to generate reports after you optimize your videos with custom thumbnails, video tags, tailored video title and description.
Mastering the art of calculating your overall watched time on YouTube is important, especially if you’re comparing stats versus other social video ad platforms.
While a number of great rank tracking tools can help you track your YouTube rankings for your targeted search terms, you can use integrate their API feeds with Data Studio to create daily, weekly or monthly performance reports. It shouldn’t be hard, but you need to know your way around Google Data Studio to configure this report.
Using the information provided above, you should be able to start creating video content that will be informative and useful to your targeted audience.
For more about YouTube SEO, check out:
YouTube SEO: Optimizing your channel in 5 steps
Video and search: YouTube, Google, the alternatives and the future
5 YouTube optimization tips to improve your video rankings
How to optimize your videos for YouTube: Best-practice tips
Google videos vs. YouTube: Which is the best video search engine?
Ivan Crnomaric is SEO Executive at Wolfgang Digital.
The post YouTube Optimization: Complete Guide appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
from IM Tips And Tricks https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/02/04/youtube-optimization-guide/ from Rising Phoenix SEO https://risingphxseo.tumblr.com/post/182554967930
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YouTube Optimization: Complete Guide
When you think SEO, naturally you think Google. Some of you might even think Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, or Baidu depending on your target location.
But the often-forgotten search engine when it comes to prioritizing your optimization efforts is YouTube.
According to Alexa’s global traffic rankings, YouTube is the second most visited website in the world.
It’s also arguably the second biggest search engine in the world that you haven’t yet properly optimized for — despite this very topic featuring at Mozcon over four years ago!
Why YouTube?
“YouTube viewers watch a lot of video — over 4 billion hours a month at last count. But the average household also watches several hours of video per day on their TVs. So for YouTube to become the most important media in more people’s lives, we’ve got a lot of growing to do.”
Source: YouTube Creators
Unlocking the potential within YouTube means you can access millions of viewers every day. This gives you a new channel for your promotional videos along with your more generally helpful content. In return, you can boost your overall online presence.
Ok, so a lot of YouTube is soppy cat videos and watching people inadvertently hurt themselves. But the platform does offer quite a bit for businesses to take advantage of, presenting those who embrace it with ample opportunity to:
Capture more attention
Garner better integration with social media content
Nurture a highly-engaged, loyal audience
Take advantage of the inherent benefit from better search engine rankings
That last one is the kicker.
Below, we will see how TOP can help you optimize your videos to increase your YouTube rankings, create engagement and why should you promote and embed your branded videos in your website’s
Targeting your videos – Understanding searcher intent, keyword research and video creation.
Optimizing your videos – Creating a branded presence, optimizing titles, tags and descriptions.
Promoting your videos – Getting real, engaged views on your videos, building links and embeds to your videos.
Easy as the Alphabet: Google and YouTube
Google shows more than just articles in their SERPs. They also rank videos, images, books and more.
The more content you create, in more varieties, the more you are increasing your chances of being picked up and ranked in Google SERPs for related search terms.
Considering that Google owns YouTube, it does not come as a surprise that you can increase your organic visibility by spending some time optimizing your video content on YouTube and embedding videos on your website.
It is important to know that embedding videos won’t directly improve your rankings in Google SERPs, according to Google’s John Mueller.
However, having useful videos within your content can help you keep a visitor on the page longer. That should eventually help you increase your niche authority, which should see you increasing your organic rankings.
In short, once your visitors see that your site is sharing informative and helpful content they are most likely to return. Thus, over time making your site authoritative and engaging source rewarded by Google.
Based on your keyword research (explained further in this guide) you will be able to create video content useful for your targeted audience, that will result in your viewers seeing you as a trusted resource of information.
Before we dive into more detailed steps on how to optimize your videos, let’s take a look at the main YouTube ranking factors.
YouTube ranking factors
YouTube has cited Audience Retention as one of its main ranking factors. In short, this is how long people watch your videos before exiting.
The Audience Retention report analyses :
Average view duration for all videos on your channel
Top videos or channels listed by watch time
Audience retention data for a specific video for different time frames
Relative audience retention for a video compared to the YouTube average for similar videos
Other YouTube ranking factors surrounding engagement:
Video comments
Subscribers – after watching a video
Video shares
Click-through rate
Thumbs up/Thumbs down
Also, according to the YouTube SEO Ranking Factor Study, published on Briggsby, the most important aspects of ranking well on YouTube are:
Watch time
Channel authority
Positive sentiment & engagement
Broad match keyword targeting across title, description, and keyword tags
Now that we know what are some of the key ranking factors on YouTube let’s dive in and see how can you discover topics and how to optimize your videos to increase its chances to rank better on YouTube.
(T) Keyword research
The YouTube SEO process starts just like any content creation process, with a keyword, search query and topic research. If you are new to keyword research, check out Moz’s great guide on the topic or watch our very own ‘Wolfgang Bites’ and learn how can you ‘Read Your Customers’ Minds’.
The goal you are trying to achieve here is to understand searcher intent, what kind of information users are looking for and which search terms are relevant to your business and your audience.
An additional bonus would be to discover trending search terms or keywords related to your industry.
Find relevant topics with high volume keywords and low competition.
As highlighted in MOZ’s keyword research, you should ask yourself…
Is the keyword relevant to your website’s content?
Will searchers find what they are looking for on your site when they search using these keywords?
Will they be happy with what they find?
And, will this traffic result in financial rewards or other organizational goals?
Now that you know how to do a keyword research, let’s see how can you discover your potential keywords using YouTube.
YouTube’s Search Suggest
To start discovering industry related search topics, you can use YouTube’s search suggest feature. Just type something into YouTube search and you’ll see a list of suggested topics appear. If you have the Keywords Everywhere Extension plugged in too, you’ll even get some additional competition and volume information too.
Keywords Everywhere – Mozilla Firefox
Keywords Everywhere – Google Chrome
It doesn’t matter if you use MS Office Excel or Google Sheets, as long you create a database with search volume for your targeted keywords. Once you have at least 50 different keywords, you are ready to make your analysis. Based on your analysis, you should be able to discover which keywords are more valuable to you.
Bear in mind that by using YouTube’s search suggest you would have to type the data in your sheets manually for each targeted keyword.
Considering that this process can be time-consuming, we would suggest creating a database of targeted search terms (topics and keywords related to your services). Using tools such are SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner you will be able to discover the most valuable keywords.
As an alternative to Google Keyword Planner you can use KeywordTool.io. This tool allows you to find keywords and you will be able to compare keyword search volume in YouTube, as opposed to search volume from Google.
Unfortunately, the free version is fairly limited and you need a pro version in order to unlock the following awesome features:
Keyword suggestions (variants stemming from your entry)
Related keywords (not keyword variants, but related, e.g. same semantic area)
Questions (similar to Answer The Public and the likes, great for Featured Snippet opportunities. etc)
Prepositions (again, similar to Answer The Public and the likes, great for increasing your site’s chances of appearing in Featured Snippets and ‘People Also Ask’ query suggestions)
Industry related topics and videos
Another way of finding the industry related topics and keywords is to analyze your competitor’s videos. Analyzing their videos, you can discover topics, gather ideas and aim to create a better and more engaging video. Your ultimate goal here: ‘Steal’ their viewers.
The process here is rather straightforward. Visit your competitor’s branded YouTube profile and see which videos have the most views and comments. Analyze the keywords and topics they’ve used for their best performing videos and 10x it! Make it better!
Vid IQ and TubeBuddy are freemium browser plugins that allow you to spy on competitor tags, while providing additional performance data about selected YouTube video. Using one of these tools should help you discover what tags and keywords are your competitors use when uploading their videos.
Branded YouTube profile report
Using your business’ YouTube search report, you can discover how viewers are engaging with your content, a total watch time, average view duration, a total number of views, etc.
To view your YouTube analytics, navigate to Creator Studio Dashboard from your profile image (top right) or click here, once you’re logged into your YouTube account.
Within YouTube Analytics, navigate to ‘Traffic Sources’ -> ‘YouTube Search.’
You will be able to see which search terms were used by viewers on YouTube to discover your content. Based on your previous keyword research, you should be able to notice if you’ve missed any important keywords.
Additionally, with knowing how users are discovering your videos, you will have a clear picture of what your most important keywords are for targeting purposes.
List of targeted keywords
When you compile a group of targeted keywords for your video, it’s time to see the amount of search volume for each keyword. It’s good practice to ensure that target keywords generate at least 100-1k searches per month in Google.
While it is a good practice to discover keywords with high search volume (at least 100-1k searches per month), it is important to know that some topics or industries don’t generate high search volume.
So, knowing your own industry this should not come as a surprise. You can prioritize your keywords even if the search volume is below 100-1k searches per month.
Using Google Keyword Planner or KeywordTool.io you will be able to pull search volume for your targeted keywords.
Once you have a set of 50 – 100 targeted keywords, you can set up a campaign to track your YouTube rankings.
One of the tools that allow you to track your rankings on YouTube is Rank Tracker from Link Assistant. Similar to Google SERPs rankings campaign in Moz, Rank Tracker will show you performance and rankings for your YouTube videos.
Creating a Video that Retains Attention
At Wolfgang, we often say attention is the modern digital commodity so you want your video to retain a viewer’s attention for as long as possible.
This means your video content needs to be high quality and engaging. In short, if your video keeps viewers on YouTube, the chances are increased that YouTube will rank your video higher in the platform’s search results.
Additionally, responding to people’s questions or comments on your videos can create conversations that help your audience learn more about your company and the topic of your video.
Knowing how your viewers think can be used to create in-depth and topically related videos or content for your blog.
Using Google Trends can help you determine when is the best time to share your videos with your audience.
In the example below, we can see that January is the best month to share and create videos related to health insurance topics:
While car insurance topics are mostly researched between June and August:
Optimize like it’s… 2009
Sometimes, optimizing your YouTube videos might even feel like you’re going back in time and optimizing for Google Search a decade ago, roundabout when Susan Boyle was setting YouTube alight with her mind-blowing Britain’s Got Talent performance (the most watched clip of the year, amazingly!).
To increase your video’s chances of striking the high notes and being picked up by search engines, every YouTube video should have relevant title name and description along with the ever-critical relevant tags.
It’s important you don’t simply create video content for the sake of it. Always stop to consider whether or not the content will be helpful for your audience. Also, check if there is a similar content out there and ask yourself how can you create something like this, but better. Try to apply 10X content strategy on your videos.
(O) YouTube video optimization
Keywords and search queries are just as important to YouTube as they are to Google.
As touched upon earlier, once the targeted keyword has been selected and a relevant video has been created, including metadata in your videos is important. Considering that YouTube cannot fully index the content within your video, it needs to rely on the content you provide.
The following parts will cover:
Video title
Video description
Tags
Video thumbnails
The title, description and tags will help influence where and when your video appears in YouTube search results, as well as within the actual vocal copy of your suggested videos.
Video title
We’d highly recommended that the video title is at least 5 words long and up to 70 characters in length. Having a catchy, relevant and descriptive video title will enable you to include targeted keywords.
If possible, placing the targeted keywords closer to the beginning of the title is recommended. However, keep in mind that your video title should entice viewer to watch your video.
YouTube’s very own, awesome Creator Academy features some effective tips that can help you create a title that should entice a viewer to click through:
Keep titles concise (between 60 and 70 characters) with the most important information up front.
Save episode numbers and branding towards the end.
Check that your titles don’t get cut-off in suggested videos, search results, and mobile
We also suggest including additional items that they haven’t flagged:
Use your targeted keyword in the video title
Include intent modifier (e.g. best, compare, free, local (Irish, American etc.), top, review etc.)
Video description
While video descriptions can be up to 5,000 characters in length, you should ensure that the key message is at the beginning of your description. In his YouTube study, Justin found out that the optimal word count is between 300 – 350 characters long.
A tailored video description can even attract some views coming from Google results. Using search terms in your video description that are searched on Google, not just on YouTube.
The description can also help drive relevant traffic to your website. Including a link to your domain within your video description can bring additional traffic to your site.
Video tags
A tag is pretty much just a keyword that you add to your video and it can help you grow your YouTube audience. You need to ensure that your tags precisely describe the topic and content of your video. Including relevant and related keywords should help you gather more views. Create tags that are based on your topic and are relevant to your targeted keyword.
In order to find tags for your videos, you can start with the YouTube search bar and type in your targeted search term, as in the example below:
If we take these four keywords and if you look at the search volume, it becomes quite clear which keywords you can and should utilize within your tagging logic.
Health insurance – High search volume
Volume: 673,000/mo | CPC: $12.22 | Competition: 0.89
Health insurance ireland – Medium search volume
Volume: 6,600/mo | CPC: $3.91 | Competition: 0.74
Health insurance broker – – Medium search volume
Volume: 4,400/mo | CPC: $8.60 | Competition: 0.63
Health insurance advisor – Low search volume
Volume: 390/mo | CPC: $8.63 | Competition: 0.66
If you don’t have access to any paid keyword volume tools and perhaps find Keyword Planner a little cumbersome for this task, you can use Keywords Everywhere to find out the search volume for each keyword, free n’ easy within the SERPs.
Use the data discovered in keyword and tag research and use it when creating video titles and video descriptions.
Video thumbnails
When you have a verified YouTube account you are able to upload your own image for your thumbnail video. Which means that you can edit your image to make it stand out from other videos in your niche.
It is recommended to use high resolution image for your video thumbnail – width: 1280p and height: 720p.
However, it is important to know that there’s a limit of of 2MB and the supported thumbnail image formats are .JPG, .GIF, .BMP, or .PNG.
Once you upload your video you will see an option to choose a Custom thumbnail under the “Video thumbnails” section. You can also upload thumbnail image for any of your previously published videos.
Using YouTube SEO Checklist can help you track your video optimization steps and help you optimize your video to give it a better chance to rank higher. Unfortunately, this extension is only available for Google Chrome.
(P) Promoting your videos to increase your overall brand awareness
In the opening section we’ve mentioned YouTube’s ranking signals, where we listed video subscribers, video shares, comments and Click Through Rate as important ranking signals (engagement).
To increase the number of users that will watch, subscribe and share your videos, you need to promote the video content also. You have to reach the audience.
By incorporating YouTube content into your ongoing marketing strategy for your business, you are increasing the chances to draw more visits and views to your branded YouTube channel. The more views and engagements you have on your videos, the more authoritative and relevant your videos are in Google’s eyes.
Linking to your video in your email signature
A simple link to your video in your email signature can be an effective driver of traffic. As mentioned earlier, comments, shares and likes (thumbs up) are important ranking signals. Considering that your email recipients are most likely your service users, they are the audience most likely to be interested in video content related to the news and services that your business provides. Furthermore, a satisfied customer will more likely share the video if they find it useful.
Embedding videos in blog posts
Creating some written content on your website gives you the opportunity to embed the YouTube video or recommend that readers watch your video to find more information. This creates another link between your site and the video for Googlebot to consider.
Embedding videos in blog posts or landing pages is the most direct and advantageous way to integrate your content and YouTube videos.
When you include videos in your articles, your posts become more dynamic and engaging. Writing new articles, related to your video topic, can help you reuse the same video content multiple times. Presenting older videos to a new audience will help you gather more views, subscribers and engagements in general.
You can follow Google’s own guidelines on embedding YouTube videos.
Take advantage of Playlist functionality
Perhaps one of the simplest high-value feature inclusions you should embrace on your YouTube page; the utilization of playlists as part of your optimization strategy.
Playlists can be excellent for garnering that ‘snowball effect’ and to help keep users clicking and rolling through your semantically related videos with ease. They help ramp up the view count and generally tend to rank higher than standalone videos in the search results, making them a no-brainer for inclusion in your YouTube optimization arsenal.
Engagement matters
It’s no secret that video content is a popular way to grab attention and drive home a key message, but it seems many brands are just creating video for the sake of it.
As covered in-depth within this guide, ranking well on YouTube search requires some smart thinking to increase your likelihood of winning some vital engagement. That means obsessing over important metrics like:
“Dwell time” (how long people are watching your videos for)
Share rate (social)
Links and embeds on other sites
Channel subscriber count (real ones)
Therefore, assuming your video quality is of a high standard of course, spending some time to optimize your videos for your potential YouTube in terms of quality and searchability should see your videos attract more views and dominate that vital second search engine that we as SEOs are often quite guilty of neglecting — never more if you follow these steps to a tee!
Measuring ongoing performance
Last, but by no means least, we’d highly recommend that you analyze your current video performance using Google Data Studio and YouTube analytics.
These tools allow you to discover how your content is performing up to date (average number of views, comments, watch time, thumbs up, etc) and to generate reports after you optimize your videos with custom thumbnails, video tags, tailored video title and description.
Mastering the art of calculating your overall watched time on YouTube is important, especially if you’re comparing stats versus other social video ad platforms.
While a number of great rank tracking tools can help you track your YouTube rankings for your targeted search terms, you can use integrate their API feeds with Data Studio to create daily, weekly or monthly performance reports. It shouldn’t be hard, but you need to know your way around Google Data Studio to configure this report.
Using the information provided above, you should be able to start creating video content that will be informative and useful to your targeted audience.
For more about YouTube SEO, check out:
YouTube SEO: Optimizing your channel in 5 steps
Video and search: YouTube, Google, the alternatives and the future
5 YouTube optimization tips to improve your video rankings
How to optimize your videos for YouTube: Best-practice tips
Google videos vs. YouTube: Which is the best video search engine?
Ivan Crnomaric is SEO Executive at Wolfgang Digital.
The post YouTube Optimization: Complete Guide appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/02/04/youtube-optimization-guide/
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YouTube Optimization: Complete Guide
When you think SEO, naturally you think Google. Some of you might even think Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, or Baidu depending on your target location.
But the often-forgotten search engine when it comes to prioritizing your optimization efforts is YouTube.
According to Alexa’s global traffic rankings, YouTube is the second most visited website in the world.
It’s also arguably the second biggest search engine in the world that you haven’t yet properly optimized for — despite this very topic featuring at Mozcon over four years ago!
Why YouTube?
“YouTube viewers watch a lot of video — over 4 billion hours a month at last count. But the average household also watches several hours of video per day on their TVs. So for YouTube to become the most important media in more people’s lives, we’ve got a lot of growing to do.”
Source: YouTube Creators
Unlocking the potential within YouTube means you can access millions of viewers every day. This gives you a new channel for your promotional videos along with your more generally helpful content. In return, you can boost your overall online presence.
Ok, so a lot of YouTube is soppy cat videos and watching people inadvertently hurt themselves. But the platform does offer quite a bit for businesses to take advantage of, presenting those who embrace it with ample opportunity to:
Capture more attention
Garner better integration with social media content
Nurture a highly-engaged, loyal audience
Take advantage of the inherent benefit from better search engine rankings
That last one is the kicker.
Below, we will see how TOP can help you optimize your videos to increase your YouTube rankings, create engagement and why should you promote and embed your branded videos in your website’s
Targeting your videos – Understanding searcher intent, keyword research and video creation.
Optimizing your videos – Creating a branded presence, optimizing titles, tags and descriptions.
Promoting your videos – Getting real, engaged views on your videos, building links and embeds to your videos.
Easy as the Alphabet: Google and YouTube
Google shows more than just articles in their SERPs. They also rank videos, images, books and more.
The more content you create, in more varieties, the more you are increasing your chances of being picked up and ranked in Google SERPs for related search terms.
Considering that Google owns YouTube, it does not come as a surprise that you can increase your organic visibility by spending some time optimizing your video content on YouTube and embedding videos on your website.
It is important to know that embedding videos won’t directly improve your rankings in Google SERPs, according to Google’s John Mueller.
However, having useful videos within your content can help you keep a visitor on the page longer. That should eventually help you increase your niche authority, which should see you increasing your organic rankings.
In short, once your visitors see that your site is sharing informative and helpful content they are most likely to return. Thus, over time making your site authoritative and engaging source rewarded by Google.
Based on your keyword research (explained further in this guide) you will be able to create video content useful for your targeted audience, that will result in your viewers seeing you as a trusted resource of information.
Before we dive into more detailed steps on how to optimize your videos, let’s take a look at the main YouTube ranking factors.
YouTube ranking factors
YouTube has cited Audience Retention as one of its main ranking factors. In short, this is how long people watch your videos before exiting.
The Audience Retention report analyses :
Average view duration for all videos on your channel
Top videos or channels listed by watch time
Audience retention data for a specific video for different time frames
Relative audience retention for a video compared to the YouTube average for similar videos
Other YouTube ranking factors surrounding engagement:
Video comments
Subscribers – after watching a video
Video shares
Click-through rate
Thumbs up/Thumbs down
Also, according to the YouTube SEO Ranking Factor Study, published on Briggsby, the most important aspects of ranking well on YouTube are:
Watch time
Channel authority
Positive sentiment & engagement
Broad match keyword targeting across title, description, and keyword tags
Now that we know what are some of the key ranking factors on YouTube let’s dive in and see how can you discover topics and how to optimize your videos to increase its chances to rank better on YouTube.
(T) Keyword research
The YouTube SEO process starts just like any content creation process, with a keyword, search query and topic research. If you are new to keyword research, check out Moz’s great guide on the topic or watch our very own ‘Wolfgang Bites’ and learn how can you ‘Read Your Customers’ Minds’.
The goal you are trying to achieve here is to understand searcher intent, what kind of information users are looking for and which search terms are relevant to your business and your audience.
An additional bonus would be to discover trending search terms or keywords related to your industry.
Find relevant topics with high volume keywords and low competition.
As highlighted in MOZ’s keyword research, you should ask yourself…
Is the keyword relevant to your website’s content?
Will searchers find what they are looking for on your site when they search using these keywords?
Will they be happy with what they find?
And, will this traffic result in financial rewards or other organizational goals?
Now that you know how to do a keyword research, let’s see how can you discover your potential keywords using YouTube.
YouTube’s Search Suggest
To start discovering industry related search topics, you can use YouTube’s search suggest feature. Just type something into YouTube search and you’ll see a list of suggested topics appear. If you have the Keywords Everywhere Extension plugged in too, you’ll even get some additional competition and volume information too.
Keywords Everywhere – Mozilla Firefox
Keywords Everywhere – Google Chrome
It doesn’t matter if you use MS Office Excel or Google Sheets, as long you create a database with search volume for your targeted keywords. Once you have at least 50 different keywords, you are ready to make your analysis. Based on your analysis, you should be able to discover which keywords are more valuable to you.
Bear in mind that by using YouTube’s search suggest you would have to type the data in your sheets manually for each targeted keyword.
Considering that this process can be time-consuming, we would suggest creating a database of targeted search terms (topics and keywords related to your services). Using tools such are SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner you will be able to discover the most valuable keywords.
As an alternative to Google Keyword Planner you can use KeywordTool.io. This tool allows you to find keywords and you will be able to compare keyword search volume in YouTube, as opposed to search volume from Google.
Unfortunately, the free version is fairly limited and you need a pro version in order to unlock the following awesome features:
Keyword suggestions (variants stemming from your entry)
Related keywords (not keyword variants, but related, e.g. same semantic area)
Questions (similar to Answer The Public and the likes, great for Featured Snippet opportunities. etc)
Prepositions (again, similar to Answer The Public and the likes, great for increasing your site’s chances of appearing in Featured Snippets and ‘People Also Ask’ query suggestions)
Industry related topics and videos
Another way of finding the industry related topics and keywords is to analyze your competitor’s videos. Analyzing their videos, you can discover topics, gather ideas and aim to create a better and more engaging video. Your ultimate goal here: ‘Steal’ their viewers.
The process here is rather straightforward. Visit your competitor’s branded YouTube profile and see which videos have the most views and comments. Analyze the keywords and topics they’ve used for their best performing videos and 10x it! Make it better!
Vid IQ and TubeBuddy are freemium browser plugins that allow you to spy on competitor tags, while providing additional performance data about selected YouTube video. Using one of these tools should help you discover what tags and keywords are your competitors use when uploading their videos.
Branded YouTube profile report
Using your business’ YouTube search report, you can discover how viewers are engaging with your content, a total watch time, average view duration, a total number of views, etc.
To view your YouTube analytics, navigate to Creator Studio Dashboard from your profile image (top right) or click here, once you’re logged into your YouTube account.
Within YouTube Analytics, navigate to ‘Traffic Sources’ -> ‘YouTube Search.’
You will be able to see which search terms were used by viewers on YouTube to discover your content. Based on your previous keyword research, you should be able to notice if you’ve missed any important keywords.
Additionally, with knowing how users are discovering your videos, you will have a clear picture of what your most important keywords are for targeting purposes.
List of targeted keywords
When you compile a group of targeted keywords for your video, it’s time to see the amount of search volume for each keyword. It’s good practice to ensure that target keywords generate at least 100-1k searches per month in Google.
While it is a good practice to discover keywords with high search volume (at least 100-1k searches per month), it is important to know that some topics or industries don’t generate high search volume.
So, knowing your own industry this should not come as a surprise. You can prioritize your keywords even if the search volume is below 100-1k searches per month.
Using Google Keyword Planner or KeywordTool.io you will be able to pull search volume for your targeted keywords.
Once you have a set of 50 – 100 targeted keywords, you can set up a campaign to track your YouTube rankings.
One of the tools that allow you to track your rankings on YouTube is Rank Tracker from Link Assistant. Similar to Google SERPs rankings campaign in Moz, Rank Tracker will show you performance and rankings for your YouTube videos.
Creating a Video that Retains Attention
At Wolfgang, we often say attention is the modern digital commodity so you want your video to retain a viewer’s attention for as long as possible.
This means your video content needs to be high quality and engaging. In short, if your video keeps viewers on YouTube, the chances are increased that YouTube will rank your video higher in the platform’s search results.
Additionally, responding to people’s questions or comments on your videos can create conversations that help your audience learn more about your company and the topic of your video.
Knowing how your viewers think can be used to create in-depth and topically related videos or content for your blog.
Using Google Trends can help you determine when is the best time to share your videos with your audience.
In the example below, we can see that January is the best month to share and create videos related to health insurance topics:
While car insurance topics are mostly researched between June and August:
Optimize like it’s… 2009
Sometimes, optimizing your YouTube videos might even feel like you’re going back in time and optimizing for Google Search a decade ago, roundabout when Susan Boyle was setting YouTube alight with her mind-blowing Britain’s Got Talent performance (the most watched clip of the year, amazingly!).
To increase your video’s chances of striking the high notes and being picked up by search engines, every YouTube video should have relevant title name and description along with the ever-critical relevant tags.
It’s important you don’t simply create video content for the sake of it. Always stop to consider whether or not the content will be helpful for your audience. Also, check if there is a similar content out there and ask yourself how can you create something like this, but better. Try to apply 10X content strategy on your videos.
(O) YouTube video optimization
Keywords and search queries are just as important to YouTube as they are to Google.
As touched upon earlier, once the targeted keyword has been selected and a relevant video has been created, including metadata in your videos is important. Considering that YouTube cannot fully index the content within your video, it needs to rely on the content you provide.
The following parts will cover:
Video title
Video description
Tags
Video thumbnails
The title, description and tags will help influence where and when your video appears in YouTube search results, as well as within the actual vocal copy of your suggested videos.
Video title
We’d highly recommended that the video title is at least 5 words long and up to 70 characters in length. Having a catchy, relevant and descriptive video title will enable you to include targeted keywords.
If possible, placing the targeted keywords closer to the beginning of the title is recommended. However, keep in mind that your video title should entice viewer to watch your video.
YouTube’s very own, awesome Creator Academy features some effective tips that can help you create a title that should entice a viewer to click through:
Keep titles concise (between 60 and 70 characters) with the most important information up front.
Save episode numbers and branding towards the end.
Check that your titles don’t get cut-off in suggested videos, search results, and mobile
We also suggest including additional items that they haven’t flagged:
Use your targeted keyword in the video title
Include intent modifier (e.g. best, compare, free, local (Irish, American etc.), top, review etc.)
Video description
While video descriptions can be up to 5,000 characters in length, you should ensure that the key message is at the beginning of your description. In his YouTube study, Justin found out that the optimal word count is between 300 – 350 characters long.
A tailored video description can even attract some views coming from Google results. Using search terms in your video description that are searched on Google, not just on YouTube.
The description can also help drive relevant traffic to your website. Including a link to your domain within your video description can bring additional traffic to your site.
Video tags
A tag is pretty much just a keyword that you add to your video and it can help you grow your YouTube audience. You need to ensure that your tags precisely describe the topic and content of your video. Including relevant and related keywords should help you gather more views. Create tags that are based on your topic and are relevant to your targeted keyword.
In order to find tags for your videos, you can start with the YouTube search bar and type in your targeted search term, as in the example below:
If we take these four keywords and if you look at the search volume, it becomes quite clear which keywords you can and should utilize within your tagging logic.
Health insurance – High search volume
Volume: 673,000/mo | CPC: $12.22 | Competition: 0.89
Health insurance ireland – Medium search volume
Volume: 6,600/mo | CPC: $3.91 | Competition: 0.74
Health insurance broker – – Medium search volume
Volume: 4,400/mo | CPC: $8.60 | Competition: 0.63
Health insurance advisor – Low search volume
Volume: 390/mo | CPC: $8.63 | Competition: 0.66
If you don’t have access to any paid keyword volume tools and perhaps find Keyword Planner a little cumbersome for this task, you can use Keywords Everywhere to find out the search volume for each keyword, free n’ easy within the SERPs.
Use the data discovered in keyword and tag research and use it when creating video titles and video descriptions.
Video thumbnails
When you have a verified YouTube account you are able to upload your own image for your thumbnail video. Which means that you can edit your image to make it stand out from other videos in your niche.
It is recommended to use high resolution image for your video thumbnail – width: 1280p and height: 720p.
However, it is important to know that there’s a limit of of 2MB and the supported thumbnail image formats are .JPG, .GIF, .BMP, or .PNG.
Once you upload your video you will see an option to choose a Custom thumbnail under the “Video thumbnails” section. You can also upload thumbnail image for any of your previously published videos.
Using YouTube SEO Checklist can help you track your video optimization steps and help you optimize your video to give it a better chance to rank higher. Unfortunately, this extension is only available for Google Chrome.
(P) Promoting your videos to increase your overall brand awareness
In the opening section we’ve mentioned YouTube’s ranking signals, where we listed video subscribers, video shares, comments and Click Through Rate as important ranking signals (engagement).
To increase the number of users that will watch, subscribe and share your videos, you need to promote the video content also. You have to reach the audience.
By incorporating YouTube content into your ongoing marketing strategy for your business, you are increasing the chances to draw more visits and views to your branded YouTube channel. The more views and engagements you have on your videos, the more authoritative and relevant your videos are in Google’s eyes.
Linking to your video in your email signature
A simple link to your video in your email signature can be an effective driver of traffic. As mentioned earlier, comments, shares and likes (thumbs up) are important ranking signals. Considering that your email recipients are most likely your service users, they are the audience most likely to be interested in video content related to the news and services that your business provides. Furthermore, a satisfied customer will more likely share the video if they find it useful.
Embedding videos in blog posts
Creating some written content on your website gives you the opportunity to embed the YouTube video or recommend that readers watch your video to find more information. This creates another link between your site and the video for Googlebot to consider.
Embedding videos in blog posts or landing pages is the most direct and advantageous way to integrate your content and YouTube videos.
When you include videos in your articles, your posts become more dynamic and engaging. Writing new articles, related to your video topic, can help you reuse the same video content multiple times. Presenting older videos to a new audience will help you gather more views, subscribers and engagements in general.
You can follow Google’s own guidelines on embedding YouTube videos.
Take advantage of Playlist functionality
Perhaps one of the simplest high-value feature inclusions you should embrace on your YouTube page; the utilization of playlists as part of your optimization strategy.
Playlists can be excellent for garnering that ‘snowball effect’ and to help keep users clicking and rolling through your semantically related videos with ease. They help ramp up the view count and generally tend to rank higher than standalone videos in the search results, making them a no-brainer for inclusion in your YouTube optimization arsenal.
Engagement matters
It’s no secret that video content is a popular way to grab attention and drive home a key message, but it seems many brands are just creating video for the sake of it.
As covered in-depth within this guide, ranking well on YouTube search requires some smart thinking to increase your likelihood of winning some vital engagement. That means obsessing over important metrics like:
“Dwell time” (how long people are watching your videos for)
Share rate (social)
Links and embeds on other sites
Channel subscriber count (real ones)
Therefore, assuming your video quality is of a high standard of course, spending some time to optimize your videos for your potential YouTube in terms of quality and searchability should see your videos attract more views and dominate that vital second search engine that we as SEOs are often quite guilty of neglecting — never more if you follow these steps to a tee!
Measuring ongoing performance
Last, but by no means least, we’d highly recommend that you analyze your current video performance using Google Data Studio and YouTube analytics.
These tools allow you to discover how your content is performing up to date (average number of views, comments, watch time, thumbs up, etc) and to generate reports after you optimize your videos with custom thumbnails, video tags, tailored video title and description.
Mastering the art of calculating your overall watched time on YouTube is important, especially if you’re comparing stats versus other social video ad platforms.
While a number of great rank tracking tools can help you track your YouTube rankings for your targeted search terms, you can use integrate their API feeds with Data Studio to create daily, weekly or monthly performance reports. It shouldn’t be hard, but you need to know your way around Google Data Studio to configure this report.
Using the information provided above, you should be able to start creating video content that will be informative and useful to your targeted audience.
For more about YouTube SEO, check out:
YouTube SEO: Optimizing your channel in 5 steps
Video and search: YouTube, Google, the alternatives and the future
5 YouTube optimization tips to improve your video rankings
How to optimize your videos for YouTube: Best-practice tips
Google videos vs. YouTube: Which is the best video search engine?
Ivan Crnomaric is SEO Executive at Wolfgang Digital.
The post YouTube Optimization: Complete Guide appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
from Search Engine Watch https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/02/04/youtube-optimization-guide/
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[Udemy] Learn Excel 2016 Intermediate Level - Beyond the Basics
If you already know the basics of Excel, this intermediate level course will help you become an Excel power user What Will I Learn? Review Excel terminology Learn cool tips and tricks in the Ribbon Discover common Excel hotkeys How to use VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP Learn how to use popular functions Discover how to use named ranges Discover the power of Dynamic Formulas and how to use them Get advanced level tips for creating awesome charts and graphs How to work with and analyze your data using data slicers, PivotTables, Power Query and PivotCharts Practice what you learned with included exercise files Requirements Microsoft Excel 2016 desktop version for Windows installed and ready to use on your computer. Description Master important topics such as Charts and Graphs, Working With Data, Dynamic Formula, and Named Ranges. A full 4.5 hours of expert instruction 39 individual video tutorials More advanced mastery of Excel Perfect for advancing at work Easy to follow instructions Step by step tutorials are easy to understand More advanced use of working with data Mastery of charts and graphs Covers Dynamic Formula and Named Ranges Helps you become an Excel power user Practice what you learned with included exercise files Learn Excel 2016 Intermediate takes you well beyond the beginner stage to become an Excel power user. Now you can possess the more advanced skills that will set you apart from others. The course consists of 39 individual video tutorials that last a full 4.5 hours. Work at your own pace and take as much time as you need. This lets you fit the course work with your work schedule and life. Or speed through the course to give yourself crash mastery. This Intermediate level course gives you the additional advanced skills you need to become more valuable at work. Also perform more impressive duties in your own business, for volunteer work, or to augment fun hobbies. Excel is part of the MS Office package that is used in business everywhere in the world. Now you have access to a step-by-step course that empowers you to become an impressive Excel power user. Instruction is professionally produced for clarity and ease of learning. Each process is explained in detail with lots of illustration. Step by step instruction makes functions easy to understand and remember. Contents and Overview Learn Excel 2016 Intermediate starts where the beginning Excel course concluded. This course gives you more advanced mastery of working with Excel. Rather than being limited to a few functions, this Intermediate course lets you go much deeper into the remarkable power and functionality of MS Excel. The course starts by explaining terminology, tips and tricks in the ribbon, hotkeys, and defining your Excel view. This approach to the beginning gets learners off on the right foot. You gain a better understanding of finding your way around Excel. The next few chapters present interesting video tutorials that fully explain Indexing and Lookups. The various functions are illustrated and discussed and case study lookups are explored. Additional chapters talk about intermediate creation of charts and graphs and working with data. DataTables, Data Slicers, Pivot Tables and much more. Video lengths range from around 3 minutes to 11 minutes. This lets you learn in small manageable blocks that can be studied around a busy schedule. *Updated July 2017: Close captions in English added. Who is the target audience? Those new to using Microsoft Excel 2016. Users of earlier versions of Excel looking to update their skills. Users who have a foundation of Microsoft Excel and seeking to take advance there Excel 2016 knowledge. source https://ttorial.com/learn-excel-2016-intermediate-level-beyond-basics
source https://ttorialcom.tumblr.com/post/177939382073
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